Fine for polluting Forth little more than an irritation for firm

Published on Wednesday 27 February 2008 20:59

LAST week Veolia Water Outsourcing was fined £13,500 for a massive spillage of sewage into the Firth of Forth in April 2007. This is the same Forth estuary that the Scottish Government and opposition politicians have sought, quite rightly, to protect from the threat of ship-to-ship oil transfers.

The fine of 13,500 represents 0.00005 per cent of the parent company's total income of 24.6 billion in 2007.

Read that again.

For every 100,000 that the company – Veolia Environment, the world's largest environmental services firm – takes in, it will pay just over 5p in a fine for the privilege of pumping more than 100 million litres of raw sewage into the Forth.

Let us go back to that weekend of 20-22 April, 2007. On Friday, 20 April, there was a complete failure of the pump system at Seafield sewage treatment plant in Leith, owned by Scottish Water but contracted to a private company to operate. Local residents immediately drew the problem to the attention of Scottish Water, having been immersed in a six-year campaign to rid the area of the notorious "Seafield stench".

The smell of raw sewage was enough to draw the First Minister-in-waiting, Alex Salmond, down to Leith on a Sunday.

But despite the early warnings, the pollution continued for two and a half days before finally being halted.

Campaigning on Leith waterfront throughout that period, Edinburgh Greens drew attention to the lamentable track record of Thames Water Services – as it was then – in breaching environmental standards. In a dossier assembled at the time, we listed ten examples where the company had been fined or criticised for unleashing raw sewage or other waste in various parts of the UK.

Since then, Thames Water Services has been sold to the Veolia Group, a vast international company with almost limitless capacity to absorb the costs of failure and the indirect threats of bad publicity.

While the negative publicity from last week's fine will not be welcome, when you have 300,000 employees in every continent on the planet you will be relaxed about some brief restlessness in tiny Scotland.

Of course a 13,500 fine is as much a reflection of the weakness of the overall enforcement system as it is of the individual sheriff's judgment. Even if Sheriff Janys Scott had levied the maximum fine of 40,000, it would still rank as little more than an irritation to the company. Compare this to the fine of 41.6 million levied on the National Grid this week. Clearly, anti-competitive activity is more of a priority than polluting the sea.

If, however, the directors of the parent company were to face the threat of a prison sentence or paying a truly effective fine out of their own pockets instead of paying a fine out of shareholders' dividends, things would change very rapidly indeed.

But until then, despite assurances of lessons having been learned, we can, tragically, expect the culture of careless pollution to continue.