Surfers against sewage

We’d suggest that Surfers Against Sewage do a little work and acquaint themselves with the basics of cost benefit analysis:

Water companies discharged raw sewage into bathing water beaches almost 3,000 times in the past year, polluting the environment and risking public health, new analysis shows.

The discharges took place all over England and Wales, including at some of the most popular beaches.

The study by Surfers Against Sewage, which publishes data on sewage releases as they occur, examines the notifications by water companies of effluent discharges over 12 months.

The claim is that this led to 156 cases of gastroenteritis and the like. The solution to which is:

Our ambition at Surfers Against Sewage is to end sewage discharge into UK Bathing Waters by 2030.

More specifically, they are talking about storm drainage and sewage. Trying to insist that when the heavens open there is no overflow at all - their insistence - from said sewage system into the standard water run off from the weather is going to be somewhere between vastly expensive and impossible.

That is, the cost of gaining the benefit of 156 dickey tummies fewer seems more than a little excessive. We cannot do everything, cannot be perfectly clean, and we’d propose that there are more important things to devote resources to than this.

We’d also suggest that a certain knowledge of finance could be useful:

We need to see legally-binding sewage emission reduction targets and subsequent investment that bring about an end to sewage pollution.

....

Ultimately, ambitious and progressive investment is needed to separate our surface water from sewage treatment infrastructure to truly protect the environment. It is incumbent on water companies to identify the pathway to make this happen. Perhaps instead of sickening dividend pay outs...

Why would people put more capital in if they weren’t going to gain a return on it? And no, shouting that the water companies should be nationalised again won’t work either. For when the government did own and run them it invested very much less than the privatised companies have done. Which was the reason for the sell off in fact, in order to bring in the capital necessary to raise water standards, capital that government wasn’t willing to assign.

Which is an interesting point really. If it can’t even pass a government cost benefit analysis with people spending other peoples’ money on other people then possibly this really is something we shouldn’t be attempting.