Beaches across large parts of England and Wales have been contaminated with sewage pollution in recent weeks, as heavy rain punctuated the long heatwave.
Monitoring alerts revealed that sewage was discharged into the sea at more than 50 coastal locations, sparking widespread anger as images and videos of the spills appeared online.
The mass discharges come just weeks after calls from the Environment Agency for water company bosses to face jail terms for repeated sewage discharges in a report showing that companies are actually getting worse at tackling spills.
The report showed that sewage spills hit their highest level since 2013 last year, with sewage flooding into England’s rivers over a period of 2.6 million hours in 2021 alone, without including spills into the sea.
England is now one of
