By Press Release
In the ’70s and ’80s, Feargal Sharkey was the lead singer of The Undertones before launching a solo career. These days he’s a fisherman who campaigns on the environment.
Having noticed the Island has the most polluted coastal waters in Britain, unsurprisingly he wants to “speak to someone on the Isle of Wight”. Of his songs, ‘A Good Heart’ was my favourite. It starts with the line “I hear a lot of stories; I suppose they could be true”, and that became my earworm last week, when I saw Bob Seely outlining his party’s polices for cleaner seas.
It was only last year that Bob was voting in parliament to allow Southern Water another 15 years to clean up their mess, so maybe it’s him Feargal should have a word with? The Tories have a ‘five-point plan’ for water quality, and Bob seems quite excited about it. These five-point plans are all the rage and arrive like buses. Kier Starmer was at it last week, and the week before that it was Rishi’s turn with his to-do list. Call me a cynic, but these lists never seem credible; it’s almost as if they’re preparing us for a general election!
Last year, Bob said stopping sewage being dumped around our coastline would cost Southern Water too much money. Now he’s Mr Clean Seas, promising he’s going to force Southern Water to “raise their game”. Like Paul the Apostle, has Bob seen the light? Even if we do have to wait until 2030 for the promised reductions. Usually, he’s far too busy elsewhere to discuss our filthy coastline. As well as popping up on TV, I imagine he’s been visiting Portsmouth’s QA Hospital, to check on all those new beds we’ve funded. It’s also possible he’s been marking the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, standing outside their embassy in the newly renamed ‘Kyiv Rd’ waving a pointless placard.
I discovered Southern Water has a ‘misconnections’ team. Their job is to identify households where surface water is incorrectly connected to foul drains. Rain water should run off your roof into storm drains, or ideally, a water butt. If it doesn’t, it’s using valuable capacity in the foul drains, which should only contain the stuff from our loo, kitchen and bathroom. If the investigations team can change the course of ‘misdirected’ wastewater, it takes pressure off the sewage system and, in turn, helps reduce discharges into our coastal waters.
In the past, the only way of detecting ‘misconnections’ was to search for toilet paper in the drains using nets. That does sound pretty gross, but when they do happen upon some Andrex (presumably without any puppies attached), they can trace it straight back to you. Now, thanks to what they call ‘Fluidon’ technology, it’s possible to detect tell-tale chemical traces of household cleaning products in drains, and they reckon that’s a game-changer. In just one year, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight’s misconnections team managed to identify a remarkable 19 misconnected properties. Yes, I’m afraid you read that right, 19 households, in the two counties. Combined! It begs the question, how many of them were searching, and were they working from home?
Time and time again, the often-fined water companies and double-dealing politicians like Seely claim to be serious about improving water quality. There’s little noticeable change, so is it any wonder campaigners like Feargal go on about hearing stories that could be true?
The Environment Agency has called for water firm bosses to be jailed for repeatedly breaking the law, but meanwhile the boss of Thames Water will earn £2 million this year, including bonus, while ours gets by on a measly £1 million.
