The Times: Raw sewage poured into Windermere for 6,000 hours last year
Raw sewage was released into Windermere for most of last year, data obtained under freedom of information laws has revealed.
The water company United Utilities, which serves the Lake District and the northwest, released untreated sewage into England’s largest lake for more than 6,000 hours last year, equivalent to an average of 17 hours a day.
The firm said the true daily figure would be lower, as some spills happened simultaneously at multiple sites.
The Unesco site, which draws huge numbers of tourists and is used by swimmers and anglers, has been plagued in recent years by algae blooms linked to excessive nutrient pollution. Sources include sewage treatment works, agriculture and leaking septic tanks.
Steve Reed, the environment secretary, who has made tackling dirty waterways a priority, is due to visit the lake next week. He said: “The level of pollution entering Lake Windermere is unacceptable. This government will never look the other way while water companies pump record levels of sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas.”
Official Environment Agency figures on the scale of sewage dumping will not be released until four weeks’ time, but campaigners have forced United Utilities to release them earlier.
They show that six sewage treatment works and pumping stations in the lake’s catchment released untreated sewage from outfalls for 6,327 hours last year, in line with recent years despite pressure on United Utilities to act. The tally is now more than 33,000 hours since 2020, according to an analysis of spill stop-start times by Peter Hammond of the campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution.
“United Utilities’ current investment isn’t good enough. They have illegally dumped sewage into Windermere and are merely tinkering at the edges with short-term fixes that will only offer slight improvements. This is not acceptable,” said Matt Staniek of the Save Windermere campaign, which obtained the figures.
The company initially partially refused Environmental Information Regulation requests by Staniek for stop-start times of spills and logbooks. However, the Information Commissioner’s Office later ordered the release of the materials. They cover sewage pumping stations at Hawkshead, Glebe Road and Elterwater, plus wastewater treatment works at Ambleside, Grasmere and Near Sawrey.
Louise Beardmore, the United Utilities chief executive, admitted to MPs last week that the company’s approach to being transparent with data had been wrong. She said the issue had taken up “too much time” with internal lawyers, and the experience of withholding data from Save Windermere had been a “lesson learnt”.
While levels of one nutrient pollutant, phosphorus, peaked in the lake’s two basins in the 1980s and have been declining since, Windermere has warmed by 1C since the 1950s. That may mean nutrient pollutant levels need to go lower than previously thought to stop the algae blooms, which can pose a risk to the health of people and their pets.
Staniek, who has been “striking” outside a United Utilities office in Windermere every Monday for 70 weeks to secure more investment in water infrastructure, has been supported by celebrities including the comedian Paul Whitehouse and the actor Steve Coogan. “Windermere must be protected for the people of this nation forever, and the only way to achieve that is to end sewage pollution in our lake once and for all,” the campaigner said.
United Utilities has invested £45 million in infrastructure around Windermere since 2020, cutting phosphorus levels by a third. The firm is planning to invest £190 million in the area over the next five years, such as building more storm tanks so raw sewage is held during heavy rainfall and treated later, rather than being spilt from outfalls. The Times’s Clean it Up campaign is calling for greater investment.
United Utilities boss Beardmore blamed a 71 per cent increase in pollution incidents across the northwest of England last year on storms leading to power cuts and outages with equipment such as pumps. A 2023 incident in which millions of litres of raw sewage were released into Windermere after pumps failed was due to an issue with a telecommunications provider, she said. “That is not an excuse,” she added.
United Utilities noted that the duration of spills in 2024 was down on 2023, despite it being the wetter of the two years in the Windermere area.
Matt Hemmings, the chief operating officer at United Utilities, said: “We totally understand concerns about storm overflows. That’s why we have the largest overflow investment programme of all companies over the next five years.
“Our teams right across Cumbria and the northwest are working extremely hard on projects such as increasing storage on sites, designing bespoke solutions such as sustainable drainage schemes and using the latest innovation to treat wastewater to even higher standards. This investment is making a real difference.”
