Large sewage discharges from the United Kingdom into the North Seas and the English Channel are worrying on the French side. MEPs are stepping up to the plate.
The British media have been sounding the alarm for a week: beware of swimmers enjoying the beaches of southern England! They might be swimming in sewage. Heavy rains in recent days have overwhelmed sewage systems, leading dirty water to spill into the English Channel and the North Sea. In the middle of summer, dozens of beaches in England, particularly in Sussex and Devon, as well as in Wales, have been declared at risk by the environment agency.
On the French side, are bathers in Normandy and Brittany exposed to the polluted waters of British neighbors? Three MEPs expressed concern on August 24, demanding a reaction from the European Commission. “We fear negative consequences on the quality of the marine waters that we share with this country and incidentally on marine biodiversity but also on the activities of fishermen and shellfish farmers.», warn Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, Nathalie Loiseau and Pierre Karleskind, chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Fisheries, in a letter addressed to the European Commissioner for the Environment.
The case takes on a politico-diplomatic dimension when Xavier Bertrand, president of the Hauts-de-France region, denounced on Friday a “ecological disaster» worsened since Brexit. In a letter addressed to the Secretary of State for the Sea Hervé Berville, the former right-wing presidential candidate criticizes the United Kingdom for “exempt from European environmental regulations“. In question, aBritish legislative standard (…) which exempts water companies from the obligation to treat waste water before discharging it into the sea“, underlines the president of the Region.
A Victorian Escape System
Where does the problem come from ? Across the Channel, several very old British cities, including London, are equipped with a special water evacuation system: dirty water intended for treatment passes through the same pipe as collected rainwater, a legacy of the 19th century Victorian infrastructure. Severe weather, such as that which occurred in August, can quickly overwhelm this system, which plans, in this case, to discharge the additional water – containing in particular human waste – into the rivers and the sea.
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The problem of waste water is therefore far from new in the United Kingdom. At the end of June, the British government published on its own site a column by Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer of England, Jonson Cox, President of the Water Regulator, and Emma Howard Boyd, President of the Environment Agency. , alerting to the fact that pollution by overflows during bad weather was “more exceptional». «In some cases, up to 200 discharges per year occur“, explained the specialists. “This is a serious public health concern for government and regulators“, they denounced, pointing in particular to the inaction of the water companies.
«It’s just the tip of the iceberg we’re seeing right nowsaid Hugo Tagholm, director of the environmental organization Surfers Against Sewage. The activist warns in particular of the increased risks to come for the health of swimmers and surfers. Contact with water containing human faeces can expose you to gastrointestinal diseases, respiratory, skin, eye or ear infections, recalls the Bloomberg site. Sewage spills can also contain microplastics, which are increasingly found in the marine food chain.
«If we try hard…»
The three French Renaissance MEPs accuse the United Kingdom of exonerating itself for years from its environmental commitments on an international scale. They recall that the country has been a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea since 1997, as well as, more recently, to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement established in December 2020 on the sidelines of Brexit, guaranteeing that “the livelihoods of European fishermen will be safeguarded, and natural resources preserved». «If we make efforts on our side, they must also make efforts at home“says Pierre Karleskind.
The European Commission said Thursday that it would respond to the complaints of the three European elected officials. “We rely on the UK to honor all its legal obligations (…) to prevent any health and environmental damagetweeted Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius on Friday.
The British government wants to reduce discharges at sea to zero
The British authorities, far from denying it, are looking for the solution. On Saturday, Environment Minister George Eustice, interviewed by the BBC, announced that a government plan presented on Friday required water companies to invest some 56 billion pounds (66 billion euros) to “revolutionize our sewer systems“. He assured that the current British government, which has only a few days left of its existence awaiting the appointment by the Conservative Party of a successor to Boris Johnson by September 5, was “the first to seriously tackle this issue».
«The reason why this decision has been pushed back by successive governments, both Labor and Conservative, for decades, is that we wanted to keep water bills low, and that is understandable“, pleaded the minister.
But this government plan generates multiple criticisms. The Liberal Democrat opposition called the plan “cruel joke», in particular in that it will weigh directly on consumers. At the end of June, an independent report commissioned by the British government revealed that the separation of the waste water and rainwater systems would lead to an increase in household bills ranging from 569 to 999 additional pounds per year, or 670 to 1180 euros.
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