Water companies are set to evade fines of up to £250 million for spilling sewage into rivers and seas.
Environment Secretary Therese Coffey is understood to believe the fines are disproportionate.
Ministers last year pledged a rise in the maximum penalties from £250,000 following persistent spills, but Therese Coffey is said to have declined to commit to higher penalties and allies say she wants to look at the evidence with a fresh pair of eyes and do what is most effective.
There are also concerns that threatening companies with vast penalties could frighten off investors needed to fund £56 billion in waterway infrastructure. However, Defra insists the biggest penalties are still on the table.
Sources close to Therese Coffey insist that she believes her priority is an effective deterrent rather than high penalties.
It was wrong to sell off all of our utilities and all our water companies, and all our energy companies to overseas conglomerates.
They refuse to invest because it costs nothing to just dump into our robes, but poisoning our rivers with contaminated raw sewage is truly despicable.
The question is, why do the Tories support that? What is their motive? Either way, we should never vote Tory again.
Selling off industries that are essential to our way of life like energy and water is nothing more than criminal neglect, and we are seeing now, more than ever the scale of harm this is causing the United Kingdom.
Therese Coffey is a catastrophe wherever she goes. She did nothing in her Minister of Health role. In fact, she ditched plans to look at healthcare inequality, instead of concentrating on maximising the use of the private sector in the NHS, and ineffective politicians just get rotated around, giving one poor outcome after another.
The incompetent Tories should be held responsible for this and various other issues. They’re incapable of running a bath let alone our country.
Unions knew this so held the country to ransom, but it is actually the rich who are holding this country to ransom. They’re allowed to destroy our natural resources without consequence. They were not sold off due to unions, they were sold off to line their friend’s pockets, and it’s sad when you see people destroying this country including the electorate who don’t think about the impact of their vote and who benefits.
We should now get private companies out of our essential utilities because the only thing private businesses are interested in is returning dividends to their shareholders, and this and other utilities should never have been sold, but it’s no big surprise that this incompetent government refuses to commit to larger fines. They don’t want to punish their CEO friends or shareholders.
Now Therese Coffey is concerned that if they’re fined they will run away, well I say good, utilities should never have been privatised, and I no doubt that palms have been greased in the lobbying corridors of power.
Therese Coffey voted to pump raw sewage in her own coastal Suffolk constituency in 2022 – she really is a truly unpleasant individual.
The Tories don’t give a dickens because they know they’re finished as a party. It’s now all about favours, looking to the future out of power, what’s good for them in the time that they have left, and public opinion is getting totally ignored – why should they worry, nobody is going to vote for them anyhow, and they’re now lining their pockets as fast as they can before they all inevitably lose their seats at the next election.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 