Mother-of-one Soraya Wooller spends her weekends in places most people wouldn’t want to venture.
A volunteer for local group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, Soraya tests treated wastewater being discharged back into her local river
from a nearby sewage treatment plant.
In the past ten years Soraya and her community have seen the river deteriorate. The water has turned opaque, coated with algae, its fish populations quietly diminishing.
So why has the health of Britain’s rivers been allowed to decline so dramatically in the past decade? In this week’s episode of The i Podcast we travel back to the late 80s and the privatisation of this critical industry.
Host Molly Blackall is joined by i's Environment Correspondent Daniel Capurro and Senior Reporter Ben Gartside who have been following the money to find out why community groups such as Soraya’s are now finding their local rivers in such a perilous position.
Find out more about i's campaign to Save Britain's Rivers
Produced by Julia Webster and Phoebe Fleming. The executive producer is Albert Evans.
Music featured is by Michael Kobrin and Lexin Music - licensed via Pixabay.
A Thames Water spokesperson said:
"Our turnaround plan stretches over eight years and will fix the basics, raise the bar and shape the future. It has already seen a number of improvements including improving trends in water quality, complaints management and supply interruptions performance. It will take time and we know there is a lot of work we need to do but we’re making progress."
"We’ve committed £1.6 billion of investment in our sewage treatment works and sewers over the next two years. This will help us to deliver our commitment to a 50% reduction in the total annual duration of discharges across London and the Thames Valley by 2030, and within that an 80% reduction in sensitive catchments.
"We’re currently increasing sewage treatment capacity at a number of our sewage works across the Thames Valley, including Witney, Chesham, Church Hanborough, Bampton and Fairford to be completed by 2025.
"We’re also the first company to provide live alerts for all untreated discharges throughout our region and this ‘near real-time’ data is available to customers as a map on our website and is also available through an open data platform for third parties, such as swimming and environmental groups, to use.
"We are taking these steps to rebuild our business in order to deliver on our turnaround plan.This will take time and significant investment, but we are committed to achieving this plan and ensuring our customers see and feel the progress we are making."
Regarding the testing at Standlake they said: "We adhere to the site permit issued by the EA and achieve higher standards when possible."
An Environment Agency spokesperson said:
"We are holding the water industry to account on a scale never seen before – securing record fines against water companies and driving up monitoring and transparency to ensure the public can see what is going on."
"Locally, we have secured penalties of almost £33m from Thames Water since 2017 and the number of sewage spills from Thames Water overflows was down 50% in 2022 on the year before – and we will continue to ensure polluters are held to account."
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