Rivers of waste

Simon Cooper traces the history of sewage discharges in British waters and suggests possible solutions

- Carla Passino

READING about the state of the rivers of the British Isles, with the destruction visited upon them by sewerage outflows, which are often officially sanctioned as illegal, it is tempting to rail against 33 years of privatisation as the source of our current woes.

I’m no apologist for the water and sewerage corporations and I am happy they are finally being held to account, at least in part, not only in the court of public opinion, but in the courts of law, which have handed out fines worth hundreds of millions. The truth is, however, that the 1989 privatisation was the last in a long line of bad ideas going back centuries. Those ideas have failed to deal with our sewage in a way that pro- tects the rivers that we love, but which our governments and water industry apparently only purport to love.

Even at what is often held up as the high point of waste management, the Joseph Bazalgette sewer-building pro- gramme in the Victorian era, we were indulging in a giant deception—namely, using our rivers and coastline as a giant dumping ground for at best inadequately treated and at worst raw sewage. It has ever been thus. The first recorded British domestic home-sewer system in the Orkneys five millennia years ago did exactly that. Henry VIII tasked Commissioners and Courts of Sewers with hurrying effluent out of the cities, regardless of its eventual destination.