By Professor John Robertson

Typically Anglocentric or should that be Britocentric (?), the Guardian has the above headline and:

Exclusive: Whistleblowers point to broader sewage scandal, with wastewater systems manipulated to divert sewage. Whistleblowers say UK water companies are knowingly failing to treat legally required amounts of sewage, and that some treatment works are manipulating wastewater systems to divert raw sewage away from the works and into rivers and seas.

It is well known that water companies are dumping large volumes of raw sewage into rivers and seas from storm overflows but an investigation by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations reveals that the industry’s “dirty secret” is bigger, broader and deeply systemic. By law, every wastewater treatment works must treat a minimum amount of sewage as stipulated in their environmental permits. Four whistleblowers have told Watershed that a large proportion regularly fail to do so and are not reporting it to the environmental regulator.

_{https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/20/dirty-secret-insiders-say-uk-water-firms-knowingly-breaking-sewage-laws}

Does that reference at the end, to ‘the‘ regulator, tell us something? If any of the four whistle-blowers was based in Scotland, there’d a reference to it (sepa), long before the 25th paragraph, when we read:

Nathan Critchlow-Watton of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency says: “Sepa assess Scottish Water’s compliance with authorisation conditions at wastewater treatment works through site inspections, investigating events and incidents, sampling discharges, assessment of operator data and Sepa’s programme of environmental monitoring. We are not aware of any evidence of deliberate misreporting of overflow data by Scottish Water or other operators.”

Are the Reporting and/or Good Mourning Scotland staff hard at it, on the phone to friendly contacts?

Anas Sarwar’s second cousin’s best pal works for Scottish Water, has been denied promotion and can now confirm they saw a guy misread a meter for something smelly?

I made that last bit up. It’s a fnnn joke! Then again maybe it’s not.