Southern Water Sewage Spills in the East Stour: Why Councils Must Use Statutory Nuisance Powers

England had its driest spring for more than 100 years, and 2025 was England’s warmest and sunniest year on record. Even so, the selected Southern Water overflows affecting the East Stour, the Speringbrook Sewer, the Royal Military Canal tributary, the Guldeford Sewer and connected local waters still clocked up 738.6 monitored discharge hours in 2025 alone. Across five years, the total reaches 10,004.6 hours. This is no longer just a Southern Water scandal. It is also a council failure.

There are spreadsheets that whisper, and there are spreadsheets that grab you by the crown jewels. These ones grab.

Across the five years from 2021 to 2025, the selected Southern Water overflows affecting these local watercourses recorded 10,004.6 hours of monitored discharges and 1,090 spill events. Put another way, that is more than a year and seven weeks of sewage pouring into rivers, drains, sewers and connected waters in this part of Kent. That is not a one-off incident. It is not a blip. It is not a regrettable operational hiccup. It is a pattern with the kind of grim staying power usually associated with bureaucracy, mould and official buck-passing.

Then comes the part that should make both Southern Water’s press office and Kent’s more passive councils shuffle in their seats. The Environment Agency says 2025’s lower spill figures were helped by unusually dry conditions. The Met Office says England had its driest spring for more than 100 year, and that 2025 was England’s warmest and sunniest year on record. So if anyone is still reaching for the old line that this is all just rain being terribly inconsiderate, 2025 rather ruins the act. Even in a year that was dry, warm and bright enough to sound like a Visit England brochure, these selected local overflows still ran for 738.6 hours (or five weeks non-stop). That is not a weather excuse. That is a system excuse.

The yearly picture is ugly enough on its own. The selected sites logged 1,349.7 monitored discharge hours in 2021, 1,266.6 in 2022, then 3,889.5 in 2023 and 2,760.2 in 2024. Even after a year of unusually favourable weather, they still logged another 738.6 hours in 2025. So this is not a story of one dreadful year that everyone can solemnly promise to learn from. It is a five-year habit.

The worst of it is not especially hard to find. Hamstreet WWTW on the Speringbrook Sewer is the heavyweight, with 3,023.3 hours across the period. Sellindge WWTW on the East Stour network adds 2,403.1 hours. Icklesham WWTW on the Royal Military Canal tributary contributes 1,475.9. South Ashford Pumping Station adds 1,086.0, and Lydd Road Pumping Station another 873.2. Those five sites account for the overwhelming bulk of the monitored discharge time in this local watch-list. Southern Water’s local problem is not hiding in the reeds. It is standing in the middle of the marsh waving both arms.

Nor is this only an East Stour story in the narrow sense. The grouped figures show 3,522.8 monitored discharge hours in the East Stour network over the five years, but the Speringbrook Sewer contributes another 3,023.3 hours, the Royal Military Canal tributary 1,475.9, the Freshwater River 1,086.0 and the Guldeford Sewer 873.2. In plain English, this is not one rogue outlet or one unlucky patch of water. It is a spread problem, across connected local water environments, recurring year after year.

That matters because Shepway Vox and others have been pointing for some time to the way these systems connect. The Speringbrook Sewer does not magically become somebody else’s problem because a boundary line appears on a council map. The East Stour does not stop mattering because the pollution story gets administratively awkward. Water flows. So should responsibility.

At this point the usual institutional theatre begins. Southern Water looks concerned. The Environment Agency looks regulatory. Councils look upward. Everyone agrees that sewage in water is bad. Then the public is invited to enjoy another helping of “partnership working”, “continued engagement” and “monitoring arrangements”, which is official language for: we have held a meeting, produced a note, and are now hoping the river will clear before the next one.

But this is not only the Environment Agency’s responsibility, and councils need to stop behaving as if they are merely bystanders with lanyards. Section 259 of the Public Health Act 1936 says that a pond, pool, ditch, gutter or watercourse that is so foul as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance is a statutory nuisance. Section 79(1)(h) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 pulls that into the main statutory nuisance regime. Section 80 then says that where a local authority is satisfied that a statutory nuisance exists, or is likely to occur or recur, it shall serve an abatement notice. Not “might”. Not “could, after a workshop and a stakeholder roundtable”. Shall. Parliament did not write that word for decoration.

And let us deal with another favourite dodge while we are here. Councils do not need to sit around waiting for some mythical perfect medical dossier before taking the “prejudicial to health” limb seriously. Tim Everett, writing for the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, makes the point plainly: qualified and experienced environmental health practitioners can provide expert evidence on whether conditions are prejudicial to health, and medical evidence is not generally required. In other words, environmental health officers are not ornamental shrubbery in steel-toe boots. Their inspections, observations, photographs, sampling, complaint history and professional judgment count. The law does not require them to wait for a doctor to arrive clutching a clipboard and a worried trout.

That matters because one of the most threadbare excuses in this whole foul business is the idea that sewage pollution somehow belongs inside a sealed regulatory cupboard marked “not our department”. The law is moving the other way. In Manchester Ship Canal v United Utilities (No 2), the Supreme Court made clear that the Water Industry Act 1991 does not prevent a claim in nuisance or trespass when a watercourse is polluted by discharges of foul water, even without negligence or deliberate misconduct. Different legal route, same broad lesson: regulation is not a magical force field. The existence of one regime does not make every other remedy vanish in a puff of chlorinated smoke.

So what, exactly, are councils waiting for?

This is where the politics of it starts to smell almost as bad as the water. Councils are very keen on declaring emergencies when the emergency can be laminated and put on a lectern. They are less keen when the emergency comes with a statutory duty, possible conflict, and the need to stare down a utility company rather than issue another strongly worded motion. The result is a kind of modern local-government pantomime in which everyone points solemnly at the Environment Agency and hopes nobody notices that councils have legal powers of their own.

Southern Water, for its part, has spent years offering the sort of vocabulary that only a water company could love: “storm overflow performance”, “network pressures”, “investment programmes”, “operability”, “investigations ongoing”. What those phrases usually mean in ordinary English is that sewage has gone where it should not have gone, for longer than it should have gone there, and the company would prefer you to focus on tomorrow’s promise rather than yesterday’s muck.

Yet the harder question now is not only for Southern Water. It is for the councils. If more than 10,000 monitored discharge hours across these selected local sites over five years does not at least trigger serious statutory nuisance scrutiny by FHDC, what do they think these powers are for? A commemorative plaque? A museum exhibit? A charming period feature from the age of black-and-white photographs and proper drains?

The oldest part of this story may be the most important. Parliament gave councils nuisance powers because foul watercourses are not a new problem. They are an old one. The law was designed precisely because leaving communities to endure recurrent filth and then passing the parcel between agencies was not supposed to be an acceptable form of public administration. Yet here we are, in 2026, still watching too many public bodies behave as if raw sewage entering local watercourses is a regrettable act of weather rather than a recurring matter of law, health, evidence and enforcement.

And that brings us back to 2025, the year that strips away one of the last comforting excuses. England had its driest spring for more than a century, and 2025 was England’s warmest and sunniest year on record, then this was about as favourable a year as the old rain-based alibi could possibly hope for. Even then, these selected local Southern Water overflows still logged 738.6 [or five weeks] monitored discharge hours.

The sewage still came.

So the weather excuse is running out. The council excuse should be next.

The Shepway Vox Team

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