Water companies in England could face more, and automatic, fines for sewage dumping under new Environment Agency powers.<\/p>\n
The government is consulting on allowing the regulator to use a lower, civil, standard of proof instead of the higher criminal standard, for minor to moderate environmental offences.<\/p>\n
Other measures under consultation include setting a cap at either \u00a3350,000 or \u00a3500,000 for penalties issued to the civil standard, introducing new automatic penalties \u2013 like a speeding ticket \u2013 for specific and obvious breaches without the need for lengthy investigations, and setting a value of either \u00a310,000, \u00a315,000 or \u00a320,000 for the new automatic penalty.<\/p>\n
Currently, investigations into pollution can take years<\/a> and fewer than 1% have resulted in a prosecution.<\/a><\/p>\n Regulators have been forced to be lenient to water companies which have been fined for illegally dumping sewage but are in dire financial straits. Ofwat recently decreed that Thames Water could<\/a> have a bespoke payment plan for fines it owes worth \u00a3123m. The creditors that run Thames Water are <\/a>asking for leniency for the company on up to \u00a31bn of expected fines.<\/p>\n The government is consulting on streamlining its regulators, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced on Tuesday they will be given a growth duty, meaning that financial performance of companies has to be placed ahead of regulatory compliance, and will be placed in a league table to show which regulators are failing to deliver economic growth. Defra recently announced it would be abolishing the much-criticised regulator Ofwat<\/a> and merging its powers with that of the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency.<\/p>\n The environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, said: \u201cI share the public\u2019s anger at the current state of our water system, and this government is taking decisive action.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to give the Environment Agency the teeth it needs to tackle all rule breaking. With new, automatic and tougher penalties for water companies, there will be swift consequences for offences \u2013 including not treating sewage to the required standard and maintenance failures.\u201d<\/p>\n The new policies are expected to cost the water sector between \u00a350m and \u00a367m annually, but the true cost could be lower if the penalties drive improvement in behaviour.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The fines will be paid by shareholders, the government said, rather than being put on to customer bills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Water companies in England could face more, and automatic, fines for sewage dumping under new Environment Agency powers.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-217839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}