Anglian Water is a privatised water company in England, with shareholders primarily based in Canada and Australia. They are regulated by Ofwat and the Environmental Agency.
In July 2025, they were fined £62.8 million for breaching legal obligations in operating their sewage network. They were found to be spilling excessively amount of sewage across their network of 1,427 storm overflows.
Anglian Water has 54 designated bathing waters within its region and in 2025, there were 178 sewage alerts issued to bathers warning of impact on bathing due to sewage – this is equivalent to over a year of bathing lost across the region!
Gorleston Beach received 29 alerts and there was a warning every month of 2025. Cleethorpes, Southend Thorpe Bay and Southend Westcliff Bay were some of the worst impacted by sewage alerts.
They’ve flooded more properties with sewage in 2024-25 than in 2019-20, with reported incidents increasing by 33%.
Anglian Water urgently needs to stop paying themselves for a job clearly not well done, and start investing in our future.[AM2] On top of this, they have failed to meet their target for pollution incidents every year since 2020 with a commitment of reducing to 19.5 incidents per 10,000km of sewer but reporting almost 3 times more in 2024.
