Thames Water spills
SIR – In the early 1990s, shortly after Thames Water was privatised (Letters, July 13), local management decided to close some of the smaller sewage treatment works in our area of the Northamptonshire countryside, to pipe the sewage to a new plant in Banbury. Sadly, this scheme was later cancelled by senior management, and the cash saved will probably have been used to pay dividends.
Thames Water has sewage pipes under our land leading to an adjoining sewage treatment works. Due to a lack of investment, there are frequent spills from these pipes on to our land, on to neighbouring land, and on to the nearby public highway.
Reporting them is very timeconsuming and opens one up to being inundated with texts, emails and phone calls. The Thames Water follow-up process is highly inefficient: the first person to turn up never knows what they are looking for; subsequent visitors do not know what their predecessors did and take misleading photographs that seem designed to hide the problem; and the sensors they put in their manholes seldom work. The processes are so inefficient that we sometimes do not bother to report spills, which eventually find their way into the Cherwell and the Thames.
We understand the need to sort out the problems in the Victorian sewage system in London and those in other population centres along the Thames, but the people in charge should not forget the needs of smaller towns and villages. Perhaps it would be best to divide Thames Water into smaller, more manageable units designed to be better able to cope with the needs of local communities.
Nicholas Ward Banbury, Oxfordshire