Southern Water Bewl Water Signs Show £30m and £40m as FHDC Faces Statutory Nuisance Test

Two Southern Water signs at Bewl Water appear to describe the same reservoir-upgrade scheme, yet one says “over £30 million” and the other says “over £40 million”. At the same time, Folkestone & Hythe District Council is still condemning sewage discharges in fierce terms while, on the public record, stopping short of the harder statutory route many residents might expect.

If a water company wants the public to trust it with reservoirs, rivers, coasts and bills, it is generally best not to mislay £10 million on the signboard.

That, in essence, is the problem at Bewl Water. In two photographs taken at Bewl Water on 28 March 2026, Southern Water are describing the same project. The wording is near-identical. The phone number is the same. The project reference number is the same. The broad description of the works is the same. Yet one sign says the company is spending over £30 million, while the other says it is spending over £40 million.

Now, to be scrupulously fair, this does not automatically mean Southern Water has published a flat falsehood. It may simply mean one sign is old and the project cost later rose. Southern Water’s own earlier Bewl leaflet said it was investing “over £30 million”. Its current Bewl project page now says it is spending “over £40 million”, gives the start date as April 2023 and the completion date as winter 2025/26, and says that by January 2026 the upgrade was in its final stages. But that still leaves a basic public-trust problem: if the number changed by at least £10 million, the company should explain when, why and why inconsistent signage is still out there.

Normally, a mismatched reservoir sign would be a mildly comic local curiosity. With Southern Water, it lands differently. This is a company already taking a hammering across Kent and the south east over sewage discharges, storm overflows and public confidence. In that context, even a sign matters. If residents are being asked to believe that everything important is under control, then apparently small contradictions stop looking small.

That wider argument is already running through Folkestone & Hythe politics. At full council in January, leader Jim Martin said discussions with Southern Water were continuing, that the council had taken over chairing the Stakeholders Group, and that the authority had written again about the “overwhelming amount” of untreated sewage discharged into local seas that winter. In the same meeting, after referring to years of talks about leaking cesspits, misconnections and other possible sources, he said the council would continue to fight with “whatever weapons we have on that”. In February, he returned to the theme, again saying discussions with Southern Water were continuing and describing the level of untreated sewage being discharged into the sea as “truly scandalous”.

No one can honestly say the rhetoric is timid. The harder question is whether the action has matched it. The January council record shows the authority pressing for more from the Environment Agency and Southern Water, backing out-of-season testing, continuing technical group meetings, continuing public meetings and supporting work on missed connections and leaking cesspits. It also recorded the leader saying that, by that point in 2026, there had already been five sewage-discharge alerts at Dymchurch, five at St Mary’s Bay, five at Littlestone, 27 at Sunny Sands and 200 notifications on the Hythe long pipe, while two of the district’s bathing waters, Littlestone and Dymchurch, were designated poor. That is a great many meetings, a great many alerts and a great deal of justifiable anger. What it is not, at least in the public council material we have checked, is a visible move to the sharpest formal power the council already has.

That sharper route is statutory nuisance. Section 259 of the Public Health Act 1936 treats certain foul ponds, pools, ditches, gutters and watercourses as statutory nuisances. Section 79(1)(h) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 brings within the statutory nuisance regime “any other matter declared by any enactment to be a statutory nuisance”. Section 80 of the 1990 Act 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. None of that means the council can skip the evidence stage. It cannot. Whether the legal threshold is met in any particular watercourse is a question of facts, evidence and professional judgment. But the route exists. It is real. And it is not merely decorative.

Which is why the motion coming to full council on 1 April suddenly matters rather a lot. The motion, tabled by the Conservative group and proposed by Cllr Tony Hills and seconded by Cllr David Godfrey, asks cabinet to bring forward urgent, costed options for a targeted water-testing programme covering major open sewers and connected watercourses on Romney Marsh and within the East Stour catchment. It also asks for options to test for E. coli and other indicators of faecal contamination and, where lawful and practicable, options for antimicrobial-resistance screening through partnership work with public bodies, regulators, water companies, laboratories and academic institutions. The findings of any agreed programme would then be reported publicly.

 

That is the awkward beauty of the motion. It is not revolutionary. It does not ask the council to gallop across the marsh waving legal parchment and shouting Latin. It asks for evidence. Sensible, costed, targeted evidence. Yet that is precisely the point. If the council’s answer to residents has been that this is a difficult, technical, evidence-heavy problem, then proper testing is not a distraction from tougher action. It is the foundation for it.

And that is where Jim Martin’s own words come back to haunt him. If the council will fight with whatever weapons it has, then evidence is one of those weapons. Statutory nuisance powers are another. A motion designed to build the first may help unlock the second. So the real political question now is not whether Southern Water deserves more sternly worded criticism. Plainly it does. The question is whether the council is finally prepared to arm itself properly, or whether residents are to be offered yet another round of meetings, letters and visible exasperation while the sewage keeps turning up with clockwork reliability.

Southern Water, for its part, should clear up the Bewl confusion without delay. If the project moved from “over £30 million” to “over £40 million”, the company should say when that happened, why it happened and whether older project signage remains in place. In isolation, a £10 million discrepancy on two signs would already be sloppy. In the middle of a wider crisis of confidence, it looks like something worse: a small symbol of a larger institutional habit of expecting the public to cope with blurred edges where clear answers ought to be.

For Folkestone & Hythe District Council, the issue is just as plain. The leader is right that the level of untreated sewage going into local seas via our watercourses, is scandalous. He is right to be angry. But anger, however sincerely expressed, is not a substitute for escalation. On 1 April, councillors have a chance to decide whether they want evidence robust enough to support stronger action, or whether they are content to go on fighting a public-health and pollution problem mainly by sounding cross about it.

Because residents do not need another performance of official frustration. They need facts, follow-through and a council willing to use every power it can lawfully justify. And if that really is the fight, then the first step is obvious: back the testing, gather the evidence and stop pretending that endless meetings are a weapon in themselves.

The Shepway Vox Team

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