Thames Water has been fined £4 million for pollution incidents in Kingston between 2016 and 2019 following extreme winter weather.
The company pleaded guilty at Aylesbury Crown Court to charges brought by the Environment Agency (EA) primarily concerning the escape of untreated sewage into a park, woodland and the Hogsmill river in New Malden after a storm in February 2016.
The EA as prosecutor said the incident was avoidable and noted that a power failure during the storm triggered alarms at the site after pumps stopped working. The malfunction triggered almost 50 warning alarms but these were not checked until the morning when an engineer attended the site. The company did not report the incident to the EA for 15 hours.
Steve Spencer, operations director at Thames, apologised for the incidents and said they do not reflect how much the organisation cares about the environment, its customers and communities, or how it wants to perform.
“We’ve developed a turnaround plan which focuses on significantly improving our performance, with an unprecedented amount of investment directed towards safeguarding the environment. We’re committed to long term, sustainable solutions and we’re already working with partners across our region to enhance and restore the rivers we all share and value.”
The judge noted the company’s commitment to improving compliance and said Thames would be held to the commitment in the future.
“We’re pleased the judge recognised this new approach in his comments, and we are determined to deliver on our promises,” Spencer added. “We strongly believe that discharges of untreated sewage are unacceptable, even when they are legally permitted, and we will work with our stakeholders to accelerate work to stop them being necessary.”
The court also took into consideration breach of a permit regarding that incident and discharging into the Hogsmill river in January and October 2018 as well as an incident in September 2019 when sewage sludge was released from Hogsmill sewage treatment works in error.
Thames plans to deliver environmental improvements to 745km of rivers in its region during AMP7.