South West Water’s pollution incident reduction plan is working.
Pollution incidents have halved in the first half of 2025, thanks to the brilliant efforts of our teams. We are building on solid progress in 2024, where the company was one of a handful of companies to reduce the number of pollution incidents.
Our focus has been two fold. Firstly, reducing pollutions to homes, businesses and land. As a result, internal sewer flooding to homes and businesses has reduced by 68% in the past 5 years. External sewer floodings have also fallen by 24% since 2020. Across the South West, homes and businesses are now less likely to experience flooding than in any other part of the UK.
We are focused on reducing the use of storm overflows at our beaches, with a 20% reduction in bathing water spills over the last five years, protecting our 100% bathing water quality for the 4th consecutive year on a like-for-like basis, as measured by the Environment Agency.
As result of multi-million-pound investment and a year ahead of the government’s target, 100% of South West Water’s 1,342 storm overflows are now fitted with Event Duration Monitors which record data at least every 15 minutes, with some sites capturing updates every two minutes and others as often as every 10 seconds. By seeing what’s happening in our network every few seconds, we can act faster, plan smarter, and invest where it matters most.
We know there’s more to do, and we are spending £760m to reduce storm overflows across the region as part of its record investment over the next five years.
Richard Price, Managing Director of Wastewater Services at South West Water, said; “Our plan is working. We are one of the few water companies to reduce our number of incidents last year and in the first half of 2025, we have more than halved pollution incidents compared to the same period in 2024.
We know we need to do more to fight the impact of climate change, and make our infrastructure future proofed to reduce the impact on homes, businesses and our region and that’s why we’re investing a record £760m in storm overflows alone over the next 5 years.
No-one wants to improve our performance more than the 4,000 brilliant colleagues who live and work in the regions we support.”
