2023 Water Quality Report Launch - Surfers Against Sewage
Surfers Against Sewage release their annual Water Quality Report
Surfers Against Sewage finds popular sites for bathing in England fail to meet minimum safety requirements
60% of inland bathing spots monitored by SAS over the 2023 bathing season would be classified as ‘poor’ based on Environment Agency methods
Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) supported 20 communities to ‘bridge the gap’ left by inadequate and inefficient official testing regime.
SAS’s annual water quality report brings together citizen science data, EDM data, and figures from SAS’s Safer Seas and Rivers Service to paint a picture of water quality across the UK.
The report highlights a severe lack of monitoring in Scotland and Northern Ireland and unearths a shocking reliance on emergency sewage discharges in Wales.
A new report released today reveals that multiple popular inland swimming sites in England are unsafe for water users. 40 locations were sampled weekly by volunteer citizen scientists throughout the 2023 bathing season. 20 were popular sites for bathing, and 20 were upstream of a nearby sewage overflow associated with the swimming spots.
Of the 40 locations, SAS found that 24 would be deemed ‘poor’ quality were they designated bathing waters, as per Environment Agency methodology. Four out of 20 bathing sites showed a clear decrease in water quality from locations upstream to downstream of a sewage overflow. The data is released just weeks after the Government announced its intention to diverge from the EU’s standards for monitoring water quality in England.
Surfers Against Sewage’s (SAS) annual water quality report explores the shocking state of UK bathing waters in a year when untreated sewage was discharged over 399,864 times into UK waterways – the equivalent of more than 1,000 discharge events every day. The report notes that the majority of overflows in Scotland and Northern Ireland go unreported, meaning this figure is likely a significant underestimate of the true frequency of sewage discharges into the UK’s rivers and seas. In Scotland only 4% of sewage overflows are monitored whilst Northern Ireland Water admits it lacks the ability to record or measure when sewage discharges occur.
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Posted On: 21/11/2023