Sewage crisis putting people off sea swimming

Telegraph

18 hours ago

The sewage crisis is putting people off swimming in the sea, according to a poll.
Almost half of adults say that they would never swim off the British shoreline, up six percentage points in two years.
Labour has promised to halve the amount of raw sewage being pumped into rivers, lakes and seas by the end of the decade.
But the poll of more than 2,000 people by the Liberal Democrats found that even halving the amount of waste off the coastline would only tempt a fifth of bathers back into swimming in the sea.
There are around 14,500 storm overflow drains in England, which are used to pump raw sewage into rivers and the sea when there is heavy rain.
Last year, there was a record 3.6 million hours of sewage spills into waterways, suffocating wildlife and making bathing waters unsafe for humans.
The Government has also promised a crackdown on polluting water companies, scrapping the failing regulator Ofwat and replacing it with a more effective body.
The bosses of polluting water companies also face having their bonuses blocked by the Government if their firms fall short of stricter new standards of pollution.
But the Liberal Democrats have urged that the Government go further in its actions against water companies, demanding higher fines and the threat of criminal repercussions for persistent polluters.
Tim Farron, the party's environment spokesman, said: 'This coastline crisis threatens to wreck British summers with people afraid of swimming in the sea due to rampant sewage dumping.
'These polluting firms have been let off the hook at every turn and it is our local environments and people's summer holidays that are suffering the consequences.
'The Government has tried talking a good game on sewage but their targets have failed to wash with the public who expect more than a job half done.
'The only way to reverse the Conservatives' neglect of our waterways is for Labour to give the new regulator the powers it needs to hold these water companies accountable for the damage they are doing.'
The Liberal Democrats made sweeping gains to the detriment of the Conservatives in rural areas in last year's general election, having made the state of Britain's waterways a central plank of their campaign.
Chichester, a city which had been Tory for a century, was captured by the Lib Dems after the party capitalised on anger over contamination of the River Lavant.
Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, has backed plans to strengthen environmental protections on Britain's coasts.
A Conservative Environment Network (CEN) report put forward proposals to strengthen marine protections by introducing more highly protected marine areas (HPMAs).
Designating a site as an HPMA would ban all fishing and seabed mining in the area, which the report argued should be done in places 'guided by ecological evidence'.
It also argued that instead of building more seawalls and groynes to tackle coastal flooding and erosion, nature-based solutions such as dunes and saltmarsh should be prioritised as primary defences instead.