Lhe Great Britain is taking on a huge challenge: it wants to reduce untreated wastewater discharges into the sea to zero by 2050. To do this, colossal investments are planned, which will result in an increase in the bill consumers, said the Minister of the Environment on Saturday. Water supply companies will have to invest some 56 billion pounds (66 billion euros) to renovate sewage systems, according to a government plan presented on Friday.
It is a question of “revolutionizing our sewage systems”, stressed George Eustice, interviewed by BBC4 radio, noting that the current situation, with some 15,000 sewage pipes flowing into the sea, was “a legacy 19th century Victorian infrastructuree century. Untreated sewage can thus be discharged in large quantities, particularly when the evacuation systems are saturated by violent stormy rains, as happened last week.
At the height of the summer season, many beaches in the United Kingdom were thus prohibited for swimming due to the health risk.
“We wanted water bills to stay low”
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Friday, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, had alerted the French government to these waste water discharges, an “ecological disaster” which, according to him, has worsened since Brexit. George Eustice assured that the current British government, which has only a few days left of its existence awaiting the appointment by the Conservative Party of a successor to Boris Johnson by September 5, was “ the first to seriously tackle this issue”.
“The reason why this decision has been pushed back by successive governments, both Labor and Conservative, for decades, is that we wanted to keep water bills low, and we can understand that,” pleaded Mr Eustice.
Water supply companies must have renovated pipes discharging near designated bathing areas under the government plan by 2035 and the others by 2050 at the latest.
The additional cost to consumers by 2030 will be around £12 per year per household, and £42 by 2050.
The Liberal Democrat opposition called the plan a “cruel joke” and estimated that there would still be 325,000 sewage spills per year in 2030, into the sea, lakes or rivers.
The European Commission said Thursday that it would soon respond to complaints from MEPs on the subject.