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This Is Why

Down the drain: What caused Britain’s sewage problem?

This Is Why

Sky News

News Commentary, Daily News, News

4.0552 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has told Sky News the repeated release of illegal sewage outflows is a "scandal" as she signals that customers may need to be prepared to pay more for an improved system.

Our economics and data editor Ed Conway has investigated the scale of the sewage crisis.

On the Sky News Daily, Leah Boleto talks to Ed about his findings, which show that - far from being a failure of the system - raw sewage is released into Britain's waterways by design.

Senior podcast producer: Annie Joyce
Interviews producer: Melissa Tutesigensi
Promotion producer: Jada-Kai Meosa John
Editor: Wendy Parker

Transcript

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0:00.0

Add water to your will.

0:02.0

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you'll help bring essential clean water to people who need it,

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to change their own lives for generations

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to come. Add Water Aid to your will. Search WaterAid legacy to find out how. For unlimited all-day

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0:48.3

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0:55.3

Always use the same card of device when touching in and out for full terms and conditions such TFL fair capping.

1:06.4

Hello everyone, I'm Leah Belletto and I'm in for Neil Patterson today on the Sky News Daily podcast.

1:12.9

And we're talking about what's gone wrong with Britain's sewage systems.

1:19.2

And I never thought I'd get this excited about talking about Poo and we and the history of the pipes under London and in the entire country actually.

1:29.3

Well it's hard to describe how it smells very very bad like kind of the worst

1:37.3

lavatory you've ever been to. But here we are because we've done some number crunching

1:43.3

and the reason we're going to be talking about this, it is a big problem.

1:47.0

The Environment Agency, their figures showing that 300,000 sewage spills happened in England.

1:54.0

That was just last year. So that's 824 a day.

1:58.0

And then on top of that, Water UK says around 10 billion pounds is needed to upgrade

2:04.7

the system. And where will that hit? Will it hit our bills? And we're going to be talking all

...

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