Unpacking the 2024 Annual Sewage Spill Data

Our good friends and last year’s featured charity have analysed the data for you

Unpacking the 2024 Annual Sewage Spill Data - The Rivers Trust

This week (w/c 24 March), the summaries of the 2024 event duration monitoring on CSOs in England and Wales were released. Our technical experts dug into the data on raw sewage spills into our rivers so you don’t have to — and it’s not good news.

This week the Environment Agency released the annual summary of storm overflow (CSO) spill data, also known as EDM data, from water companies in England for 2024. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s far from good news for rivers.

With raw sewage spilled in England's rivers for an all-time high of over 3.6 billion hours, it’s clear that significant progress to address this form of pollution was not made in 2024.

If you're concerned about spills in your local area, you can check the Near real-time alerts tab of our Sewage Map to identify your nearby CSOs, and see whether a spill is currently occurring or when it most recently discharged and for how long.

We've looked at the data In 2024 across England:

A total of 450,398 discharges, or monitored spill events, were counted.
Untreated sewage was discharged for a record total of 3,614,427 hours through storm overflows – 8,558 hours more (0.22%) than last year.
On average, each overflow recorded 31.8 spills. In 2023, this was 33, 2022, this was 23, and in 2021, this was 29. The Government’s target for this is less than 10 per year.
On average, each overflow discharged for 8 hours each time a spill took place – slightly longer than 2023 (7.8h), and much longer than in 2022 (5.8h).

Posted On: 31/03/2025

Read today’s news here.