Could Tony Vaughan MP Take Southern Water to Court Over Sewage?

Joining a briefing is easy. Holding a placard is easy. Posting angry words on social media is easy. The harder test is whether Folkestone and Hythe’s MP is prepared to do what any other affected resident can do: go to court and force the issue.

Tony Vaughan’s latest post says all the right things. He says he joined the Sewage Campaign Network’s parliamentary briefing, stood alongside Feargal Sharkey and the Channel 4 Dirty Business team, condemned “unacceptable levels of pollution”, attacked the Environment Agency’s response as inadequate, demanded transparency over Southern Water’s promised £11 million local investment, and called for decisive action including prosecutions. In the attached screenshot, he is literally holding the sign. Very good. Very photogenic. Very shareable. But in the battle against sewage pollution, joining something is one thing. Doing something is another.

And this is where the awkward question begins. Vaughan is not just any politician reading out a party brief. He has a legal background. His official biography says he worked for almost two decades as a barrister before entering Parliament. That matters, because he is better placed than most to understand that outrage is not a remedy. Press releases are not a remedy. A nice picture beside a campaign banner is certainly not a remedy. Law is a remedy.

The route is there in black and white. Section 82 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 allows “any person aggrieved by the existence of a statutory nuisance” to complain to a magistrates’ court. In most cases, the person has to give at least 21 days’ notice before starting proceedings. If the court is satisfied the nuisance exists, it can make an order requiring abatement and prohibiting recurrence, and a breach can bring financial penalties. Richard Buxton Solicitors describes a section 82 claim as a private criminal prosecution. That is not a slogan from a protest leaflet. It is the legal mechanism Parliament created.

Then there is section 259 of the Public Health Act 1936, a provision so often ignored you could be forgiven for thinking Whitehall and local government had misplaced it down the back of a filing cabinet. It says that any pond, pool, ditch, gutter or watercourse which is so foul, or in such a state, as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance, is a statutory nuisance for the purposes of Part III of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.Section 79(1)(h) then does the connecting work by bringing within the EPA any matter declared by another enactment to be a statutory nuisance. Put simply, a sewage-fouled watercourse can fall squarely within the statutory nuisance regime. That is not activist folklore or social-media law. It is what the legislation says.

Indeed, in correspondence seen by us, Gravesham Borough Council, Ashford Borough Council, Folkestone & Hythe District Council and others have expressly accepted in principle that a sewage-fouled watercourse can fall within section 259 of the 1936 Act and, where the conditions are met, within section 79(1)(h) of the 1990 Act. That is significant. It means at least three Kent councils have already acknowledged the basic legal point. The argument is not fanciful. The law is sitting there, waiting to be used.

Now, to be precise, this is not a magic wand. Section 82 is available to a person “aggrieved”, not just anyone who fancies a day out at the magistrates’ court. And section 259 is a much cleaner fit for foul rivers, streams, drains, ditches and watercourses than for the open sea in general. Evidence matters. Location matters. Facts matter. None of this means Vaughan would automatically win. But it absolutely does mean there is a route available to an affected resident who is serious enough to try. And Vaughan, as a local MP with legal training and a stated concern about water pollution, is plainly in a stronger position than most to test it.

That is why the politics of this begin to look a little flimsy. Vaughan is right to say the sources of pollution are known. He is right to say regulators have too often been weak. He is right to demand transparency from Southern Water. But if actions speak louder than words, then the obvious question is why not act? Why not put Southern Water on notice, assemble the evidence, and bring a section 82 case if the facts support it? Why not use the law available to ordinary people instead of merely applauding campaigners who do the hard yards while politicians hover nearby for the photo? The whole point of having a barrister as your MP is that he ought to know the difference between a strongly worded caption and an enforceable remedy.

And there is an even wider political problem for Labour here. Steve Reed is now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Before that, he was Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from July 2024 to September 2025. Inside Croydon reported last month that Reed was being challenged to release messages linked to water-industry lobbying questions arising from his DEFRA period. Whatever one makes of that campaign, the basic chronology is not in dispute. So when Labour MPs denounce sewage today, they are not doing so from the purity of the opposition benches. Their party has already been in government and already had control of DEFRA. The public is entitled to ask what, exactly, all this righteous indignation has achieved.

To be fair, Vaughan has at least raised Kent water pollution in Parliament before. Hansard records him asking what steps were being taken to tackle water pollution in Kent. So this is not a case of total silence. But asking a question in Westminster is still not the same as forcing a legal issue in a courtroom. One is politics. The other is action. One produces a line for the weekly column. The other can produce an order.

The blunt Shepway question, then, is this. If Tony Vaughan wants residents to believe this sewage campaign is more than a tasteful afternoon of networking with a placard, why not use the tools the law already gives him? Like any other ordinary local resident who can properly say they are aggrieved by the nuisance, he could seek to bring a section 82 case. He could test the section 259 route where sewage-fouled watercourses are involved. He could do more than issue statements, join briefings and call for “decisive action” by someone else. He could decide to be decisive himself. Until then, the post is fine, the photo is fine, the words are fine. But the sewage is still there. And the question remains: will he?

The Shepway Vox Team

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