Protest march a ‘tipping point’ in fight for cleaner water, says Feargal Sharkey

In Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common, London dog-walkers were told to keep their pets out of Beverley Brook after a mains failure let raw sewage enter the river.
On Exmouth beach, as people tried to enjoy their summer holidays in south Devon, bathers faced “do not swim” warnings twice in the space of a week because of sewage spills from a broken pipe. Meanwhile, 100 miles east along the coast in Hampshire, “do not swim” alerts were triggered at Milford-on-Sea when systems failed at a sewage works.
Incidents such as these — all in the past ten days — have left people so angry that Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer and now water campaigner, hopes they will join a march demanding the nation’s waters are cleaned up. “Everywhere I go,” he said, “people out there are absolutely furious. They’re fed up.”
Following a record year for sewage spills and proposals to hike water bills by a fifth to build new infrastructure, Sharkey has joined forces with other activists to organise the march in central London on October 26. The actor Stephen Fry is among the celebrities backing the protest to get “Britain’s waters off life support”.
Sharkey said of the March for Clean Water: “We’ve had enough. I think this could be an extraordinary, pivotal tipping point in the history of this conversation.”
One of the key demands of the march, backed by the charities River Action, Surfers Against Sewage and many more, is a plan to end water firms’ “continuous illegal dumping of raw sewage”. They are also calling for an end to other major sources of water pollution — a nod to farming, which is the biggest contributor — and regulatory reform to allow greater enforcement against polluters.
Sharkey’s immediate priority is to stop the average £94 water bill increase coming from regulator Ofwat last month, allowing water companies to spend £88 billion by 2035. It is £16 billion less than water firms wanted, a shortfall the industry claimed would slow the clean-up of rivers.
“We need to put a freeze on this price increase because we need to clarify exactly what it is that’s now being demanded of customers and what we’re being asked to pay for and not pay for,” said Sharkey. He argued that households were being asked to pay twice for infrastructure their past bills should have already paid for — a charge Ofwat has unequivocally rejected.
Despite being close to Labour and speaking at its party conference two years ago, Sharkey, 66, said he would not be pulling punches now that Sir Keir Starmer was in power. Within days of taking office, the environment secretary Steve Reed announced four reforms in the water sector, including increasing compensation for customers facing disruption. But Sharkey dismissed these initial steps as tinkering.
He said: “What government should be doing right now is putting a [water] commission together with urgency, with a remit to do a complete and utter root-and-branch review of the whole oversight, regulation, operation, function and structure of the water industry.
“Because anything else is simply just pruning hedges around the edges and not actually dealing with the nucleus of the issue. There is no plan, there is no strategy,” he told The Times, whose Clean it Up campaign has been calling for stronger regulation to tackle dirty waterways.
Depending on what the government does next, the unlikely campaigner hopes that he can eventually stop worrying about water pollution and enjoy trout fishing and his other interests. “I’m really looking forward to talking to people about music again so we can all stop talking about other people’s poo,” he said.
Ofwat said: “We will make sure that customers do not pay more than they need to, and that they do not pay for improvements that should already have been delivered.”
Defra said: “We share the public’s anger on this issue and have taken immediate steps to reverse the tide on the unacceptable destruction of our waterways.”
Water UK, the trade association for the water industry, said: “No sewage spill is ever acceptable.”
The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean It Up campaign.