Sir Ed Davey went overboard today as he tried to put pressure on the Tories over the UK’s sewage crisis.
The Lib Dem leader’s love of a stunt saw him embark – and then rapidly disembark in an uncontrolled manner – from a paddleboard on Windermere, the scene of a highly controversial effluent spillage in February.
He will be hoping the situation has been rectified after he fell off the board into the chilly waters of England’s largest lake.
Earlier this month it was claimed million of litres of raw sewage were ‘illegally pumped’ into the Lake District beauty spot by United Utilities after a fault was not corrected for hours.
According to the Environment Agency, sewage spills into England’s rivers and seas more than doubled in 2023 with 3.6 million hours of spills last year – equal to about 400 years – compared with 1.75 million hours in 2022.
The Lib Dems are campaigning for local environment experts to get seats on water company boards as non-executive directors to ‘improve public accountability and transparency’.
The Lib Dem leader’s love of a stunt saw him embark – and then rapidly disembark in an uncontrolled manner – from a paddleboard on Windermere, the scene of a highly controversial effluent spillage in February.
He will be hoping the situation has been rectified after he fell off the board into the chilly waters of England’s largest lake.
Earlier this month it was revealed million of litres of raw sewage were ‘illegally pumped’ into the Lake District beauty spot by United Utilities after a fault was not corrected for hours.
Sir Ed accused Tory ministers of ‘sitting on their hands’ and allowing firms to get away with pumping poo into waterways.
‘These disgraced firms are destroying our treasured lakes and rivers with their filthy sewage dumping – hitting human health, harming our precious environment and damaging the local tourism economy all at the same time,’ he said.
‘Enough is enough. It’s time to get tough on the water industry and a key part of that change must be new ways to hold these firms to account, putting power in the hands of the local communities suffering from this scandal.
‘Local environmental experts on company boards could hold water bosses’ feet to the fire and local people would finally have a say in how their water company is run.’
In the run-up to the General Election, the Lib Dems have unveiled plans to abolish Ofwat and introduce a new water regulator to tackle the sewage crisis, in addition to banning water CEO bonuses.
Sir Ed is visiting the Lake District, where protests have taken place outside the office of water company United Utilities, after it was accused of pumping sewage into Unesco protected lakes.
According to Liberal Democrat analysis of Companies House records, United Utilities has made £2.3 billion in operating profits since 2019 and paid their top executives over £2 million in bonuses.
In April, Steve Coogan joined protestors in demanding that the firm stop dumping sewage in Windermere.
Speaking to Good Morning Britain, Coogan called the situation a ‘timebomb’ and said: ‘United Utilities have a big fancy PR machine and they put nice fancy offices up like this to say ‘we’re working together with the people of Windermere’.
‘But it’s all a smokescreen to distract attention from what they’ve been doing over the last 30 years, which is putting treated and untreated sewage into Lake Windermere.
‘It’s to such an extent that there are toxic levels of algae, there are algae blooms that show the nitrate levels are like through the roof.
‘They’ve been doing this year on year. They’re doing it legally and we have evidence they’re legally putting sewage into the lake. They’ve been paying record dividends to shareholders, there’s no excuse for this.
‘We’re telling them to stop putting sewage in the lake and take out what they’ve put in. It is possible. They’ve said they’ll pass the bill for that operation onto the bill payers.
‘They shouldn’t be able to do that, they should take it from the huge profits they’ve made and just deny their shareholders a dividend for a few years and put that money into infrastructure to clean up the lake.’
A United Utilities spokeswoman said: ‘This incident was caused by an unexpected fault on the third party telecoms cable network in the area, which United Utilities was not notified about and which affected both the primary system and United Utilities’ backup.
‘As soon as we discovered this fault was affecting the Glebe Road pumping station, our engineers took urgent steps to resolve the situation and we informed the Environment Agency within an hour of the pollution being confirmed.’
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