A personal point of view from East Devon Leader Paul Arnott.

On New Year’s Day 2024 when I might otherwise be starting a book I’d been given for Christmas (still unopened, of course) I received a call from Cllr Geoff Jung. Geoff is the cabinet member for coast, country and environment at East Devon, an enormous portfolio that ranges from waste & recycling to sea defences and a watching brief on the environment.

On January 1st, and not for the first time, Geoff found himself inundated with calls about the sewage crisis in Exmouth. Could I come and have a look? They don’t tell you this when you stand to be a councillor, but you soon learn that dog poo, public toilets and sewage issues will play a central role in your life.

I zipped down to Exmouth, where hard-working tanker drivers had been drawing raw sewage out of the failed Phear Park pumping station and driving it across the town to its Maer Road Car Park sister station, where it was pumped under the sands of the Maer and into the sea. This noisy process kept hundreds of families awake and went on for weeks more.

While there, I was introduced for the first time to the superb leaders of ESCAPE, a proud acronym standing for “End Sewage Convoys and Poollution (sic) Exmouth”, as well as a group of local women who had reluctantly but wisely decided not to have their New Year’s Day swim after all.

A few weeks later, officials from the responsible body, South West Water, appeared by Zoom before the Scrutiny committee at East Devon. I loathe flat-track bullying and could see that, on the operational side of SWW, people are doing their level best, as are the tanker drivers. But much less persuasive is SWW’s executive narrative around how this – and many other crises from Budleigh Salterton to Seaton via Sidmouth – came to be in the first place. The executives seem reluctant to visit the recent past.

So, I’ll have a go for them. Simply, in the present day both foul water and rain water go down the same pipes. They should be separate. When there is heavy rainfall these days, the combined pipes are at risk of bursting. At which point SWW have to open the sluices and it all goes in the sea. Not before, however, it bursts up horribly through manhole covers in places like Clyst St Mary, or seeps through the ground in the Cranbrook country park, and into brooks and streams. And many other places too numerous to mention.

Just like the Post Office or Windrush compensation schemes, this is a here and now crisis seeded in past neglect which needs national government intervention. Put simply, the water regulator OFWAT is toothless, the Environment Agency has been defunded, and the private water companies pay money in dividends rather than sufficiently invest in infrastructure.

At East Devon District Council last week, we said enough is enough and passed a unique resolution of no confidence in SWW. To my mind we cannot make progress until we know how thousands of extra homes were permitted by the then Conservative East Devon District Council when as far back as 2010 it was clear that the infrastructure was already teetering on the edge.

Which raises the inevitable question as to whether more homes should be built today before that appalling lapse is corrected. I was disappointed but unsurprised that the Conservative leader and his chair of Scrutiny refused to vote for the resolution. These battles are not won in a day.