Folkestone & Hythe Council Backs East Stour and Romney Marsh Sewage Testing

There are some council debates that arrive gift-wrapped for local government purists: knotty, procedural, full of worthy intent and decorated with enough amendments to make the public wonder whether they accidentally tuned into an amateur dramatics society staging Standing Orders: The Musical. Wednesday night’s debate on sewage pollution and water testing was one of those rare treats.

On one level, the issue was deadly serious. Councillors were debating a motion on water testing in Romney Marsh and the East Stour, against a backdrop of mounting concern about foul contamination, public health, sewage discharges and the now-familiar spectacle of Southern Water and the Environment Agency appearing in local discussion rather as thunderstorms appear in weather forecasts: frequently, gloomily, and with no guarantee that anything useful will follow.

On another level, it was a classic chamber performance. Everyone agreed there was a problem. Almost everyone agreed something had to be done. The disagreement was over whether the council should first demand costed options for testing, or first demand a report to tell it where testing should happen, and whether those locations would be considered valid by the Environment Agency, and whether “bring forward” was bolder than “investigate”, and whether one could improve an amendment by amending the amendment before returning to the motion that everyone claimed to support in the first place.

In short, it was local democracy doing what local democracy does best: trying to fight sewage with syntax.

The original motion was brought forward in the name of the Conservative group and moved by Cllr Tony Hills, with Cllr David Godfrey seconding it, although the wording did not originate inside the group itself: it had been supplied to Cllr Hills by a member of the public. Its basic thrust was plain enough. The council was asked to recognise concerns about possible foul contamination, water quality and public-health risks in major open sewers and connected watercourses on and across the Romney Marsh and in the East Stour catchment. It was then asked to do something practical: request that Cabinet, as a matter of urgency, bring forward a report setting out costed options for a targeted water-testing programme.

     

That testing would cover major open sewers and connected watercourses in the affected areas. It would include options for testing for E. coli and other indicators of faecal contamination. And, where practicable and lawful, it would also look at antimicrobial-resistance screening through partnership working with public bodies, regulators, water companies, laboratories and academic institutions. The motion further sought letters from the Leader and Chief Executive to the Environment Agency, Southern Water, Kent County Council, UKHSA and relevant academic or public-health partners seeking cooperation and data-sharing. Finally, it asked that any agreed testing programme be reported publicly and sent on to Overview and Scrutiny for next steps.

As motions go, it was serious, reasonably broad and clearly intended to show that the council was still trying to prise answers out of a system that often seems designed to produce delay instead.

Hills’s speech in support was measured and practical. He praised the Leader’s efforts on water pollution, said the council had made little progress with Southern Water and the Environment Agency despite trying, and argued that the district now needed to go further. He spoke about wanting a water-testing partnership involving relevant bodies, and referred to support from the Kentish Stour Countryside Partnership and from Dr Iain Goodall, whom he described as an enthusiastic supporter of citizen science and an expert in the field.

He also drew the link between inland watercourses and coastal consequences. Dymchurch beach, he said, had again been designated by the Environment Agency, in his view unfairly, as a site where bathing was not recommended. For Hills, this was not an abstract exercise in environmental virtue. It was about protecting rivers, marshland water environments and coastal waters, and doing so on the basis of evidence rather than shrugging resignation.

So far, so straightforward.

Then came the amendment, and the evening acquired that extra layer of council-movie absurdity where a decent motion is no longer simply debated, but placed gently on the operating table and surrounded by members armed with scalpels, caveats and adverbs.

Cllr Paul Thomas (pictured) made clear he supported the motion in principle. But he wanted to improve it. Specifically, he wanted the council first to commission an independent report identifying the relevant watercourses and proposing the optimum sampling locations before officers went away and started drawing up costed options for testing.

He also wanted the scientific scope sharpened. Instead of referring only to E. coli and general indicators of faecal contamination, he proposed adding intestinal enterococci and references to traces of human faecal contamination. This was not mere technical garnish. Thomas’s point was that if the council was going to spend time, money and officer effort doing this work, it had to be done properly and in a way that would actually stand up when challenged.

And challenged it would be. Thomas argued that any science the council relied upon had to be robust enough to challenge the datasets, assumptions and deflections that have long surrounded these debates. He referred to recent Environment Agency reporting and to the persistent tendency for poor water quality to be explained away by reference to bird droppings, dog waste and other non-human sources. Yet, he said, Southern Water had acknowledged in recent meetings that poor water quality was down to human faecal contamination, even if the source was not properly explained. Hence the emphasis on markers and methods that might better identify human sewage.

He was, in effect, saying this: if we are going to do science, let us at least do the sort of science that cannot be waved away with a corporate shrug and a PowerPoint about seagulls.

That was already a significant intervention. But this being a council meeting, there was still room for the plot to grow another procedural limb.

Cllr Stephen Scoffham (Green – pictured), the Cabinet Member for the Environment, who had not seen fit to bring forward such a motion himself, rose to support the general thrust of the amendment while also proposing to amend the amendment. Anyone who still thinks council business is dull should spend a little more time with modern local government.

Scoffham’s central concern was not with the existence of testing, but with its usefulness. He warned against asking officers to spend more time and money unless the Environment Agency would actually accept the resulting data as valid. Citizen science, he said, might sound appealing, but there was a risk it could become a sort of respectable hobby if the official bodies later declined to recognise it.

He therefore proposed a further change. Rather than asking Cabinet simply to “bring forward” the commissioning of an independent report, he wanted the wording altered so Cabinet would “investigate” it, and he wanted explicit reference to sampling locations and a testing programme that the Environment Agency would consider or accept as valid.

At this point the meeting entered that glorious constitutional thicket in which language itself starts to perspire. The amendment became an amended amendment. Officers had to read it back. Members had to decide whether they accepted wording that had just been altered mid-flight. The chamber briefly sounded like a group project being marked in real time.

Thomas accepted Scoffham’s additions. Hills did not.

And that refusal exposed the real tension in the debate. The argument was not truly about the seriousness of sewage pollution, nor about the need for better evidence. It was about tone, control and the posture the council wished to adopt at the outset. Beneath that sat a more uncomfortable fact: the motion had been supplied to Cllr Hills by a member of the public, because no councillor had thought to table such a measure unaided. So much for the chamber’s brighter sparks.

Those in favour of the amendment said it made the motion stronger. It would ensure that the council was not gathering evidence only for Southern Water or the Environment Agency to dismiss it as badly located, badly framed or scientifically inadequate. Cllr Adrian Lockwood said councillors shared the concern over water quality but had to be careful about burdening officers in what would probably be the busiest year in the authority’s history, given local government reorganisation. He questioned the value of spending officer time and public money producing evidence only for the Leader to present it at yet another meeting and be ignored all over again. The amended wording, he suggested, was a better use of effort.

Cllr Tony Cooper took much the same line, but more bluntly. After years of meetings with Southern Water and the Environment Agency, he said, the council was getting nowhere. The strengthened amendment would give the council some teeth, because it would bring experts in and create evidence harder to sidestep. At present, too much of what came back from meetings was vague, disputed or evasive. The council needed something firmer.

Cllr Tim Prater then distilled the whole thing into a line that may have been the phrase of the evening. If the council was going to war with Southern Water, he said, it needed the best weapons available. There was no point collecting data only to be told later that it had been gathered at the wrong place, in the wrong way, by the wrong people, and therefore counted for nothing. Better to agree the terms of battle first and then arrive armed with evidence that could not be batted away.

The Leader, Cllr Jim Martin, supported that view. He made clear that repeated meetings with Southern Water and the Environment Agency had generated too much fog and too little clarity. He also made plain his exasperation at the now-familiar explanations involving dogs, birds and assorted non-human culprits. The issue, he said in substance, was overwhelmingly about human sewage. Any additional weapon in the arsenal the council could acquire to force the argument forward was worth having.

Against that, Hills’s objection was not unreasonable. He was not denying the need for robust science. He was objecting to what he saw as a more confrontational tone and to an unnecessary narrowing of the original motion at too early a stage.

He said he did not want the council to approach the Environment Agency as though it were the enemy. He had worked with the agency and its predecessors for years, he said, and knew many of its officers well. They were underfunded, overstretched and trying to do a good job in difficult circumstances. For Hills, the strength of the original motion lay precisely in its breadth. It required the Leader and Chief Executive to write to the relevant agencies and partners, seek cooperation, seek data-sharing and try to form a wider coalition around testing. It was meant to open doors, not begin by kicking them.

That was a real difference in outlook. One side was saying: first secure scientific legitimacy so the authorities cannot dodge the evidence. The other was saying: first build a workable partnership and let the details emerge from that process.

The chamber sided with the first approach. The amended amendment was carried by 23 votes to four, with one abstention. At that point it became part of the substantive motion.

The later debate on the full motion (the amended amendment) therefore had a slightly odd quality. The drama had already happened. The question was no longer whether the original Hills motion would pass untouched. It would not. The question was whether the chamber would now unite behind the tougher, more technical version.

In practice, it did.

Cllr Clive Goddard stressed that important parts of Hills’s original architecture remained, especially the requests for letters to relevant bodies and for public reporting back through Overview and Scrutiny. Those mattered because they preserved the wider partnership and accountability route even after the scientific wording had been strengthened.

Cllr David Godfrey, who had seconded the original motion, made clear that he had been persuaded more by Hills’s broader methodology than by the amendment, but that the essential point was to keep pressure on and ensure the issue travelled into the next phase of local government rather than being buried in the churn of reorganisation.

Hills himself, in summing up, was notably gracious. He made it plain that he did not think the amendment was necessary, but accepted the democratic position. He returned to the larger point that the council has no direct power over Southern Water, but it does have clout and a duty to use it. He spoke about climate pressures, future water stress, and the need to be honest with residents about what is coming. This, he said, was not a sprint but a marathon. At the risk of sounding earnest in a chamber that had just spent several minutes discussing an “amendment to the amendment”, he was right about that.

When the final vote came, the motion as amended was carried unanimously.

That final unanimity was important, not because it magically solves anything, but because it means the council has now formally committed itself to an evidence-led approach with sharper scientific teeth than the original motion contained. The motion now requires urgent investigation into commissioning an independent report to identify the relevant watercourses and optimum sampling points, before officers set out costed options for a targeted testing programme. It also explicitly widens the scientific scope to include intestinal enterococci and traces of human faecal contamination, rather than relying on E. coli alone.

That is a meaningful shift. It means the council is not merely saying, “something should be done”. It is saying that if something is done, it should be done in a way that makes it harder for the usual institutions to pat the district on the head and explain that the results are regrettably inconclusive because a gull looked at a puddle in 2024.

None of this disguises the larger absurdity. The council still talks as though it has no direct power over the bodies whose conduct, or inaction, lies at the heart of so much public anger. Yet, with the right evidence and the will to use it,it could pursue Southern Water through the statutory nuisance route. Meanwhile, Southern Water remains the kind of company that can trigger fury across an entire district and still sound faintly inconvenienced that the public has noticed the sewage. The Environment Agency remains trapped between statutory duty, limited resources and a reputation that suffers each time people feel the official answer bears little resemblance to what they can see, smell or avoid with their own noses.

So Folkestone & Hythe’s councillors have done what local councils often end up doing in modern Britain. They have reached for process because process is what they have. They have sharpened wording because wording is one of the few weapons left to them. They have sought better evidence because the people with the money, the pipes and the legal powers keep turning up with explanations that somehow manage to be both technical and unconvincing at the same time.

Still, there was one clear outcome. The chamber did not duck the issue. It did not kick the matter into the long grass. It did not say the public should simply trust that everything is under control while untreated sewage wanders through marshland watercourses and someone somewhere drafts another press release about partnership working.

Instead, after much procedural choreography and a brief flirtation with constitutional self-parody, the council voted unanimously to press on.

Which is good. Because if there is one thing more polluted than some of these watercourses, it is the national habit of pretending that obvious problems will fix themselves if only enough agencies hold enough meetings about them.

At least on Wednesday night, Folkestone’s councillors decided to test the water.

Now comes the difficult bit: finding out what is actually in it.

The Shepway Vox Team

Discernibly Different Dissent