“So how’s all that banning bonuses, sending executives to jail bulls*t working out I wonder?”
Storm Claudia swept across the UK this week, causing widely reported floods across Wales, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire. But one quieter casualty lay in Buckinghamshire, where two rare chalk streams, the River Misbourne in Gerrards Cross and the River Chess in Chesham, endured hours of sewage discharges under the label of ‘storm release.’
These rivers, fed by groundwater filtered through chalk bedrock and home to diverse wildlife, saw more than 24 hours of sewage pumped into them by Thames Water in the space of a week.
According to the Bucks Free Press, the Misbourne recorded 23 hours and 15 minutes of discharges even as the river remains in the midst of infrastructure ‘upgrades.’
The pollution came despite Thames Water having recently completed a £20 million upgrade to its treatment works, a project the company claimed would “reduce the need for untreated discharges in wet weather” and deliver a “higher quality of treated effluent.” The company says the capacity upgrades were completed in early 2023, with the improvements to effluent quality finished in early 2025.
Yet the rivers continue to bear the burden of repeated contamination.
This isn’t the first time sewage has derailed community life in Buckinghamshire. In 2024, Chalfont St Giles withdrew from the Best Kept Village competition because pollution in the Misbourne made the area impossible to present as ‘kept’ at all. The parish council publicly urged Thames Water to “clean up its act,” a message that still appears unanswered.
In September 2024, the government introduced sweeping powers to crack down on Thames Water and the wider water industry. Those reforms promised environmental protection, financial accountability, automatic fines for pollution, bonus bans, and even possible jail time for senior executives.
Yet Storm Claudia has offered a test of those powers, and the results are hard to ignore.
Environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey summed up the public mood in a post on X, writing: “Bucks chalk streams have seen over 24hours of sewage discharged into them by Thames Water in a week. So how’s all that banning bonuses, sending executives to jail bulls*t working out I wonder?”
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