Southern Water to spend £10m to cut storm overflows before spring 2025

Southern Water has been given the green light to increase its investment in driving down the use of storm overflows after a short-term £10m boost was ratified by Defra.

“The agreement will allow our Clean Rivers and Seas Task Force to further expand its work in rolling out nature-based and engineering solutions so that sewers are no longer overloaded by surface and groundwater, leading to storm overflows,” a Southern Water spokesperson said.

The cash, to be spent between now and spring 2025 and paid for by shareholders, will go towards:

– An expansion of optimisation activity – going beyond the permit;

– Real-time digital wastewater catchment control;

– An additional surface water pathfinder catchment;

– An additional programme of ground water infiltration reduction of both customer\private and public sewers;

– An accelerated construction programme for wetland(s) benefitting Chichester Harbour.

This news comes in the wake of last year’s clean rivers and seas plan which set out where £1.5bn would be spent between 2025 and 2035 to ‘cut storm overflows more widely’.

Southern Water’s environment and innovation director, Nick Mills, said: “This additional funding will help us expand and accelerate our programme of work reducing the reliance on storm overflows.

“It is really important that the clean rivers and seas task force continues to ramp up its delivery of sustainable catchment solutions that make a real difference to communities and the environment.”

So far, solutions already making a real difference in pilot areas, for example we have seen an 85 per cent cut in the use of tankers to remove groundwater from sewers in the Pan Parishes of Hampshire.