ENVIRONMENT AGENCY SLAMS SOUTHERN WATER’S ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE AS ‘UNACCEPTABLE’

The latest annual Environmental Performance Assessment shows Southern Water is still among the worst performing companies despite modest improvement. 

The Environment Agency has released its annual report on the environmental performance of England’s 9 water and sewerage companies.

Since 2011, the Environment Agency has used the Environmental Performance Assessment (EPA) to rate each company in England from 1 star to 4 star. The rating takes into account performance on environmental commitments such as pollution incidents and permit compliance. Last year an updated reporting approach was introduced, with revised metrics and tightened performance thresholds.

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This year’s report for Southern Water gave them 2 stars, up from 1 star the previous year. It found that:

• The number of the most serious pollution incidents declined with 5 recorded in 2022 compared to 12 serious incidents in 2021.

• Total pollution incidents improved slightly to 358 in 2022, compared to 372 in 2021, but this figure remains unacceptably high.

• Self-reporting of incidents maintained the high levels seen in previous years, with 90% of all pollution incidents self-reported.

• It was the worst performing company for sewerage pollution incidents per 10,000km of sewer and 1 of 2 companies (out of 9) to be rated red.

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Simon Moody, Environment Agency Area Deputy Director said:

“Although we have seen some improvement in Southern Water’s performance, including a significant reduction in the most serious pollution incidents, they remain 1 of the poorest performing companies in the country. That is unacceptable.

“This year we expect to see them build on the early improvements of 2022 across their entire business and will continue to hold them to account if this is not the case. We cannot transform water quality in the way we all want if water companies’ environmental performance does not improve.

“We will always work closely with water companies who want to do the right thing and take robust action against those who don’t.”

Southern Water was fined a record £90million 2 years ago after pleading guilty to thousands of illegal discharges of sewage polluting rivers and coastal waters.

Responding to the report, Southern Water issued the following statement:

“The Environment Agency report notes a significant reduction in serious pollutions (down 58%), amongst other signs of progress, in the face of a regulatory framework which progressively revises metrics and tightens thresholds.”

“Southern Water has ambitions to go further, as repeated and reinforced in recent Turnaround Plan. We are focussed on accelerating the improvement in our operational performance across multiple areas, embedding a culture of improvement, with an ambition to reach a three-star EPA rating by 2025.”

“To achieve this, Southern Water has recently announced plans to invest more than £3billion of capital investment during the 2020-25 regulatory period, the equivalent of more than £1,500 per household.”

“This is a further increase from the £2 billion of capital investment that was announced in late 2021, when a new majority shareholder injected £1.1billion of new equity into the Southern Water group. To facilitate this additional capital investment, Southern is engaged with its shareholders to secure an additional £550million of equity funding by October 2023.”

Lawrence Gosden, Southern Water’s CEO, said:

“This has been a challenging year for our customers and our business. The sector is under intense scrutiny. We also face diverse and significant regional and industry-wide challenges of climate change, population growth and the need to upgrade a legacy network of pipes and pumping stations, treatment works and storm overflows to meet increasingly stringent regulatory standards and the expectations of our customers and wider.”

“We understand and are responding to these challenges. Whilst we are making progress against the commitments outlined by our new majority shareholder in late 2021 and our April 2023 Turnaround Plan, we recognise the desire of all stakeholders for us to go faster.”

“We are directing all our efforts into executing our plans, investing wisely, and employing cutting-edge technology in the right places to highlight risks and to enable us to respond more intelligently and proactively.”