Southern Water fined £7m over sewage pollution in Kent
Southern Water has been fined more than £7 million after dumping sewage illegally off the Kent coast between 2019 and 2021.
The company, said to have caused harm from “a pattern of repeated incidents over several years”, pleaded guilty to 13 offences at Medway Magistrates’ Court last April over sewage discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations between 2019 and 2021.
Nine counts related to the incidents of untreated sewage dumped off the Kent coast while three counts were over failure to notify authorities of the discharges as soon as practicable and within 24 hours of a warning which is a condition of its environmental permit.
A final conviction was for failing to have a standby pump at Margate’s station between July 27 2019 and October 4 2020 in breach of its permit.
The sentencing at Canterbury Crown Court took place across Thursday and Friday, with Mr Justice Johnson imposing a total fine of £7,127,083.
It comes after the company was fined £90 million for nearly 7,000 incidents across Hampshire, Kent and Sussex in a case brought by the Environment Agency in 2021.
On Friday, Mr Justice Johnson said there were “overall serious failures”, adding: “The defendant knew the importance of maintaining resilience systems and equipment at these sites.
“And it knew what the consequences would be if the system or equipment or individual components failed.
“It was well aware of the potential for equipment to fail and for the essential need for robust maintenance and testing procedures.
“That is because of the dozens of previous occasions on which that had happened.”
He told the court: “The harm was not confined to a single event, but arose from a pattern of repeated incidents over several years.
“Taken together, the offending caused serious degradation of environmental quality, significant interference with public amenity, potential risk to public health and damage to the reputation of an important coastal community.”
The judge said Southern Water is a “very large” organisation with annual revenue over the last three years between £800 million and £1 billion.
He said it has 174 previous convictions, convicted every year from 1999 to 2016, and convicted as recently as April of this year.
“The defendant’s record of convictions shows a protracted history of non-compliance with its legal obligations, and a repeated pattern of inadequate staff training, insufficient investment in the infrastructure and a failure properly to maintain equipment.
“It also shows a failure to respond to warnings from the courts, including the resident judge of this court and the Lord Chief Justice.
“This record of criminality, to the great detriment of the environment and the community in Kent, is an exceptionally serious aggravating factor,” he said.
Published: by Radio NewsHub