"Incandescent" Anger Over Sewage Pollution Drove 1st Tory Loss In 100 Years In West Sussex District

Last edited Sun Jul 14, 2024, 04:49 PM - Edit history (1)

The River Lavant, one of the world’s rare chalk streams, is a precious and much-loved habitat in the South Downs, but has been blighted by hundreds of sewage spills. Its chalk-filtered waters rise in East Dean, West Sussex, described by locals as the “quintessential English village”, flow south to Lavant and carve a route to Chichester. It flows out to sea via Chichester harbour. In February the village green and pond at East Dean were covered in what residents described as sewage with a film of fungus. The stench was described as “overpowering”. The picturesque green was still cordoned off on Friday with signs warning that it was “unsafe for public access”.

The disturbing plight of the Lavant and other rivers across the country – and the failure of the water companies to protect them – helped power the Liberal Democrats to win 71 seats on Thursday. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey hailed the party’s success the “best results in a century”. Jenny Quest, 69, from Lavant, who regularly tests the river water with fellow citizen scientists, is among the voters who were attracted by the Liberal Democrat pledges to hold the water firms to account. She said the spills on the Lavant from a failing sewage system were “horrifying”.

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About four miles downstream of East Dean, an overflow at waste water treatment works at the village of East Lavant discharged sewage 286 times for 6,542 hours in 2023, one of the worst polluting storm overflows in the country. Signs have been erected along the Lavant during discharges warning people to “keep children and pets away from the watercourse”. There are similar situations across the county, with raw sewage discharged into Chichester harbour for over 1,200 hours in just one month last year. Jenny Goldsmith, 78, one of the volunteers who also tests the river waters in partnership with the Western Sussex Rivers Trust, said there was widespread public anger about water quality. “People are incandescent that the bonuses are being paid out by the water companies and the sewage continues to flow.”

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Shortly before 4am on Friday at the Chichester count, a shell-shocked Gillian Keegan, education secretary in Sunak’s cabinet, lost her seat to Jess Brown-Fuller, the Liberal Democrat candidate who pledged to champion better water quality. The Tories had held Chichester since 1924, but Brown-Fuller emerged the victor with 25,540 votes. Brown-Fuller said she was stunned at the size of her majority, beating Keegan by more than 12,000 votes. “I knew there was a wind of change, but it was beyond my expectation,” she said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/07/sewage-spills-vote-winner-lib-dems-polluted-chalk-streams-england-chichester