Southern Water fined £7m after illegally dumping sewage off Kent coast

A sign at Margate informing people not to use the beach after a pollution incident in 2021. Photograph: Environment Agency/PA View image in fullscreen A sign at Margate informing people not to use the beach after a pollution incident in 2021. Photograph: Environment Agency/PA Southern Water fined £7m after illegally dumping sewage off Kent coast Firm pleaded guilty to 13 offences over discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations Southern Water has been fined more than £7m after dumping sewage illegally off the Kent coast between 2019 and 2021. The company, described by the judge as having a “record of criminality” which is “an exceptionally serious aggravating factor”, pleaded guilty to 13 offences at Medway magistrates court last April over sewage discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations between 2019 and 2021. Nine counts related to the incidents of untreated sewage dumped off the Kent coast, while three counts were over the failure to notify authorities of the discharges as soon as practicable and within 24 hours of a warning. This is a condition of the environmental permit. A final conviction was for failing to have a standby pump at Margate’s station between 27 July 2019 and 4 October 2020 in breach of the permit. The sentencing, at Canterbury crown court, took place on Thursday and Friday, with Mr Justice Johnson imposing a total fine of £7,127,083. The company was fined £90m for nearly 7,000 incidents across Hampshire, Kent and Sussex in a case brought by the Environment Agency in 2021. On Friday, Johnson said there were “overall serious failures”. “The defendant knew the importance of maintaining resilience systems and equipment at these sites. And it knew what the consequences would be if the system or equipment or individual components failed. “It was well aware of the potential for equipment to fail and for the essential need for robust maintenance and testing procedures. That is because of the dozens of previous occasions on which that had happened.” View image in fullscreen Litter in the water in Margate after a sewage discharge in 2021. Photograph: Environment Agency/PA He told the court: “The harm was not confined to a single event, but arose from a pattern of repeated incidents over several years. “Taken together, the offending caused serious degradation of environmental quality, significant interference with public amenity, potential risk to public health and damage to the reputation of an important coastal community.” The judge said Southern Water was a very large organisation with annual revenue over the last three years of between £800m and £1bn, which has 174 previous convictions occurring every year from 1999 to 2016 and as recently as April this year. “The defendant’s record of convictions shows a protracted history of noncompliance with its legal obligations, and a repeated pattern of inadequate staff training, insufficient investment in the infrastructure and a failure properly