Southern Water Bills Rise as Sewage Spills Persist: 50 Years of Warnings on the Kent Coast

What a “storm overflow” is — in plain English

A storm overflow (often called a combined sewer overflow, or CSO) is basically an emergency relief valve on parts of the sewer network. In heavy rain, it is designed to stop sewage backing up into homes by diverting a mix of rainwater and sewage out of the system. The industry argues that without overflows, you risk flooded properties, blocked sewers, and worse.

That is the theory. The controversy is the practice: how often overflows operate, whether they spill too readily, how well they are monitored, and how quickly the system is being upgraded so they become genuinely exceptional — not routine. Even the industry’s own plan language acknowledges the scale of the problem: thousands of storm overflows remain, and not all have been improved yet.

The core question: paying more for what, exactly?

Here is what makes people furious: the bill rise is sold as the cure, but customers experience it as the surcharge. It lands in the same household budget that is already being hammered by rent, food, and energy. It lands in a coastal district where people are also told — explicitly, in public — that some local bathing waters are “poor”.

When the product is essential, the normal consumer escape routes do not exist. You cannot take your custom elsewhere. You cannot realistically opt out. You can only pay, complain, or ration — and, as charities working with older people have warned, some do ration in grimly practical ways.

So when customers ask “why?”, they are not asking for a glossy brochure about capital programmes. They are asking for a moral explanation. Why is the public being asked to bankroll a rescue mission for services that should have been reliable all along?

In Folkestone & Hythe, this isn’t an abstract national argument

Using Southern Water’s own spill data for 2024, the local picture is stark. Across the district, the dataset records 11 discharge periods, 29 spills, and roughly 371 hours of sewage discharge over the year. Put another way, that is 15 days, 11 hours and 12 minutes of sewage entering our sea in 2024 alone.

Most of that time is dominated by one location: New Romney SSO, accounting for roughly 357 hours across 24 spills, recorded as discharging to the Littlestone Sewer. In plain terms, that means sewage-contaminated flows leaving the network and entering a receiving watercourse/pathway that ultimately connects to the coastal environment. Alongside that, the data shows “sea”-labelled spills within the district at Granville Parade, Sandgate (around 5.4 hours across four spills) — and one longer event at Queens Road, New Romney (about 8.5 hours).

And here is the thing about “where it goes after”: coastal water does not sit politely in a labelled box marked “sewage, keep away”. It moves. It mixes. It is carried by tide and current. Which means the real-world question residents ask is not simply “did it spill?” — but what does that mean for the sea where people swim, paddle, fish, and make a living?

The beaches: “Poor” ratings and the public-health reality

The district’s bathing-water story matters because it translates policy into public risk. In 2025, two local bathing waters — Dymchurch and Littlestone — were classified as “Poor”, with official advice against bathing.

This is not just a reputational bruise for a coast that depends on visitors. It is a basic health message. “Poor” bathing water can mean elevated levels of faecal indicator bacteria (such as E. coli or intestinal enterococci). For most people, that translates into a simple rule: don’t swallow the water, and if you are told not to go in, don’t go in. For families with children, older residents, and anyone with a weakened immune system, the stakes feel even higher.

So when Southern Water has the second largest price increase in the current set of rises, residents are entitled to ask: how does “paying more” square with beaches where the safest advice is to stay out?

What councillors say is happening — and why it matters

At a Folkestone & Hythe District Council full council meeting, councillors put what residents feel into blunt words.

Cllr Tony Hills pointed directly to the official ratings: “Dymchurch and Littlestone have been rated… as having poor water quality,” adding: “Bathing is advised against at these beaches.” He called that “a very damaging recommendation… for a tourist and coastal community.” Then he asked a question that slices through the jargon: “Would the leader agree that all sewage going to sea should be UV treated?” (UV treatment is a disinfection process; it does not magically remove everything, but it can reduce microorganisms.)

Cllr Jim Martin went further, describing a steady drumbeat of alerts: “over 200 notifications,” “we’ve had 27 alerts,” and — most strikingly — that Southern Water was “pouring untreated sewage into our seas continuously since the beginning of the year.” In a later exchange he added the political frustration: “We’ve had umpteen meetings…” and asked why, after all that, “we’re just flipping everything back into our seas.”

Those remarks matter for one simple reason: they show the gap between the national narrative (“investment”, “plans”, “upgrades”) and the lived local experience (alerts, spills, and warnings about bathing). If customers are being asked to pay more for improvement, then democratic scrutiny has to focus on outcomes, not promises.

What Southern Water promises — and what customers should measure it against

Southern Water says it has a major delivery programme for 2025–30 (the AMP8 period — essentially the next five-year regulatory investment cycle). In its published delivery plan, the company describes more than £8bn of investment over five years and says it plans to “significantly reduce storm overflows at almost 300 locations” across rivers and coastline, alongside upgrades intended to improve water quality and resilience. It also flags the complexity of working in protected environments — including bathing waters and other designated zones.

All of that could be meaningful. But here is the hard-edged consumer question: what would success look like in Folkestone & Hythe, in numbers ordinary people can recognise?

Not “engagement”. Not “mobilisation”. Not “frameworks”. Real-world measures:

• fewer spill alerts in the first place;

• fewer and shorter discharges in the local dataset;

• bathing waters moving out of “Poor”;

• clear, independently trusted monitoring — not a PR map that leaves the public guessing what “hours” of discharge actually meant in volume and impact.

The accountability problem: hours, not volume — and the “unknown” that won’t die

One of the oldest arguments in this space is also one of the simplest: if you want the public to trust you, show them the full scale of the harm. Southern Water spill reporting has historically been framed around duration — how long an overflow operated — rather than the volume released. That can make the true scale harder for the public to understand, and easier for everyone else to argue about.

And the wider point is almost comically grim: in previous correspondence discussed publicly, it has been claimed that the company did not hold flow-rate information that would allow “hours spilled” to be translated into “how much”. That is not a minor technicality. It is the difference between “an incident” and “a measurable discharge”.

You do not rebuild trust by telling the public to pay more while simultaneously saying the public cannot know the size of what was discharged. Trust is not a branding exercise. It is data, clarity, and delivery.

The core question doesn’t go away