Real-time, river sections downstream of sewage discharges from storm overflows
sewagemap.co.uk
sewagemap.co.uk
The water authorities were privatised to 'encourage investment' rather than the government footing the bill for maintaining and expanding them.
The new water companies were snapped up by big multinationals who didn't invest in infrastructure. Instead these newly-owned water companies then took humungous loans which they paid to the buyers. So the buyers got the money and the water companies got the debt to service.
Now everyone wonders why the water companies, who are charging more than ever and have a really failing system, are going bankrupt...?
They need to build more capacity to handle this.
The other problem is that much of our system was built before it was recognised that it's better to have separate sewage and surface water systems. (Oddly enough, the word sewage originally referred to surface water drainage, not excrement).
[1] The Elizabeth line is our newest and widest metro line. The new tunnel at 7m diameter is larger, although technically since it only goes in one direction it's only bigger than half the Elizabeth line - it being the general consensus that sewage does not need to make a return journey.
That is, if you're stuck in a tunnel on an Elizabeth Line train for an hour that's a fault, everybody wants to fix that and then you'll get to Reading or, Heathrow (airport) or Woolwich or whatever.
But a turd in the Thames Tideway is supposed to be sat there, it's temporary storage, the idea is if twice as much rainfall as normal happens over a 24 hour period, we don't need twice as much sewage treatment capacity, we just need to store those turds for a while so that on average it works out OK.
Which still doesn't answer your original objection - Thames Water are shit, blame the Tories for once again taking a monopoly at point of use service which costs money and "improving" it by giving private investors a way to make money and then saying Oops when of course they take the money but leave the problem they were supposed to be solving unfixed.
In the very big picture the original problem, as for our rail infrastructure, is that England is very, very old. London has a single Combined (ie rain water and human effluent mix) sewer system because it was built many years before anybody invented separated sanitary and rain water sewers. A retro-fit upgrade, which some US cities have done, is incredibly expensive, nobody wants to pay for that even if it could be attempted. I don't anybody has even tried to estimate for London. Tens of Billions of pounds? Hundreds?
We have a particular issue with just surface water (not sewage luckily!) where I live. Usual finger pointing game between the council and Thames water and us, but the word from the guy from the council is that the surface water drains are just too small for modern weather systems, so when we get a very heavy downfall we have water being forced up and out of the drains where our guttering empties into, leading to about 2 or 3 inches of water around the entire house before it drains away into lower land in the garden.
I don't fully believe him that the pipes are too small (it rained in the past too!) - I suspect it is just partially silted-up/blocked/collapsed somewhere nearby after over 100 years of neglect, but of course Thames water have no money nor impetus to fix it. We've had non-return valves fitted in the pipes on our property (at a fairly large expense since we had to dig down) to try and abate our house getting flooded when it rains. So far so good....
No impetus, sure, but they have had money - they just paid it out in dividends to shareholders instead of using it to invest and fix problems.
I think it is fairly ludicrous to allow something like this to be privatised. It just doesn't make sense to me but then I am not PM.
I am kinda hoping they'll let it go bankrupt and then nationalise it for pennies-on-the-pound (a "haircut" for the investors).
This sewage dumping into our rivers is "normal". But to be clear, it is absolutely disgusting and the result of corporate greed and corruption.