news release
    21st Mar 2005

£200 MILLION SEWAGE PROJECT SUCKS SAY SAS - BUT FOR AN EXTRA £4 MIILLION COULD BE THE BEST!

Southern Water customers will not get value for money, or clean and safe water if the planning application submitted today by the water company is agreed.

Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) believe the additional cost of adding full sewage treatment to the £200 million secondary level treatment works will be JUST £4millon.

This would be the cost of adding Ultra-Violet (UV) Light Disinfection to the treatment process to render the effluent clean and safe. For an extra 2% investment, Brighton and Hove residents would have fully treated sewage effluent, a process that has been embraced by seaside resorts for the last 10 years and which has added value to their local economies. Bathers and recreational water users have been able to rest easy with UV disinfection treatment because the level of viruses and bacteria surviving in the effluent is tiny compared to the 100,000 faecal coliforms per 100ml in secondary level treated effluent.

Despite this Southern Water remains intent on providing a lower level treatment process – a process that wastes rather than reuses water in a region that is suffering extensive water shortages. Customers will have to pay again in finding ways to conserve water when the Brighton scheme could allow for treated effluent to be reused again safely.

Only last week Brighton and Hove City Council has given its support to a full sewage treatment proposal. SAS is hoping that East Sussex County Council will join us in this call.

Southern Water has had the money sitting in the bank to do this project for the last 5 years. The original proposal that failed at Public Inquiry was for a £60 million project. With this money sitting in the bank accruing interest at an annual rate of 5% the company would be earning £2.4million a year alone in interest. Over the last 5 years there is more than enough there to pay for the additional cost of full treatment but instead it will be lining shareholders pockets.

Richard Hardy, SAS Campaigns Director says, ”The cost of adding full sewage treatment to the proposal is tiny compared to the massive difference in water quality and quality of life it will bring. Southern Water’s proposal won’t be clean and safe nor sustainable but it does ensure the company’s shareholders get fatter pockets”.

SAS urge Brighton and Hove residents to get behind the campaign for full sewage treatment by expressing their concerns immediately to Council leaders at both Brighton and Hove City Council and East Sussex County Council.

For more information please contact Richard Hardy on Tel: 0845 4583001 or Mob: 07711 767548

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