Folkestone and Hythe District Council has accepted Shepway Green Party’s call for action to address local residents’ concerns about water quality and the impact of regular wastewater discharge, including untreated sewage, into rivers and the sea.

Councillors voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion proposed by Councillor Lesley Whybrow, Leader of the Green group on the council, at their full council meeting on 28 September, which will see practical solutions sought from Southern Water to an issue that has seen local people and visitors forced to avoid local beaches and the sea this summer. Voting 24 in favour and one against, with two abstentions, councillors resolved to:

  • Invite Southern Water to attend the council’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee at the earliest opportunity to discuss practical solutions.
  • Recognise the council’s obligation to protect its rivers and seas, including from the cumulative impacts of pollution, and take a lead on addressing the issue, working with other agencies.
  • Seek to better understand the cumulative impact of wastewater discharge on our local rivers, wildlife and people’s health.
  • Ask Southern Water, in its planning consultation responses for major development, to clarify which treatment works will be managing the sewage and about the likely impact on the number or duration of sewage discharges into local rivers or seas.
  • Request that planning officers include in all reports relating to major development a specific section on the impact on watercourses, including the potential for the development to affect sewage outflow into watercourses.

Councillor Whybrow says: “Even before this summer’s appalling discharges of sewage into the sea residents were deeply concerned about water quality and the impact on wildlife of such occurrences, yet there are no plans in place to address the immediate, wholly unacceptable, situation either locally by Southern Water or by national government.

“As we have seen, releasing sewage into our seas and rivers is no longer an emergency-only situation due to severe storms, but an everyday occurrence even in ‘normal’ rainfall. According to the Rivers Trust, in 2021 there were 20 spills in our district over a period of 164 hours.

“Further property development risks making a bad situation even worse but planning consultation documents show that it has not been the practice of council planners to ask water companies whether a proposed development would potentially increase ‘emergency’ discharge into rivers and seas.

“I am pleased that most councillors were persuaded to accept Shepway Green Party’s call for the district council take these small but significant steps towards cleaning up this unacceptable situation.”

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Folkestone and Hythe District Council has accepted Shepway Green Party’s call for action to address local residents’ concerns about water quality and the impact of regular wastewater discharge, including untreated sewage, into rivers and the sea.

Councillors voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion proposed by Councillor Lesley Whybrow, Leader of the Green group on the council, at their full council meeting on 28 September, which will see practical solutions sought from Southern Water to an issue that has seen local people and visitors forced to avoid local beaches and the sea this summer. Voting 24 in favour and one against, with two abstentions, councillors resolved to:

  • Invite Southern Water to attend the council’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee at the earliest opportunity to discuss practical solutions.
  • Recognise the council’s obligation to protect its rivers and seas, including from the cumulative impacts of pollution, and take a lead on addressing the issue, working with other agencies.
  • Seek to better understand the cumulative impact of wastewater discharge on our local rivers, wildlife and people’s health.
  • Ask Southern Water, in its planning consultation responses for major development, to clarify which treatment works will be managing the sewage and about the likely impact on the number or duration of sewage discharges into local rivers or seas.
  • Request that planning officers include in all reports relating to major development a specific section on the impact on watercourses, including the potential for the development to affect sewage outflow into watercourses.

Councillor Whybrow says: “Even before this summer’s appalling discharges of sewage into the sea residents were deeply concerned about water quality and the impact on wildlife of such occurrences, yet there are no plans in place to address the immediate, wholly unacceptable, situation either locally by Southern Water or by national government.

“As we have seen, releasing sewage into our seas and rivers is no longer an emergency-only situation due to severe storms, but an everyday occurrence even in ‘normal’ rainfall. According to the Rivers Trust, in 2021 there were 20 spills in our district over a period of 164 hours.

“Further property development risks making a bad situation even worse but planning consultation documents show that it has not been the practice of council planners to ask water companies whether a proposed development would potentially increase ‘emergency’ discharge into rivers and seas.

“I am pleased that most councillors were persuaded to accept Shepway Green Party’s call for the district council take these small but significant steps towards cleaning up this unacceptable situation.”