At Save Windermere, we don’t often wade into the national debate on sewage pollution. Our mission is clear: to end sewage pollution in Windermere.
But when Environment Secretary Steve Reed visited recently and declared that the government shares our ambition of a sewage-free Windermere, we began watching closely and asking tough questions to ensure those words weren’t just more rhetoric – and that this government is genuinely committed to cleaning up our lakes, rivers and seas.
We kept seeing DEFRA repeating a headline-grabbing claim: that £100 billion of private investment has been secured to fix the sewage crisis. But today in The Express, we’ve exposed how the government has misled the public about where this investment is really coming from.
Privatisation has failed. And the government needs to stop defending it. This makes us even more determined to see a legally binding commitment from Labour to make it unlawful to dump sewage in our lake. We have to turn their words into action.