Following major storms, a quantity of waste water was discharged by the British into the English Channel. Norman MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin and two of her colleagues urge the European Commission to react. In the United Kingdom, environmental activists denounce the inaction of the public authorities.
Dozens of beaches unsuitable for swimming in the south of Great Britain in the middle of summer. If the affair caused a stir in the United Kingdom in the middle of August, it is starting to make some waves on the other side of the Channel. The Norman MEP, Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, and two of her colleagues (all three from LREM), Nathalie Loizeau and Pierre Karleskind, the chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Fisheries, urges the European Commission to govern. “We fear negative consequences on the quality of the marine waters that we share with this country and incidentally on marine biodiversity but also on the activities of fishermen and shellfish farmers“, alert the three French elected officials.
According to our British counterparts from Inews, the association Surfers against sewage (Surfers against sewage) identified nearly 90 beaches polluted by the discharge of sewage during the month of August. In the heart of the summer, violent storms fell on Great Britain. This episode followed a major drought which rendered the soil unable to absorb this excess water. Several water network operators have therefore carried out discharges into rivers and the sea. As the BBC recalls, waste water from toilets and rainwater still pass through the same pipes in a large part of the country.
The president of the Surfers association againts sewage, Hugo Tagholm, denounces “industrial environmental vandalism“in the columns of our fellow British.”Years of underinvestment are now visible. It is time that the huge profits of water companies are diverted to the proper management of water and wastewater, and for the protection of people and the planet.“Because the problem is far from new in the United Kingdom. In the fall of 2021, Chris Pearsall posted a video on social networks that caused a scandal across the Channel. The British photographer had filmed, around forty kilometers from Southampton, a pipe discharging untreated sewage into the sea for 49 hours.
This video had been all the more scandalous as at the same time the Conservative MPs had opposed an amendment to the environmental bill carried by the House of Lords. The amendment was intended to ban water companies from this type of discharge into nature. The government of Boris Johnson had in particular put forward the cost induced by such a ban. “Eliminating storm overflows means turning the entire Victorian sewer system into a brand new sewer system“, a project estimated between 150 and 650 billion pounds sterling.”To give some perspective, £150billion is more than the entire schools, police and defense budget combined.“
These waste water discharges into nature are authorized by European legislation in “exceptional circumstances“, such as the episode encountered this summer in the United Kingdom. But this practice seems to have lost its temper “exceptional” in recent years. In July 2021, the daily newspaper The Guardian listed, in a survey, more than 200,000 wastewater spills in 2019. A few weeks later, the British Environment Agency acknowledged the existence of 400,000 similar events for the year 2020. In a statement, she said sewage pollution could be “devastating to human health, local biodiversity and our environment“. At the request of the Labor Party, she recently revealed that more than 1.2 million spills had been recorded between 2016 and 2021.
Liberal Democrat MPs also contributed to the debate this summer by studying meticulously data from the UK Environment Agency. According to their research, a quarter of discharges made last year were not monitored by water companies, due to inoperative or absent measuring instruments, as reported by the BBC. “There is an urgent need to investigate and put pressure on the British authorities so that this government establish a wastewater treatment plan to prevent it from being massively discharged into our waters“, claims the Norman MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, “We have to act quickly so that we don’t come to a prohibition fishing in the English Channel and the North Sea. It would be catastrophic. We have fishermen who do not have to experience a fourth tragedy after Brexit, the covid pandemic and the increase in prices following the war in Ukraine.”
In Cherbourg, Pascal Bailly du Bois, oceanographer and director of the Intechmer training center, somewhat tempers the concern of the MEP. The Normandy coast should be spared thanks to sea currents. “It is necessary to make the analogy between the English Channel and a river which flows from west to east, from the Atlantic to the North Sea.“, explains this specialist in pollutants at sea, “This river will form a sort of border between the coasts of southern England and the coasts of the English Channel (Norman side). There will be a transport to the east of any pollution that will be diluted on our coasts.“The North Sea sector should be more impacted even if, according to Pascal Bailly du Bois, the concentration of pollutants should be divided by ten.
If the speech is French, the concern is shared beyond our borders, says MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin. “There are also our Belgian friends, in the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland who are worried“, indicates the elected Norman who challenged with two of his colleagues the European commissioner for the environment.It is not because there was Brexit that the British government should be exonerated from its obligations: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (concluded with the EU during Brexit).”
“We are the first government to take action on sewage overflows“, said Steve Double recently, the british minister in charge of water (Source: BBC). The Conservative government has indicated that it wants to reduce wastewater discharges into bathing waters by 70% by 2035. Last spring, the Ministry of the Environment launched a public consultation on a “government storm overflow discharge plan“. This plan was originally to be presented on September 1st.
But Boris Johnson, pushed out by his party, is now content to manage current affairs. The suspended Prime Minister was also beaten by his own father, Stanley Johnson, a former MEP and one of the drafters of European legislation on water quality. As for the potential future tenant of 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, given favorite by the polls, the daily newspaper The Guardian revealed at the beginning of the week that she had considerably reduced the budget allocated to the fight against water pollution when She was Secretary of State for the Environment between 2014 and 2016. However, the plan still seems relevant, assure the authorities of the United Kingdom. “The government’s plan will require water companies to make the biggest ever investment in environmental infrastructure – £56billion over 25 years – as part of a long-term program to tackle wastewater discharges by 2050“, assures the British Embassy in France in a statement released this Friday at the end of the afternoon.