Baroness Jenny Jones has joined members of Cornwall's branch of the Green party to present a bottle of 'Chateau Sewage' to Cherilyn Mackrory the MP for Truro and Falmouth.

A group of Green Party campaigners including Baroness Jenny Jones gathered outside the office of Cherilyn Mackrory MP on Saturday to present a bottle of 'Chateau Sewage' the group said the bottle served as a reminder that South West Water is continuing to pollute Cornwall's rivers and beaches on a massive scale.

The bottled delivered to Cherilyn's office (Image: Green Party)

The bottle contained water taken from Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, which was reportedly polluted by sewage 59 times in 2022 and has seen several sewage alerts already this year. The beach is near two pumping station overflows, with untreated effluent from these also affecting nearby Gyllyngvase Beach.

The bottle had a message on the back (Image: Green Party)

Cherilyn, MP for Truro and Falmouth, was one of 265 Conservative MPs who voted down an amendment to the Environment Bill aimed at stopping water companies from dumping raw sewage into the UK's waterways and coastal waters in August 2022. Conservative Mps denied these claims.

Although a multi-million-pound sewage system investment for Falmouth was announced many felt the government wasn't acting quickly or strongly enough, Cornwall's Labour Parliamentary Candidates then signed an open letter to Conservative MPs urging them to vote for a new Bill.

The bill was voted down however Cornwall's MPs denied the sewage vote claims and labelled them as political spin by opposition parties. In a separate motion on the same day, the Government announced its own plans for legally binding targets to cut sewage discharges.

Karen La Borde, the Green Party's parliamentary candidate for Truro and Falmouth, said: "The profits of the privatised water companies rose to £1.4 billion last year. Meanwhile, Pennon Group, the parent company of South West Water, has just announced that it is raising its shareholder dividend by 10.9% to £112 million. Last year, South West Water's chief executive was paid a bonus of over £1 million on top of her basic salary of around £456,000.

"It's outrageous that shareholders and executives are profiting in this way from our water bills while the company is failing to clean up its disgusting and dangerous pollution of our waterways, and the government needs to do much more to stop this."

Baroness Jones said: "The water companies' recent apology and promise to spend £10 billion on new infrastructure just add insult to injury, because this is money they're proposing to add to our water bills. Why should we be paying for their appalling failure to invest in the past? We need to make the polluters pay. Ofwat should act to stop undeserved dividend payments and fat cat payouts.

"The Green Party would like to see these companies taken back into public ownership and run for the public good rather than for private profit. In the meantime, they should be spending all available resources to tackle this extremely serious problem, rather than handing costs to consumers and profits to their shareholders.

"If they refuse to do this, they should be facing much larger fines that reflect the enormous damage they are doing to our natural environment and the threat to human health, and that prevent them from making any profit at all. If they continue to pollute then some of the fines should be used to buy back shares."

The Green Party has set up a petition requesting Cornwall Council to call on Cornwall's MPs to take stronger action on sewage pollution and to make South West Water pay for improvements to infrastructure: https://actionnetwork.org/.../call-for-action-on-sewage...

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