PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Sewage: Waste Disposal (7 September 2020)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for how many hours and on how many occasions combined sewer outflows of each water company have discharged sewage in each year since 2015.

Asked by:
James Wild (Conservative)

The Environment Agency holds data for storm overflows, which includes combined sewer overflows, storm discharges at sewage treatment inlet works, storm tank overflows and storm overflows at pumping stations.

Between 2015 and 2020, water and sewage companies embarked on an initiative to monitor the vast majority of storm overflows in England. The data below is informed by this monitoring program and records the number of spills from storm overflows monitored.

It is important to note that these data sets have grown from 2016. Initially, it took a year for monitors to be installed and to produce annual data. Therefore data is provided from 2016-2019. To contextualise the number of spills recorded, the numbers of storm overflows monitored that year should also be considered.

	2016	2017	2018	2019
Number of storm overflows monitored	862	2,515	6,182	8,276
Number of recorded spill events	12,637	33,159	146,930	292,864

Answered by:
Rebecca Pow (Conservative)
15 September 2020