Lisa Smart has made The Guardian in a story about an issue we all love to hate – sewage: Sewage-soaked field stops creation of new woodland in Greater Manchester where you can view of photo of Lisa gamely inspecting the mess.
Lisa is a councillor on Stockport Council and our PPC for Hazel Grove. The article tells us:
Plans to plant a new woodland have been cancelled after local councillors discovered a field was so saturated with sewage the soil could be too toxic for the trees.
The woodland was to have been planted in a council-owned field located by Otterspool Road in Romiley, Greater Manchester. Officials hoped the woodland would improve the environment, provide green space and encourage wildlife habitats.
However, Stockport councillors have learned the land is unsuitable for tree planting because of sewage discharges leaching into the ground. They were told the resulting soil contamination would make it hard to plant the trees, so they had decided to cancel the woodland.
And the blame for this stink?
According to Environment Agency data, United Utilities discharged sewage at Otterspool Road 135 times last year, which amounted to 40 days of sewage flowing.
The water company was found to be the most polluting in the country last year. One of United Utilities’ pipes spilled sewage into the River Ellen, near the Lake District, for nearly 7,000 hours in 2022. Environment Agency data also showed that 10 of the country’s 20 pipes that spilled the most sewage in 2022 were owned by United Utilities, which provides water to the north-west and the Lake District.
This isn’t the first time Lisa has looked into sewage. She has been running a campaign on river pollution for some time, and tells us that “Lib Dem run Stockport Council has become the first council in the country to launch an official Sewage Inquiry”, which she is chairing.
The Manchester Evening News covered the campaign with this headline: “Toilet paper hanging from trees…and the smell”: Sewage inquiry launched after water firm pumped filth into river nearly 1,000 times last year.
Back in January:
This evening fellow Werneth Liberal Democrat councillors and I will have the chance to question water company and Rivers Trust representatives about sewage dumping in our precious rivers and streams. Watch here live, from 6pm: https://t.co/736FR1aNd5 pic.twitter.com/XM2CMeJywg
— Lisa Smart (@Lisa_Smart) January 23, 2023
Well done to Lisa for stepping in where most of us would fear to tread.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
20C night
Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors
Lessons from 1936 and 2026 for the Liberal Democrats (LDN#211)
Recipe for a real change of direction
Day 9304: So Farewell Then, Kier Starmer
GWYN WILLIAMS
Jana
Pawel Urbanski
Iain Donaldson
Mohamed BENALIA
4 Comments
I read this earlier, and it was (and still is) the third most read article on the Guardian website.
It’s a ridiculous situation to be in, and it makes me so angry, and I hope it will be possible to take some legal action to require compensation and/or remediation of some sort. But well done to Lisa for making this stand, and getting national attention on what most people will accept is a scandal.
And well done to the coms people too, getting a quote from Tim, and tying it into our campaigning on the problems with water companies and their ongoing lack of accountability and the Tories unwillingness to do anything about it.
Is this dumping worse now than it has ever been or is it a problem that we have never been aware of? If it’s worse, what is causing it? Overdevelopment?
IMO there have always been problems, and I do think it’s getting worse, but it’s also now considered newsworthy, so we hear about a lot more of it.
In this case the water company is claiming “an issue on our network caused flooding from a manhole, affecting a small section of a field in Stockport which we are cleaning and repair work is being programmed.”
To me that sounds as if there was a blockage/collapse of the sewer downstream which became backed up. That sort of thing has always happened to a certain extent, but is far more of a problem when infrastructure is not properly inspected and maintained. How did it get this bad before anyone noticed and could stop it?
I don’t know the extent of the problem or anything about that local ecosystem, but the good news is that once the leak is stopped and debris removed, nature is pretty good at breaking down the pathogens, but breaking down organic content produces carbon dioxide (& maybe methane) which prevent roots from taking up oxygen, so it could take a while before it’s suitable for planting new trees.
Trees are pretty resilient to heavy metals, so even though they don’t break down, and I’d be surprised if concentrations were high enough to prevent that in the future. I’d be a lot more wary if it were allotments.
Fiona,
you are right to say there have always been problems, and it’s getting worse.
Thames Water maintains a real time map of sewage discharges Thames Water’s real-time map
However, Andrew Doherty, a Liberal Democrat district councillor, says “the digital map of sewage discharges tells him nothing new. Standing on the banks of the Coln, opposite the overflow pipe which is pummelling diluted untreated effluent into the river for the 625th hour, Doherty said the problem was a long running one and was down to a lack of investment by Thames Water over many years.
“There is a serious backlog of work to do,” he said. “These are the headwaters of the Thames. This is literally where it all starts, here in the Cotswolds and yet this is what is happening. This is not something that should be happening in the third decade of the 21st century.”
David Reinger, vice president of the Cotswold flyfishers said, “Ten years ago this was a beautiful example of a wild trout stream, but the double whammy of over abstraction by Thames Water in the summer, and winter storm discharges from Ampney works, probably the worst spilling works in this area, mean it is no longer.”
The overflows into the Coln and other Cotswold rivers continued days after the end of a period of heavy rain. This is because, Doherty explained, the groundwater ingresses into the sewage pipes as the water table rises and the overflows continue operating for days after the rain ends.