North Devon Green Party joins barnstaple’s Dirty Water Protest
North Devon Green Party members and Councillors joined activists from a diverse range of organisations, such as The Earth Repair Shop, XR, Plastic Free North Devon, The Devon Wildlife Trust and Surfers Against Sewage to march through the streets of Barnstaple in protest at the dumping of raw sewage into our Rivers and Seas.
“People blame the system because it is Victorian, but Queen Victoria died 122 years ago”
Local Councillor Mark Haworth-Booth, made an impassioned speech where he lambasted the Private water companies for paying out £72 Billion to Shareholders while the pipes leak and water bills rise..
(Read his full speech below)
Mark Haworth-Booth giving his speech at the Dirty water protest
“My name is Mark Haworth-Booth,
local councillor. I hope you’d like to hear something about why we are protesting about Dirty Water. I’ll ask five questions and give five answers in the next five minutes.
- Why am I part of this protest? I became a parish councillor in 2019 and started helping with our village park and its river bank. I learned that we have a Combined Sewer Overflow system. This collects rainwater and domestic waste. When there are storms the whole lot – poo and rain – gets flushed into the river to prevent sewage backing up into people’s toilets. The theory is that the heavy rainfall will dilute the sewage. The problem is that water companies discharge sewage into rivers and onto beaches even in light rain or no rain at all. In 2020 there were more than 400,000 sewage discharges, totalling more than 3m hours. We have probably all seen footage of sewage pouring from pipes onto beautiful beaches. That’s why I’m here.
2. Why is there a problem? I’ve heard people blame the system because it is Victorian but Queen Victoria died 122 years ago. Plenty of time to get things right. The root cause of this scandalous state of affairs is that our water companies were sold off by a Tory Government in 1989. Since privatisation, £72 billion has gone to shareholders – around £2 billion a year on average – while our water bills have gone up by 40% in real terms Overpaid executives have been more interested in financial engineering than boring old pipes. This is a case of private affluence and private effluent.
- What is the government doing? Huge public outrage caused the government to come up with a new plan in 2022 but it allows water companies to continue polluting until 2035 – in areas with significant importance to human and ecological health – and until 2050 elsewhere. Their ‘plan’ means almost 30 years more of pollution. Our MP Selaine Saxby supported this and bragged to parliament on 12 January that, thanks to the new plan, ‘the superb surf beach of Croyde has seen its water quality raised from good to excellent for the first time’. On that very day Surfers Against Sewage reported a sewage dump into Croyde Bay.
- Is it just a sewage problem? No. Agricultural run-off – fertiliser, pesticides, slurry and topsoil – is a serious problem, especially in North Devon. It has got worse because the government cut the Environment Agency by 50%. Fewer farm inspections and prosecutions = more run-off. But the water companies also allow 2.4 billion litres of water a dayto be lost from leakages. And climate change affects everything. By 2050 some rivers will see 50-80% less water during the summer months. During last summer’s drought the BBC named the Taw as among Britain’s worst affected rivers. Instead of addressing climate change seriously, Tory prime ministers fly around our small island in private jets, issue / new licences for gas and oil exploration and open a new coalmine.
- What can we do? We can join SAS, PFND, the DWT, the WRT and other bodies. Let’s not forget XR, which will be gathering en masse around Parliament on 21 April. Why not help XR reach its target of 100,000 protesters? Also, please vote for those who really care about the environment. And we can keep our spirits up by following the Undertones Feargal Sharkey on social media. Feargal is doing for rivers what Marcus Rashford did for free school meals. Thanks Feargal – and thank you for listening.”