Surfing

The Parliamentary Debate About the “Performance of South West Water”

On March 5th a debate was held in the Grand Committee Room next to Westminster Hall concerning the “Performance of South West Water”.

You can read the transcript of the entire session in Hansard if so desired. Alternatively you can watch a recording of the entire session.

The debate was opened by Simon Jupp MP as follows:

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of South West Water.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Henderson. I am delighted to have secured this important debate, one year on from another debate that I secured on the performance of South West Water. It is another opportunity to hold South West Water to the highest possible standards in the House.

Last year, I described the performance of our water company and its historic lack of investment as “shameful”, and many of my constituents shared my point of view. This year, I want to focus my speech on the facts facing my constituency of East Devon. The public want to see evidence of improvement and delivery of the promised investment, and they want South West Water to clean up its act and our water. South West Water must deliver better services for our constituents, improve our bathing waters, and protect our natural environment. Not doing so puts the vibrancy of our coastal communities under threat.

More on all that later. However, we’re going to start our discussion with the speech given by the Member of Parliament for North Devon, Selaine Saxby. Here is a recording of her presentation:

Ms. Saxby’s opening remarks were as follows:

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March Sewage Pollution in South West England

It’s the day after February 28th, and the previous month’s sewage pollution article is overflowing with almost continuous news of combined sewer overflow activations around the coast of Devon and Cornwall. I’ve taken the liberty of starting this article a day early, hoping rather than expecting that March will be a bit quieter.

After yet more rain overnight, here is this morning’s Surfers Against Sewage map of pollution around our coasts:

Starting with the local surfing beaches, sewage pollution has been occurring this morning at Widemouth Bay:

and the adjacent Trevone and Harlyn Bays, amongst numerous other places across Cornwall:

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Bank Holiday Sewage in the South West’s Seas

We could see it coming from many miles away:

Here is August Bank Holiday Friday’s first sewage pollution incident of the long weekend around the long coastline of South West England, courtesy of South West Water’s “Water Fit Live” map:

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An Electrified Trip to Bideford

We’d never been to Westward Ho! before. Or Bideford for that matter! Hence we decided to combine business with pleasure and visit them both this afternoon.

Our conveyance for the day was Lisa, our trusty Nissan LEAF electric vehicle. She planned on taking the shortest route to Bideford, but that road was “closed”. Hence we were all forced to take a detour in the direction of Holsworthy. Lisa’s first stop was in the Torridge Council car park. Two non electric council vans were visible, but no electric vehicle charging stations were to be seen. For use by either council or visitor EVs:

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Summer’s in the air, and sewage is in the sea

School summer holidays are starting. I don’t know if there is a causal relationship, but it probably won’t come as a huge surprise to many residents of West Devon that the UK Met Office’s rainfall map of the area looked like this yesterday afternoon:

As luck would have it, I had just set up our shiny new Twitter account so that I could report to the rest of the planet on yesterday’s exciting news from Halwill Junction football pitch.

Twitter insisted that I “follow” several other accounts, and of course South West Water was top of my list! Whereupon Elon Musk‘s latest (single) X algorithm suddenly revealed this to me:

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