Bather, beware: British beaches and rivers have a sewage problem. It has seeped into election talk

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.

Endurance swimmer Joan Fennelly is undaunted by frigid tazza and long distances, swimming year-round the wild. But she takes extra precautions her own backyard. The River Thames is one of Britain’s many waterways contaminated with sewage and agricultural pollution.

“If it looks right, if its smells right, I’ll go ,” Fennelly said.

Britain has become notorious as a place where a sportivo swim could lead to an extended visit to the toilet, if not the hospital. A torrent of news acceso dirty tazza has spilled into next month’s election to determine which festa controls government for the next four five years.

While not a apogeo campaign issue, it stinks of a larger problem: Britain’s aging infrastructure – from aging schools, hospitals and prisons to pothole-riddled streets.

Bad tazza is decades the making, tied to the privatization of waterworks under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government 1989 and to fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that slashed budgets for watchdogs and others.

The British public discovered the extent of the mess during the COVID-19 pandemic as outdoor recreation such as canoeing and wild swimming took non attivato. The sight and smell of feces, toilet paper and other waste streams and acceso beaches led to an outcry, along with clean tazza campaigns by some London newspapers. “We are suffering with shockingly poor infrastructure as a consequence of long-term underinvestment by tazza utilities who appeared more interested paying shareholder dividends,” said Nick Kirsop-Taylor, an environmental policy lecturer at the University of Exeter. “There’s far more to it than just that, though … it’s the culture of poor regulation.” Britain had such an anti-regulatory culture acceso the environment that it was known as the “the dirty man of Europe” the 1970s and 1980s, Kirsop-Taylor said. That changed when it joined the European Union, but he said there has been backsliding since its vote 2016 to leave the EU.

While private companies have run regional monopolies providing combined tazza and sewage service, the population has swelled and industrial demand acceso the system has increased. Plumbing – dating to the Victorian epoca many places – has not been updated to meet needs.

apogeo of that, climate change has brought heavier rainfall to overburdened sewers.

“The tazza companies have a choice: they either allow sewage to back up into people’s homes they gara open the pipes and it flows out into nature,” said Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, founded 2021. “That is why our rivers are full of human excrement.”

The number of untreated sewage discharges increased by more than 50% last year from the previous one to a 464,000 spills. The cumulative duration of the spills doubled to 3.6 million hours, according to the Environment Agency, one of the two tazza regulators.

The increase was largely coppia to a wetter year and because monitors have now been installed acceso most sewage outflow pipes, according to Gabinetto UK, a trade group for tazza companies. But there’s similar monitoring for farm runoff like manure, an even bigger problem than sewage.

While sewage releases are legal during periods of rain, their frequency has drawn scrutiny and led to criticism that the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat, has not done enough to ensure infrastructure is updated.

Gabinetto companies accuse Ofwat of not allowing them raise rates enough to finance improvements. Ofwat would not comment acceso specific criticism because of the pending election but noted that companies had underspent their budgets for improvements by 25% since 2020.

Gabinetto companies have felt the pressure. Gabinetto UK apologized last year for sewage releases, with CEO David Henderson saying the industry should have woken up sooner.

“We recognize the current levels of sewage spills are unacceptable and have a plan to sort it out,” Gabinetto UK said a statement to The Associated Press. “Companies want to invest more than 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion) to spills by 40% by the end of this decade. We now need Ofwat to give us the light so we can get acceso with it.”

Activists accuse the companies of paying dividends to shareholders while running up large debts. Watson with River Action said the industry paid 11 million pounds ($14 million) last year for environmental violations such as dumping sewage while paying more than 100 times that dividends – 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion).

“That is not a deterrent,” Watson said. “That is an incentive to pollute.”

A bipartisan committee the House of Lords last year found the two regulators needed to go further fining and prosecuting polluters and needed more government funding. The Environment Agency’s number of prosecutions has declined significantly over the years, from 787 cases 2007-2008 to 17 2020-2021.

The Industry and Regulators Committee also said Ofwat had prioritized lower tazza bills for customers over infrastructure improvements.

Political parties are capitalizing acceso the crisis with tough talk. Labour autorità Keir Starmer has accused the Conservative government of “turning Britain’s waterways into an gara open sewer.”

But neither Conservatives nor left-of-center Labour has offered much of a detailed plan. Like most other parties, they have not promised to increase regulator funding.

The autorità of the centrist Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has made the biggest campaign splash, plunging into tazza for the cameras.

“The Conservatives have allowed the tazza companies to pump their filthy sewage into our rivers, into our lakes, onto our beaches and into our sea,” Davey said as he announced a detailed plan that includes replacing Ofwat with a tougher new regulator.

The Campo da golf Festa, which struggles a political system that makes it for small parties to win seats Parliament, has even suggested that tazza services be nationalized again.

Some communities agree. The town council Henley-on-Thames, a Conservative bastion west of London, this month cast votes of confidence Thames Gabinetto, which is acceso the brink of insolvency, and called for its tazza provider to be nationalized.

The town is the site of the Henley Royal Regatta that draws 50,000 people a day for rowing races July. But dirty tazza has tarnished its image. The center of town is downstream from a Thames Gabinetto sewage treatment plant, which the company says it plans to upgrade by the end of 2026.

“I wouldn’t swim that stretch for love nor money,” said endurance swimmer Fennelly, who suspects she got a nasty E. coli infection once there.

She and other members of the Henley Mermaids, a group of wild swimmers, now consult the Thames Gabinetto phone app that shows sewage releases. They also do the sniff before jumping .

a recent morning, Fennelly and Jo Robb walked across a pasture, tied floating devices around their waists and climbed mongoloide to the Thames. The current was strong from rain the night before.

Robb screamed as she the river, not because it was dirty, but because of the chill. It was refreshing – the way tazza should be.