Water industry strategies to manufacture doubt and deflect blame for sewage pollution in England

Abstract

The water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England are majority-owned by a range of global investors. The industry is under intense scrutiny for widespread failure in its environmental performance, discharging 12.7 million monitored hours of untreated wastewater and sewage into English waterways between 2019 and the end of 2023. At the time of writing, multiple investigations by environmental and financial regulators are in progress, and regulatory oversight is under review by the recently formed Office for Environmental Protection. While limited monitoring hid the full extent of underperformance, we argue that the WaSCs have prolonged this environmental disaster through strategies that mirror those of other large polluting industries in the past. We test this hypothesis for the nine major WaSCs in England against a published framework of 28 ‘greenwashing/deception’ tactics of large industries. We identified 22 of these tactics that could be seen as disinformation, greenwashing and manufacturing doubt. The financial exploitation of water resources in England, alongside long-term degradation of infrastructure and ineffective regulation, raises globally important issues around water security, ethics and environmental stewardship. Much greater scrutiny of both industry performance and industry communication is required. In the past 5 years, a huge amount of untreated wastewater has been released into English waterways. An analysis of the communication used by the water utilities shows that they have employed strategies used by large polluting industries in the past, prolonging the consequences of this environmental disaster.