York councillors have been urged to take a tougher line with Yorkshire Water. This comes amid mounting concerns about sewage discharges into the River Ouse and the reliability of the company’s monitoring data.
Speaking to the City of York Council’s Place Scrutiny Committee on 21 July, Robin Norton, a regular Ouse rower, said those using the river were bearing the brunt of the city’s water-quality problems.
“Those of us in and on the water are in the front line on water quality alongside nature,” he said. “We have brown tidemarks on our boats, we get splashed with stinking water, and we sometimes get ill.”
Norton presented findings which he said showed that several of York’s combined sewer overflows (CSOs) had already exceeded the level of sewage discharges that water companies are expected to meet by 2030.
Under the 2030 target referred to in his presentation, water companies are expected to reduce sewage spills by 44% and limit individual outfalls to 18 spills a year.
Sewage discharges under scrutiny
According to the data presented to the committee, the Fulford sewage pumping station, upstream of the University of York Boat Club, had discharged 346 times in the first six months of 2026. This is equivalent to 26.4 days of continuous discharge. The Esplanade CSO, located near St Peter’s School’s boathouse, had discharged 260 times, equivalent to 20.7 days, while the Lendal Hill CSO, downstream of York St John and York City rowing clubs, had discharged 127 times, equivalent to 25.9 days.
With 36 CSOs in York, the total number of 1,992 discharge events recorded in the period January to May 2026, was equal to 106.9 days of continuous discharge.
Norton also questioned the completeness of Yorkshire Water’s monitoring data. A separate table in his presentation recorded 59 maintenance events affecting CSOs in central York between January and May, representing 170 days during which monitoring was unavailable.
One of the most striking examples was Landing Lane CSO, where monitoring was recorded as being unavailable for 107.5 days.
“Yorkshire Water are muddying the waters of what data is available,” Norton told the committee. He questioned whether the recorded number of discharges from sites with lengthy periods of missing data could be relied upon.
He also challenged the suggestion that reductions in sewage discharges in 2025 necessarily represented an improvement in Yorkshire Water’s performance.
Although the company recorded fewer hours of sewage discharge in 2025 than in 2024, Norton pointed out that 2025 was a drought year and Yorkshire Water imposed a hosepipe ban for five months. He argued that dry weather did not necessarily prevent sewage discharges.
Data quoted in his presentation showed that, by May 2026, Yorkshire Water had recorded 167,182 hours of sewage discharge, including 90,063 hours in February alone, compared to 5,460 hours in February 2025.
“When it rains, they pollute. Also, when it doesn’t rain, a lot of the time,” he said.
Challenging the ‘Victorian sewers’ explanation
Norton also challenged the frequent explanation that York’s problems were primarily the result of its Victorian sewerage infrastructure.
A council report mentioned in the presentation stated that Yorkshire Water would need to remove surface water from York’s Victorian combined sewage networks in order to meet its targets.
Norton argued that this risked allowing the water company to place too much emphasis on infrastructure inherited from the past. He cited figures indicating that only 12% of the sewer network across England and Wales is pre-1901.
He also referred to comments by Oxford economist Professor Dieter Helm that water companies, regulators and politicians should stop blaming today’s problems on what the Victorians did a century and a half ago.
Norton said Yorkshire Water also appeared to be shifting some of the blame for poor water quality towards agricultural pollution. He argued that the company should instead accept the contribution made by human sewage, while at the same time working more closely with farmers.
Who pays for the investment?
The presentation also questioned the scale and funding of Yorkshire Water’s planned investment programme.
Yorkshire Water’s current five-year Asset Management Period involves £8.3 billion of planned investment, but Norton stressed that the money ultimately comes from customers’ pockets through their water bills.
He also highlighted the company’s debt, which he said had risen from zero when the water industry was privatised to £7.6bn today.
Quoting figures reported by the BBC, he said around a third of Yorkshire Water’s bill income was being used to service debt and pay dividends. He questioned whether customers should bear the cost of investment while shareholders and executives continued to receive substantial payments.
The presentation highlighted a £660,000 payment recently made to Yorkshire Water’s chief executive, which the company described as not being a bonus, as well as the possibility of a further payment of up to £2.1mn depending on performance.
Norton called for close scrutiny of how the company’s investment budget is spent, arguing that expenditure should be spread steadily across the five-year period rather than being back-loaded. He also questioned why Yorkshire Water was seeking support from council tax revenues after three decades as a monopoly water company.
Wider political issue
Norton argued that the sewage crisis was now closely connected to wider political concerns about the cost of living, the environment, and public ownership.
He pointed to polling included in his presentation that suggested that 82% of the public support nationalisation of the water industry.
For Labour members in particular, he argued, the issue touched on several key priorities: whether consumers were receiving value for money, the economic consequences of water companies being largely foreign-owned, environmental damage caused by pollution, and the question of nationalisation.
The presentation also drew attention to reports of 41 sickness incidents in 2025 associated with poor water quality, with gastroenteritis making up the majority.
For Norton, however, the immediate issue is more straightforward: York’s river needs to be cleaner, and Yorkshire Water needs to be held properly to account.
“Yorkshire Water need to do a dramatically better job and be heavily scrutinised,” he said.
He warned councillors that the company was “very slippery” and urged them to ensure that the council was not inadvertently being drawn into its public relations efforts.
“We are here to scrutinise that monopoly and make it clean up our water,” he said. “We are not here to be used in their PR machine.”
The scrutiny committee meeting can be watched in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpgLBxKlFQc.
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