Labour has accused ministers of turning Britain’s coastline and rivers into open sewers after it analysed data on dumping released by the Environment Agency (EA) last week.
According to its analysis, Labour said raw sewage was released in 137 constituencies around Britain’s coastline for almost a million hours last year.
That amounts to a discharge every three minutes and 45 seconds, or 980,999 hours in total, the analysis found.
Blaming the government, Jim McMahon, shadow environment secretary, said people who live by the coast “should be able to just enjoy the place where they live without having to worry about encountering filthy raw sewage”.
Torridge and West Devon was the constituency found to have had the highest total hours of sewage discharge, at 57,494 hours.
According to the EA, 2022 saw more than 300,000 raw discharges into rivers and coastal areas lasting for more than 1.75mln hours.
That amounted to 825 sewage discharges daily on average across England, said the agency.
United Utilities, in the northwest, was responsible for more than 69,000 spills over 425,000 hours, Severn Trent for 44,700 spillages and Pennon subsidiary South West Water for 37,649.
On Tuesday, the government unveiled a ‘plan for water’ that included potentially bigger fines for polluters and a ban on wet wipes, but environmentalists dismissed the measures as old pieces of legislation being recycled.