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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many sewage discharges into (a) rivers and (b) seas have occurred so far this year in Cornwall.

The Environment Agency (EA) will publish 2024 Event Duration Monitoring data, showing how long and how often storm overflows have been used, in March 2025. The data for previous years is available online, here.

From 1 January, companies will be required to publish discharge data from storm overflows in near real time. This duty falls under section 141DA of the Water Industry Act 1991, as inserted by section 81 of the Environment Act 2021. To support this, Water UK recently released its National Storm Overflow Hub to provide this data on the same site for the whole of England.

The Water (Special Measures) Bill will strengthen these provisions. Clause 3 will require companies to publish discharge data for emergency overflows in near real time. This will ensure that discharge data from all sewage overflows will be published in near real time.