Why are water companies dumping raw sewage in Britain’s rivers and coastal seas?

There were more than 400,000 discharges of raw sewage in 2020, together lasting more than three million hours, from water companies into rivers in England and Wales. One company, Southern Water, was recently fined a record £90 million for dumping up to 21 billion litres of untreated sewage over six years in protected seas off England’s southern coast.

To understand why this is happening, we need to understand the history of our sewer systems.