Within a day of Thames Water imposing a hosepipe ban on London and the south-east, the company was caught pumping raw sewage into the River Wandle, and a Croydon MP wrote to the company accusing it of turning a parkland stream into an open sewer.
Polluters: Thames Water has been killing fish in the River Wandle with sewage from Beddington for more than a decade
Sarah Jones, the Labour MP for Croydon Central, expressed her concern over the stinking state of Chaffinch Brook, which runs through South Norwood Country Park and where the river banks are caked in wet wipes.
Jones sent her letter to Sarah Bentley, the £2million per year chief executive of Thames Water, demanding an urgent meeting.
“I have written to Thames Water urging swift and concrete action after reports of sewage spewing into South Norwood Country Park – an important and much loved green space,” Jones said.
“The presence of sewage in Chaffinch Brook, where children often paddle, is completely unacceptable.”
In her letter, Jones described Thames Water’s dirty business as “a serious and unacceptable health risk”.
Untreated sewage was poured into the stream 20 times in 2021, and it has happened at least twice so far this year again this year. The sewage comes from a Thames Water pumping station in the park, usually when there has been heavy rain.
Not far from the pumping station are stepping stones across the stream, which children paddle in and where pet dogs drink.
“A serious and unacceptable health risk”: MP Sarah Jones’s letter to Thames Water
“This is a nature reserve,” said Sue Takwani, from Friends of South Norwood Country Park.
“We shouldn’t have any pollution in our streams. Just because it is a little stream it doesn’t give Thames Water the licence to dump sewage into it. I just don’t think they should be allowed to do it.”
Thames Water has also been caught this week pumping sewage into the River Wandle, which has huge biodiversity significance as a rare chalk stream.
Outraged by outflows: ecology campaigner Feargal Sharkey
One local posted a video of the murky brown water in the Wandle – which has its source in South Croydon, and runs through Wandle Park and on to Carshalton as it heads to the Thames.
“What should be crystal clear is brown and full of human shit,” they said. “What do we pay them for? Where’s the money going?”
The tweet was picked up by Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones frontman and now a high-profile ecology campaigner. “This is the River Wandle, a chalk stream, one of only two urban chalk streams in the whole of London,” Sharkey wrote. “It is currently listed as achieving only ‘moderate’ ecological status.
According to the Wandle Valley Forum, the sewage outfall was reported in the Poulter Park area and originated from Thames Water’s Beddington Farmlands sewage works.
At times of heavy rainfall, water companies have been allowed by the Tory government to discharge sewage in order to maintain tank levels and to ensure they are not exceeded.
The latest data shows that the privately owned water companies have pumped raw sewage into Britain’s rivers and waters for more than 9million hours since 2016.
The figures from 2016 to 2021 represent a 2,553per cent increase on the previous five-year period.
Raw sewage was discharged into British waters more than 400,000 times last year.
Full of shit: Tory MP Chris Philp
Britain’s waterways, its rivers, streams and beaches have now become so badly polluted with untreated sewage that the French government has protested, saying that this disgusting outflow is affecting their own country’s coastline, fishermen and the “health of citizens”.
Last October, when an amendment to the Environment Bill sought to stop the practice of water companies pumping sewage into our rivers, Croydon South’s Tory MP, Chris Philp, was among the government’s lobby fodder who voted it down and block the environment-improving measure.
Philp has often been accused of being full of shit, but on this occasion he was simply helping highly profitable, foreign-owned utility companies to pour untreated shit into our rivers.
The River Wandle’s source is in Philp’s constituency.
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