East Riding councillors have grilled Yorkshire Water representatives on their sewage discharge record.
In an Environment and Regeneration Overview and Scrutiny Sub Committee meeting, two Yorkshire Water representatives were subject to rigorous examination as they presented a rather faltering report detailing the steps the company is taking to meet targets and the public’s expectations.
This comes just days after Ofwat, the water regulatory body, ordered Yorkshire Water to pay back £36 million to customers, as the company failed to meet pollution and leakage targets.
Yorkshire Water’s, Tim Myatt, head of Corporate Affairs and, Adam Ashman, Head of Strategic Planning faced tough scrutiny from councillors such as Cllr Phil Redshaw who sought to dampen the water company’s report by presenting his own analysis of storm overflow discharge data, saying:
“My analysis shows that we saw 1,188 individual spillages in 2021 as compared to 1,831 in 2023, a rise of 54%,”
“To quote Ofwat, “this is a catalogue of failure”. Yorkshire Water has routinely released sewage into our rivers and seas and there has been a failure to ensure that discharges of sewage from storm overflows occur only in exceptional circumstances.”
Yorkshire Water’s Mr Myatt assured Cllr Redshaw that the data is in fact “slightly more complex”, saying that year on year comparisons are not very useful as “in 2022 there was a drought across Yorkshire and 2023 was, according to the Environment Agency, the 6th wettest year record.”
Cllr Redshaw responded saying he “fully accepts that we had some exceptional rainfall in 2023, including 11 named storms, but the analysis shows only 7.1% of the spills were due to exceptional rainfall. 83.6% were classed as capacity issues and 6.3% were due to asset maintenance.”
Mr Myatt did admit there were some inadequacies. He told the committee “there are areas where we haven’t performed well enough and one of those is the amount of discharge going out and people are not happy with that and want to see it change quickly.
“There is an element that we have to take responsibility for as a company. Could we have done more to reduce the amount of discharges? It’s also a wider problem and one that the nation is going to be looking at together.
Yorkshire Water has committed to continue to work with East Riding Council collaboratively to ensure the best quality of service is provided.
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