Date: July 2026
Southern Water has been fined more than £7 million after pleading guilty to 13 charges of illegal sewage discharge at Margate and Broadstairs between 2019 and 2021. During the sentencing at Canterbury Crown Court, Mr Justice Johnson described “overall serious failures” by the company.
The judge also noted that Southern Water’s record showed a “protracted history of non-compliance with its legal obligations, and a repeated pattern of inadequate staff training, insufficient investment in the infrastructure and a failure properly to maintain equipment.” The company has 174 previous convictions, with convictions recorded every year from 1999 to 2016, and again as recently as April this year. The judge called this record “an exceptionally serious aggravating factor.”
Sewage dumping in Kent
Nine of the thirteen charges related to untreated sewage being dumped directly into the sea. On 20 July 2019, an intermittent discharge at Margate ran from around 2am to almost midnight – nearly 22 hours – before the Environment Agency was even notified. On 16 February 2021, a technical failure at Broadstairs saw untreated sewage discharged for nearly five hours, with the regulator only told once it was already over.
Three of the charges were specifically for failing to notify authorities as required under Southern Water’s own environmental permit; not for the pollution itself, but for failing to tell anyone it was happening. A further charge related to Margate’s pumping station having no standby pump for more than a year, between July 2019 and October 2020.
The court also heard that during the 2020 August bank holiday, a failed pump at Margate was left broken for weeks. When a second pump then failed too, at least 16 million litres of sewage were released into the sea over two days. The prosecutor noted that some of the sewage discharged was “unscreened”, meaning it still contained solid waste.
The human cost was significant. In June 2021, eleven beaches in Thanet had to close for a week, which the local council declared a “high profile pollution incident.” Tourism accounts for around 20% of employment in the area. Thanet District Council’s director of environment said the discharges had been “particularly negatively impactful” for the community.
The Environment Agency’s Lindsay Faulkner put it plainly: “These preventable incidents harmed the environment and local communities, but like so much pollution caused by water companies, they were avoidable.”
Southern Water’s response follows a familiar script. The company said it was “deeply sorry,” that pollution incidents are “unacceptable,” and pointed to new leadership since 2022 that has supposedly “radically addressed its culture, governance and operations.”
Same old story
We’ve heard this before. Southern Water said something almost identical after its record £90 million fine in 2021. It has continued to rack up serious pollution incidents since, including the further Kent discharges covered in an earlier post on this site.
A £7 million fine against a company with an £800 million-plus annual turnover is not a deterrent – it’s a cost of doing business, factored in and ultimately paid for by customers. Broken pumps left unfixed for weeks. Discharges not reported for over 32 hours. Eleven beaches closed in a town where one in five jobs depends on tourism. The apology is the same every time. The outcome never changes.
Read the full story on the BBC website.
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