Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she has plans to introduce mandatory monitoring of all sewage outlets.

Using powers in the Environment Act, we will require companies to make discharge data available in near real time to the public and monitor water quality upstream and downstream of their assets. This monitoring will be year-round. In the Storm Overflows Reduction Plan, we committed to bringing these provisions into force this year.

Water and sewerage companies have published Event and Duration Monitoring (EDM) data of sewage discharges annually since 2020 that can be found here﷟. The 2022 data will be published at the end of March 2023.