Folkestone and Hythe Council’s Unfulfilled Promise to Investigate Sewage Pollution

On 1 April, Folkestone & Hythe District Council agreed that possible human faecal contamination across Romney Marsh and the East Stour needed investigating “as a matter of urgency”. One hundred and ten days later, residents still haven’t been shown an independent report, proposed sampling sites, costed testing options, a timetable or a single result. For a Green-led council running a district with two beaches officially rated Poor, that’s no longer an awkward delay. It’s beginning to look like a political failure.

Cllr Tony Hills’s motion (pictured), seconded by Cllr David Godfrey, wasn’t some airy declaration of concern. After councillors amended it, Cabinet was asked to investigate commissioning an independent report identifying the relevant watercourses and the best places to take samples. Officers were then supposed to produce costed options for testing E. coli, intestinal enterococci and other indicators of human faecal contamination across major open sewers and connected watercourses on Romney Marsh and within the East Stour catchment. The leader and chief executive were also asked to seek cooperation from the Environment Agency, Southern Water, Kent County Council, UKHSA and suitable academic or public-health partners.

That was the promise.

Searches of Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, BidStats and the Kent Business Portal haven’t identified any notice clearly matching an independent water-testing or sampling contract commissioned after the motion. What’s publicly visible is considerably thinner: no water-testing report appeared on Cabinet’s 24 June agenda, none appears in the published Cabinet forward plans covering May through September, and no sampling programme, named delivery timetable or results have been placed before residents. A small consultancy job mightn’t require a national tender, but that doesn’t explain why the administration hasn’t produced a basic progress report telling the public what’s happening.

Meanwhile, 2026 hasn’t exactly been clean.

Southern Water’s Rivers and Seas Watch provides near-real-time information for every storm-overflow outfall in its region and makes the data available through the Water UK Stream API. Analysis of that live feed records an estimated 903 hours of overflow activity across Folkestone and Hythe during 2026: almost 680 hours at Range Road in Hythe, about 153 hours at The Stade in Folkestone and more than 57 hours at New Romney, where the receiving water is Littlestone Sewer. Southern Water says these releases happen when the network is overwhelmed and discharge heavily diluted wastewater, mostly rainwater, into the environment. It also admits that the system isn’t sustainable.

Most of those recorded hours happened in January and February, before councillors passed the motion, although another four hours were logged in May. That doesn’t get FHDC off the hook. Quite the opposite: hundreds of hours of overflow activity were already known when councillors used the word “urgent”. The live figures are experimental and may later be corrected, but that uncertainty is precisely why independent sampling matters. An overflow monitor can show that an outfall operated; it can’t tell residents how much E. coli was in a marsh ditch, where contamination came from or what eventually reached the beach.

The wider evidence is grim. Dymchurch and Littlestone were both classified Poor for 2025 and business impacted, while St Mary’s Bay scraped a Sufficient rating. The Environment Agency’s 2026 profile says Dymchurch’s marsh drainage includes sewage effluent and agricultural run-off. At Littlestone, a kilometre-long ditch receiving effluent from New Romney sewage-treatment works is pumped onto the beach through an outfall around 200 metres south of the bathing-water sampling point. These facts don’t prove that one source is responsible for every failed sample. They do prove there are known routes by which effluent can move through the marsh drainage system and onto the coast.

Put plainly, sewage and water containing faecal contamination can travel through the district’s sewers on Romney Marsh, ditches and outfalls towards the sea. This isn’t an academic debate or a spot of green window-dressing. It concerns water where families paddle, people swim and dogs run along the shoreline.

Overview and Scrutiny discussed the issue on 7 April, when councillors mentioned further examination and a possible task-and-finish group. Officers said the committee’s work programme was flexible enough to accommodate it. That’s lovely—but flexibility doesn’t collect samples, trace pollution or protect public health. Nor does sitting around a table become effective action simply because everyone agrees the water’s a worry.

FHDC can’t switch off Southern Water’s storm overflows or order the Environment Agency around. It can carry out the decision its own councillors made, publish what’s been commissioned, name who’s responsible and set a deadline.

Instead, 110 days have passed and the public record still shows meetings, concern and an empty space where the investigation ought to be. Green politics shouldn’t be a badge worn while sewage-contaminated water runs through drains and out towards the coast. It should mean doing the work, publishing the evidence and holding polluters to account. On this showing, Cllr Jim Martin’s Green-led administration doesn’t look urgent, transparent or particularly bothered.

Hardly green, is it?

The Shepway Vox Team

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