A Crappy Christmas from Anglian Water

Water utilities and their sewage-spill scandals just won’t stay out of the news. Thames Water has just been blocked from paying £2.5 million in bonuses to 21 senior executives, though £13.5 million is due to be paid out next year under a ‘retention bonus’ scheme. Stick around chaps, the company will get your money to you one way or another.

My grandparents lived by the Great Ouse outside Bedford, with a boathouse, two diving boards and nine children. As each became old enough to pass the family’s ‘Felmersham Test’, swimming fully clothed across the river and back, they could lay claim to one of the little islands below the house and camp there with friends.

Following this idyllic childhood, three sons were killed in WW2 and three more nearly were: in Burma one repelled a Japanese attack by standing in full view on the parapet to direct his battery’s gunfire, winning the MC. Another was a paratroop surgeon, but it was his friend, 127 Parachute Field Ambulance’s other doctor, who was shot dead by a communist sniper as he stepped out of an ambulance in Athens.

Their youngest brother, the bomber pilot, smashed into a German field in his blazing Lancaster, minus parachute, which was not usually survivable. These days the Ouse isn’t especially good for your health, either.

Environmental volunteers from BedsGOVET test its water quality each month at 17 places both upstream of Bedford and down, and November’s figures were astonishing. Ofwat says E.coli bacteria at anything over 900 CFU per 100ml is too risky for bathing, but only one site recorded as little as twice that. Readings at 14 others ranged from 5,030 to 7,700 CFU – more than five times the limit.

At both Great Barford, a popular wild swimming spot, and also near Anglian Water’s Bedford sewage works – unironically named the Water Recycling Centre (WRC) – pollution was so bad that readings were off the scale, at over 10,000 CFU. The E.coli level at Felmersham was 7,300, more than eight times the safe swimming level.

Water companies are only permitted to spill as ‘storm overflow’ in exceptional weather in places where old-style combined sewers add rainwater (gutters and drains) to effluent from toilets, baths and kitchens, as happens in London. Each March Ofwat and Anglian Water agree the figures and publish a big spreadsheet of the previous year’s spills from the company’s pumping stations and WRCs into streams and rivers.

In 2024, Odell WRC on the Ouse, just upstream of Felmersham, spilled for 2,997 hours – or over a third of the year, day and night – manifestly not just during storms. Bedford WRC did relatively well, recording 92 spills lasting 1,291 hours – or so locals supposed.

Anglian (motto: “Love Every Drop”) just admitted to me that at Bedford its spill monitor was only working for a few weeks of 2024 – in January, February and December – and that the Ofwat-certified 1,291 hours had not been averaged-up, those were merely spills recorded in the weeks the monitor functioned. The true figure could have been 3,000 hours, or 4,000, no-one will ever know, and a year only has 8,760 hours. Anglian pours so much untreated sewage into the Ouse from its Bedford WRC that it perfumes it to mask the stink, but locals complain the cheap scent smells worse than the ordure.

A year ago the company adopted a cunning plan. Asked by councils to comment on local planning applications, Anglian always used to reply that its local sewer network and WRCs would cope: not a bad idea, if you want to dodge awkward questions about investment and future-proofing. Now that’s changed, and Anglian routinely objects to developments large and small, except in places such as Milton Keynes where its sewage works are adequate. The implication being, apparently ‘Don’t blame us if you build and the river fills with shit’.

Bedford Borough Council called that bluff in November. Anglian had objected to a scheme for 1,100 new houses at Shortstown, by Cardington’s historic airship hangars, saying its sewage works wouldn’t be able to cope – but the council granted planning permission regardless. Anglian had done no site-specific modelling, was already in breach of its licence by spilling sewage at Bedford night and day, and had no plan to correct that in its 2025-2030 investment cycle: so the utility was in no position to complain the development would change anything, said the council. More bad news for the Ouse, unless Shortstown’s new residents get thousands of composting toilets.

E.coli contamination isn’t the only issue. Water from the Great Ouse is pumped into Anglian’s 1,550 acre Grafham Water reservoir – England’s third largest – which supplies drinking water to a wide area including Bedford. Another pollutant that BedsGOVET volunteers regularly measure is nitrate, which accumulates in the still water of a reservoir  They generally find levels of around 5-10 mg per litre in the Ouse. At Grafham contamination measured 15 mg per litre eight years ago, but since then it’s climbed to 30. The problem is that 50 mg per litre is the safe limit for babies and pregnant women.

Within five years Grafham is likely to exceed that. Remediation could cost £100 million or more, as Anglian’s Senior Agronomy Adviser Richard Reynolds told a meeting on December 10th, and there’s no plan to do so. If nothing changes, the reservoir, built only in 1965, could be condemned by 2030. Universal Studios is about to build a huge new theme park just south of Bedford, not necessarily relying on composting toilets, but it may also need to have a think about fresh water. Locals claim Anglian has told Universal it should be able to provide the site with one new standpipe, but more than that couldn’t be guaranteed.

As with the Great Ouse and Bedford, so with much of the UK: decades of under-investment have left us all in an unholy mess. Running a water company may not be your ideal job if you don’t want to lose friends and inundate people, but consider the rewards: Southern Water provoked outrage at Westminster in July when, banned like other water companies from paying its CEO Lawrence Gosden a bonus, it announced his remuneration (£764,000 in 2024) would be topped up a further £691,000 via a new Long Term Incentive Plan.

Meanwhile Bedford’s hardy paddlers, including the Viking Kayak Club, need a good gut. For years they’ve celebrated Christmas with their Boxing Day Roll. At Duck Mill they roll through 360-degrees, capsizing one way and popping up again on the other side, followed by a nice hot chocolate. Last year my teenage neighbour Holly was one of those who became violently ill afterwards, but club members like to think that plenty of Coca-Cola can ward off Norovirus, that constant exposure gives them lots of immunity anyway, and they don’t intend to give up. In 2012 their star paddler Etienne Stott MBE won Olympic gold in canoe slalom, having started on the river with the town’s Scouts aged 10.

Bedford Fire and Rescue Service used to practise on the Ouse at Harrold Bridge, but now uses a lake instead – too much filth. The river my brave uncles and father swam in could soon be an open sewer.