Thames Water bosses on Tuesday blamed heavy rainfall linked to climate change for a doubling of raw sewage discharges directly into rivers and a spike in the number of times it polluted water courses over the past year.
Embattled chief executive Chris Weston admitted that “our performance in pollutions and sewage discharges is not where it should be or where we want it to be”, as he unveiled annual financial results from the country’s biggest water company. Thames admitted that sewage discharges shot up from 8,015 to 16,990 in the year to the end of March while pollution incidents rose six per cent from 331 to 350.
But Mr Weston insisted that the deterioration was largely down to unusually heavy rainfall over the course of a particularly wet year, when 40 per cent more than average fell on London and its Thames Valley catchment area.
Mr Weston, who is on a salary of £850,000, said staff at Thames Water “go to extraordinary lengths” to try to prevent sewage or other pollutants flowing into rivers, pointing out that incidents of pollution classified at “serious” by the Environment Agency had actually fallen.
He said, “No one at Thames likes the thought of pollution or waste going into water courses”, but that the ageing mains and treatment infrastructure were simply not built to cope with recent deluges. February this year had been particularly difficult to cope with as rainfall amounted to 250 per cent of normal and had “overwhelmed” a system designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette 150 years ago.
The company said: “As part of our turnaround plan, we are prioritising targeted cleaning of the network to prevent blockages, the biggest cause of network pollutions.”
But furious campaigners said Thames bosses and shareholders could not offload all the blame on unusual weather and an ageing infrastructure.
Paul de Zylva, senior sustainability analyst at Friends of the Earth, said: “Water companies have had free licence to line their shareholders’ pockets handsomely for decades while letting our rivers and seas fill with sewage and infrastructure crumble.”
The latest pollution figure came ahead of Thursday’s key draft decision from regulator Ofwat on how much Thames can put up bills over the next five years to help pay for its investment programme. Thames has asked for one of the biggest hikes — 59 per cent.
Thames Water, which has about 16 million customers across London and the Thames Valley, wants to significantly hike bills to fund £3billion of investment and upgrade the Victorian-era pipes running under parts of the capital.
But it comes as the debt-ridden firm paid out more than £195million of dividends in the 12 months ending March, compared to £45.2million the previous year.
It said the payments were given out to help two financially struggling holding companies, Kemble Eurobond and Thames Water Limited.
