Scottish Government needs to stop turning beaches and rivers into a health hazard

It should be safe to go swimming at beaches like Portobello (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images) | Getty Images

It is one of Scotland’s most famous bathing beaches and it was one of the few pleasant days of a decidedly dreich summer. However, Portobello Beach was yesterday ruled off-limits for swimmers after tests discovered an “abnormally high level” of bacteria in the water.

While it is difficult to say with certainty – the Scottish Environment Protection Agency was still investigating – the incident appears to be a particularly high-profile and embarrassing example of a problem that is becoming an increasingly common source of public complaint: overflowing sewers that dump large amounts of untreated human waste into rivers and onto beaches.

And, given Scottish Water is a publicly owned company, those complaints should be mainly directed towards the Scottish Government. Doubtless, ministers will respond with the usual platitudes.

However, as has been seen in England, the public is fast losing its patience with a situation in which watercourses are turned into a health hazard by out-dated infrastructure and a lack of interest in dealing with the problem. It’s simply no longer good enough and the sooner politicians realise this, the better..

Some liked to think that Scotland would not see the same problems as south of the Border, hoping that this was a result of profit-hungry private companies cutting corners, and public employees would not allow such a revolting situation to occur.

However, it turns out that one reason why things have seemed better in Scotland is a relative lack of monitoring of sewage overflows. And while Scottish Water is expected to install 1,000 extra monitors this year, this will still mean less than half the sewage network is covered.

In April, The Scotsman reported that there had been a ten per cent increase in the number of discharges, although in Fife the figure went up by an astonishing 244 per cent. So what information we have paints a depressing picture.

What is now required is for Scottish ministers to take the issue seriously, improve monitoring even further, and develop a clear plan to stop sewage overflows except in “exceptional circumstances”. This is, after all, the only time they are actually legal.