In a strongly worded letter, borough council leader Cllr Dr Paul Harvey and cabinet member for strategic planning and infrastructure, Cllr Andy Konieczko, say the companies’ responses to their earlier demands for urgent, binding action on the River Loddon and River Test are “an insult to every resident of Basingstoke and Deane”.
They accuse the privatised water giants of collecting “billions from customers” while presiding over years of pollution, then falling back on a “tired playbook” when challenged – “blame the weather, announce an investment programme that never arrives, hope nobody looks too closely”.
Thames Water in the north of the Borough (Image: Cllr Paul Harvey)
Southern Water recently told the Gazette that storm overflows during this winter’s exceptional rainfall “happened to prevent homes, schools and hospitals from flooding” and pointed to an £8.8bn investment programme between 2025 and 2030, including £1.5bn to cut spills and “hundreds of millions” to remove nutrients such as phosphate and nitrates from wastewater.
But the councillors say that line “is not an explanation, it is a disgrace”. They write: “This is a company whose own chief executive told parliament its pollution record was ‘inexcusable’, now telling our residents the sewage destroying our rivers was actually protecting them.”
Questioning the record spending, they ask: “If that investment is real, why does Whitchurch wastewater treatment works, discharging directly into the Test headwaters in our borough, still have no emission limit for phosphorus? Phosphorus is a primary driver of ecological collapse in chalk streams, and has been known to be so for years. The fictional billions mean nothing when the most elementary protections do not exist.”
Thames Water’s response, which highlighted a 20 per cent reduction in pollution, “the most significant upgrade to our wastewater network in 150 years” and progress on storm overflow reductions, also comes in for fierce criticism.
Cllr Andy Konieczko (Image: Cllr Andy Konieczko)
“We did not write to receive a self-congratulatory press release from them,” the councillors say. “We wrote because Chris Weston has himself warned it will take ‘at least a decade’ to turn the company around. Our rivers do not have a decade.”
They attack the Thames Water chief executive for refusing to meet them, describing him as “the chief executive of a one-star rated, financially failing company, still on the brink of collapse” who “cannot find the time to face elected councillors of the borough he is failing”.
The letter also criticises a suggestion in Thames Water’s response that “wildlife” is among the factors influencing river health. “The brown trout, grayling and white-clawed crayfish in the Loddon are not polluting our chalk streams. Thames Water is,” they write.
Setting out their concerns, the councillors say Chineham sewage treatment works discharges into the Loddon “at a point where the river is little more than a stream, with no capacity to dilute what enters it. It simply poisons what is there.”
They add that residents have watched sewage tankers queue on local roads and “raw sewage pumped into their streets”, while discharges from Sherfield-on-Loddon sewage works are “equally at fault for discharges killing the river”.
Cllr Paul Harvey and Cllr Andy Konieczko (Image: BDBC/Cllr Andy Konieczko)
As well as the ecological impact on the Loddon and Test, the pair say they are “most alarmed” by the threat to drinking water. Basingstoke and Deane depends heavily on the chalk aquifer, they warn, with levels already described as historically low.
“Effluent discharged to ground at Whitchurch and Overton reaches the river rapidly through fissures in the chalk,” they say. “These companies are not just fouling our rivers. They are threatening the water our residents drink. That fact was absent from both responses, and its absence tells its own story.”
Cllr Harvey and Cllr Konieczko say water firms have “long relied on penalties being manageable, scrutiny being limited, and the public moving on”. They insist they will not let the issue drop.
“We demand legally binding commitments, infrastructure investment delivered, not just promised years from now, and transparency from companies that have never been run in the public interest,” they write.