A plea for a meeting with the prime minister has been sent by a Devon council leader to work out how the sewage system can be improved to cope with housing growth in the major district.
East Devon District Council leader Councillor Paul Arnott said he had written to Andy Burnham, the prime minister, asking for his help in “bringing all parties together” to try and solve the issue of marrying infrastructure improvements with additional housing.
“There were over 100 days of swimming [in the sea] lost to sewage incidents in Exmouth last year,” he said in a post on Facebook.
“I have written to the prime minister to help bring all parties together to work out how to provide proper sewage infrastructure given we are required by the government to build more housing.
“I want a multi-agency meeting with councils, the Environment Agency, and South West Water, so we can plan properly for the future.”
South West Water has been actioning improvements in Exmouth, including to the Maer Road sewage treatment plant, and has a stated goal of reducing storm overflows.
The capacity of the sewage system is frequently raised as an issue by East Devon’s planning committee, with fears about how it will cope with extra demand.
And it is something that campaigners against major prospective developments often raise, including the Stop Exmo_20 campaign group, which is fighting against a potential plot for 700 homes being included in East Devon’s draft local plan.
But because South West Water is a statutory consultee, if the firm says its infrastructure can cope, then planning committees would find it difficult to justify rejecting a plan on those grounds.
East Devon recently completed a water cycle study where it commissioned an external firm to assess the capacity of sewage treatment plants in East Devon so it could ascertain their current capacity and potential ability to cope with housing growth.
The analysis, which was published last year, suggested four of East Devon’s 16 waste water treatment plants were already running beyond their capacity permit limits, and that seven – including Maer Lane in Exmouth, Feniton and Otterton – would be doing so if house building targets in East Devon are hit without any sewer infrastructure upgrades or additions.
However, it’s understood the analysis used a more stringent benchmark for analysing the plants than environmental regulators may require, meaning South West Water said it did not recognise the data.
It has since been confirmed by East Devon that the data in the water cycle study is being re-run using a different method of analysis.
The council has previously passed votes of no confidence in South West Water.
SWW’s web page on Exmouth states that its work in Exmouth “forms part of our ambitious £760 million investment programme, which is focused on making long term improvements to the wastewater network in places where heavy rainfall and increasing demand put pressure on the system”.
“We remain dedicated to improving services in Exmouth,” it adds.
“Our goal is to reduce storm overflow spills to improve water quality, targeting a maximum of ten spills per year per overflow by 2030, with only two spills at designated bathing waters during the bathing season.”
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