An important message for all consumers of drinking water across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and West Sussex.
Yes, that means You!
Residents around the borough of Havant, where Portsmouth Water’s part-constructed ‘Havant Thicket Reservoir’ is now under threat from Southern Water’s infamous Budds Farm sewage works, have had more than enough of Southern Water’s marketing spin. The Company’s 2024 draft ‘Water Resources Management Plan’ runs to 32 volumes of detail which are as awash with the stuff as the Solent and its harbours are awash with its untreated sewage.
Many of those local residents signed our last petition to stop Southern Water recycling sewage effluent into drinking water. The good news is that the regulators at DEFRA did reject their plan, and told them to think again. The petition is open again, and this time we’d welcome signatures from across the three counties. You all get your drinking water from either Southern Water or Portsmouth Water, so Southern Water’s WRMP affects you!
Sadly, they’ve just recycled the same old leaky plan with more sewage recycling sites and propose to plug the drought gap with tanker loads of water from Norway. With more effluent recycling plants proposed for construction on the back of sewage works in the Isle of Wight and West Sussex, its time for everyone across the three counties to wake up to the fact that this is Southern Water’s current marketing vision of a sustainable drinking water supply.
We need you to email DEFRA to object to Southern Water’s revised plan and demand a better more sustainable way forward that would work with climate change, not against it, such as:
– Storing winter rain in reservoirs & aquifers for use in dry summers.
– Abstracting river water closer to the sea to protect our precious chalk streams.
Havant Matters 