Yahoo News Thames Water given record £20.3m fine after 1.4bn litres of raw sewage pollute river, killing thousands of fish
Thames Water has been fined a record £20.3 million for polluting the River Thames with 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage.
The company allowed huge amounts of untreated effluent to enter the waterway in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 2013 and 2014, leaving people and animals ill, and killing thousands of fish.
Judge Francis Sheridan handed down a fine of £20,361,140 - the largest penalty for a water utility for an environmental disaster - at a sentencing hearing at Aylesbury Crown Court on Wednesday.
Handing down the fine, which is ten times higher than the previous record penalty paid by Southern Water, Judge Sheridan said: "This is a shocking and disgraceful state of affairs."
He added: "It should not be cheaper to offend than to take appropriate precautions."
Thames Water has 21 days to pay.
The firm admitted 13 breaches of environmental laws over discharges from sewage treatment works in Aylesbury, Didcot, Henley and Little Marlow, and a pumping station at Littlemore.
It also pleaded guilty to a further charge on March 17 over a lesser discharge from an unmanned sewage treatment plant at Arborfield in Berkshire in September 2013.
The judge also took into account seven further incidents at sewage sites on the Thames in 2014.
At a hearing last week, the judge said he had to ensure the fine was "sufficiently large that they (Thames) get the message".
Thames' previous record fine for pollution was £1 million, paid in January 2016.
The sentencing followed a ruling in March 2016 that big commercial organisations which cause environmental pollution can be ordered to pay fines running into tens of millions of pounds.
According to the Environment Agency, which brought the Thames prosecution, the previous largest fine handed down to a water utility for an environmental disaster was given to Southern over an incident on Margate Beach in Kent in 2012.
Richard Aylard, Thames Water, said outside the court: "We have failed in our responsibility to the environment and that hurts both personally and professionally because we do care.
"We've also failed in our responsibility to our customers, who pay us to provide an essential public service all the time, every day and not just some of the time, and we apologise for all of those failings.
"But in the three years since the last of those incidents we have learnt our lesson - there have been sweeping, far-reaching changes across the waste water business."
He added: "That has included more people, more and better systems and more investments, and that is beginning to pay off.
"Our performance has improved considerably and we're also doing a lot of work which we're proud of in partnership with environmental groups across our area, working to improve rivers and not just get them back to where they should be."
He insisted customers will not face an increase in prices and added: "This fine will be paid in full by shareholders only."
Fine is 10 times larger than previous record penalty
The £20.3 million fine handed to Thames Water is 10 times larger than the previous stiffest penalty handed down by a court, a £2 million fine that Southern Water was ordered to pay in December for polluting the beach at Margate in Kent during the Diamond Jubilee weekend in 2012, Aylesbury Crown Court heard on Friday.
It follows a ruling in March last year that big commercial organisations which cause environmental pollution can be ordered to pay fines running into tens of millions of pounds.
Here are the 10 largest fines handed down after prosecutions brought by the Environment Agency against water utilities:
Thames Water - £20.3 million, March 2017
Southern Water - £2 million, December 2016
Yorkshire Water - £1.1 million, April 2016
Thames Water - £1 million, December 2016
United Utilities - £750,000, March 2015
United Utilities - £600,000, June 2016
Yorkshire Water - £600,000, January 2016
Southern Water - £500,000, November 2014
Severn Trent - £480,000, September 2015
Severn Trent - £426,000, July 2016
Source: Environment Agency
