Sewage: Waste Disposal

(asked on 18th July 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many sewage releases there were by water company in each of the last six months.


Answered by
Thérèse Coffey Portrait
Thérèse Coffey
This question was answered on 29th July 2019

In England, sewage is collected and treated at approximately 5,500 water company sewage treatment works. Discharges from these works occur on a daily basis and are permitted by the Environment Agency. Additionally, during wet weather there may be discharges from storm overflows.

Reports of both the volume of discharges from sewage treatment works and spill numbers from storm overflows in England are submitted to the Environment Agency on an annual basis as per the requirements in the permits. There is no routine requirement to provide reports at three or six monthly intervals.

While no data is available specifically for the last three or six months, based on the latest reported data for 2018 the daily average volume of treated sewage discharge from sewage treatment works was 17.5 billion litres per day. Spill data was also reported for 6,182 storm overflows in England with a total of 146,930 spill events during 2018.

There is currently a programme to install monitoring on the vast majority of overflows in England by 2020. This monitoring will measure how frequently and for how long an overflow operates.

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