Advocacy

• Designated Bathing Water status for four sites on the Dart in 2024: Steamer Quay (Totnes), Stoke Gabriel, Dittisham and Warfleet Creek (Dartmouth). The Environment Agency now monitors them.
• Agreed infrastructure upgrades at 16 sites in the catchment, including capacity upgrades and UV treatment at Kilbury Sewage Treatment Works in Buckfastleigh.
• Open data: every result public on River Hub, alongside live storm overflow monitoring.

Bills in the South West rose by about a third in April 2025, to pay for infrastructure that years of billing were meant to deliver. If the public is paying again, it should be able to see the plan. We are asking for four things:

1. A public plan for every failing asset. Which sewage assets on the Dart are failing, why, what fixing them will cost, and the order they will be fixed in, published so anyone can check progress against it.
2. A named fix and a deadline for every storm overflow. Water companies and the Environment Agency should publish, for each overflow, the scheme responsible for fixing it, its deadline, and its progress each year. It is the one thing the national plan leaves out.
3. The evidence in the open. Spill records, treatment works capacity and investigation findings are scattered across regulatory returns, annual reports and information requests. They should be published together as open data, with the methods behind them, so the public can be confident the fixes are the right ones.
4. The worst Dart assets in the next WINEP. The Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP) decides which assets are fixed after 2030, and it is being shaped now. Overflows that fail chronically rather than exceptionally, such as emergency overflows running for hundreds of hours, belong on it.

The need is clear. In 2024 South West Water recorded around 550,000 hours of sewage spills, the worst performance in the sector, and storm overflows across England ran for a record 3.6 million hours. In the year to March 2024, Pennon reported a statutory loss after tax of £8.5m and still raised its dividend.

Our volunteers have built the evidence for the Dart on River Hub: which overflows spill most, which treatment works are short of capacity, and how we worked it out. Every method is published with its assumptions and limits.

Sources: Water UK, April 2025 tariffs; Ofwat PR24 final determinations, December 2024; Pennon Group annual results, year to 31 March 2024; Environment Agency EDM annual returns, 2024.

• Our response to the Cunliffe review of the water sector (2025)
• Our response to Defra’s bathing water consultation (December 2024)