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Public has no right to swim in sea, claims firm that dumped sewage at bathing spot

South West Water is claiming it has no legal obligation to keep rivers and seawater clean of sewage in its defence against a Devon swimmer who is taking the water company to court.

Jo Bateman, who attempts to swim every day off the coast of Exmouth, is taking legal action against South West Water, claiming its frequent sewage discharges into the sea have taken away her legal right to a public “amenity”.

However, in its defence to Ms Bateman’s claim, seen by i, the water firm states no one has a legal right to swim in the sea.

48 comments

  • The sooner we start tarring, feathering and shunning these corporate parasites the sooner we can go back to a decent society.

  • Take the CEO and board members, tar and feather them, then throw them into the spot they dump their shit.

    The public has no legal obligation to provide soap.

  • There are two ways to think about rights: there are legal rights and then there are human rights. Legal rights are conferred by some piece of legal document (legislation, constitution or common law) that a person is able to seek legal redress if their right has been revoked or diminished. Then there are human rights - what we as individual humans believe that each humans should expect as a basic right. The two are not always aligned, predominately because human rights vary greatly from one person’s interpretation to the next.

    I think what the company is probably (accurately) arguing is that there is no legal right to swim in the UK, as no specific document states this with any specificity, so the complainant isn’t due compensation or redress of behaviour under the law. This is what the courts will examine as they are the interpreters of law but not the creators of law.

    Now, does she have a human right to swim there free of sewage? I damn well think so, and I don’t think that would be a controversial opinion either. The problem is that what we think the law should be and what it is are often different, because legislation can’t represent every view simultaneously. There’s no law that could be drafted that makes forced birthers and pro choice people agree - someone will always lose out.

    All of this is to say that while fighting this in court is a shitty thing to do (pun very much intended), it makes sense based upon the way our legal system is set up. There is no incentive for private business to respect rights that are not legally conferred, but there is a financial incentive to do the ‘cheaper and technically legal’ thing. Until we overhaul our legal systems to be inherently protective rather than inherently exploitative, this behaviour will continue.

    • There's no legal document because nobody was dumb enough to think that in the first place. If you have to write a law for everything people are allowed to do because some twat wants to argue in bad faith, then the legal system has no basis in reality. In fact, if that were the case, then there is a chicken/egg problem with laws in the first place.

  • Do they actually have a privately owned water supply in the UK?

    • Yes. Thatcher sold it off in '89, and since then the private monopolies have accumulated ~£60bn of debts and paid out ~£58bn in dividends. Now they're arguing with the regulator that they should be allowed to pay out more dividends, increase customer fees by 40% and not have to pay as much in fines for dumping raw sewage because otherwise the companies are "uninvestable" and they won't be able to raise the money to pay their debts and will collapse.

    • The water infrastructure was nationalised decades ago. Each reason has a single private company that maintains the pipes, supply, treatment etc. to everyone in that area. Being private companies, the execs have been getting massive bonuses while dumping raw sewage into public waterways recently. And why? Because as someone else here said: after Brexit, the government got rid of the environmental laws saying they couldn’t. And when you’re a monopoly in your area, are you going to spend money on treating water you don’t have to, or give that money to the shareholders?

      It’s a fucking disgrace, a lot of people should go to prison for it and the whole system should be renationalised. But then people in government would lose money, and we can’t have that now, can we?

      • The water infrastructure was nationalised decades ago.

        Privatised.

        Just another of Milk Snatcher Maggie Thatcher's little poison pills.

        And yes, it should all be renationalised. They haven't kept up with demand at any point.

        Another example is Severn Trent.

        They were releasing so much shit into the local nature reserve, that they have actually had to do something about it.

        And that something is "building a big pipe so they can dump it directly into the Trent." They've already hacked down a load of trees to make room for it.

        Before:

        After:

      • Even to an American where we have tons of privatized utilities this is a bit shocking to me. I haven’t really heard of privately owned water companies before. Although my region is a bit more into public ownership than most I guess. We have private gas supply and private internet but other utilities are public.

        Predictably, those two are fucking awful and the other services run just fine. But the next town over has private electricity and it’s a total disaster.

        I can see why Thatcher has such a poor reputation now.

48 comments