South West Water has been fined £7,867,733 — the largest environmental fine in the region's history — for 18 charges covering hundreds of illegal sewage discharges across Cornwall and Devon between 2016 and 2021. District Judge Matson at Plymouth magistrates court described the offences as "horrendous, very significant incidents of pollution" and found repeatedly that SWW's conduct amounted to reckless failures in management systems and response to known risks. The specifics are damning in their banality. At Polperro harbour on the south coast of Cornwall, untreated sewage gushed through a harbour wall on an August 2019 bank holiday weekend; SWW engineers took 10 hours to attend. At Harlyn, near Padstow on the north coast, 231 illegal sewage discharges occurred over a five-year period from January 2016 to July 2021. The River Camel — home to otter and Atlantic salmon — received sewage. In Plymouth, SWW failed to permanently fix a sewer entering a creek despite multiple formal warnings from the Environment Agency over several years. The judge was particularly unsparing about contrition. Despite guilty pleas to all 18 charges — 17 for illegal water discharge and one for failing to take reasonable remedial measures — Matson found that SWW had tried to minimise its role rather than accepting full responsibility. The company was also ordered to pay £329,993 in costs. The political frame is shifting fast. Prime Minister Andy Burnham described water as a symbol of what had gone wrong with Britain and promised to reverse Margaret Thatcher's "ideological ban" on public ownership of water companies. Environment Secretary Angela Eagle said SWW "repeatedly broke the law" for six years and pledged tougher regulation. Liberal Democrat MP Ben Maguire called the fine "another slap on the wrist" and demanded prison sentences for executives overseeing serious illegal sewage dumping. Maguire's arithmetic is hard to argue with. SWW is part of Pennon Group, a publicly listed company. An £8M fine for five years of systematic illegal pollution across some of England's most ecologically sensitive and economically important coastal sites is a cost-of-doing-business calculation, not a deterrent. The company's own response — describing offences as "historic" and pivoting immediately to a £760M investment figure — demonstrates the playbook: absorb the fine, announce a capital programme, move on. The structural problem remains untouched. Privatised water companies operate natural monopolies with captive customers. Fines levied through magistrates courts are capped at levels that cannot materially affect the behaviour of billion-pound utilities. The Environment Agency prosecutes, but the penalty regime was designed for a different scale of offender. Until enforcement can threaten licence conditions, executive liability, or dividend restrictions, the incentive structure rewards precisely the behaviour the judge condemned. SWW claims a 17% reduction in spills and 25% reduction in spill duration in the last year, investing £760M to tackle storm overflows. Whether this represents genuine remediation or baseline compliance rebranded as ambition will be tested by future monitoring data — and by whether the next fine, if it comes, is large enough to matter.
