Severn Trent to build 40 tanks a week as part of storm spill stemming speed-up

Severn Trent has set out plans to expand and accelerate its work to slash storm overflow spills. The company said it will deliver around 1,000 capital schemes before April 2025 at 900 overflows (40% of the total), eradicating 20% of its discharges.

The plan steps up spend from the planned £384m in 2024-25 to £450m, the extra sourced from Severn Trent’s late 2023 £1bn equity raise.

Among the initiatives planned are:

• 700 new storage solutions at treatment works. 

• A large-scale community trial, supplying 8,000 free water butts across ten communities to reduce surface water going into drains.

• 70 reed beds and 25 other treatment units to expand treatment capacity. 

• 198 enhancements to increase the flow of sewage to treatment works.

• 130 valves to stop river ingress into the network to prevent overloading.

• 300 engineers and data scientists working in a Zero Spills Hub dedicated to storm overflow improvements. 

• A new international partnership programme bringing together water companies and academics from around the world to find innovations to reduce spills more quickly. 

Chief executive Liv Garfield said: “We’ve been working flat out to find new and agile ways of delivering complex capital schemes much quicker. At our peak we’ll be building up to 40 tanks a week. We won’t stop working on this until we’ve delivered on our targets.

“Since we launched Get River Positive two years ago, we’ve already made large-scale infrastructure improvements. Our share of impact on the health of our region’s rivers has fallen to 14% and we are confident this time next year our impact will have fallen to 10%. This will mean that nine in ten reasons for rivers in the Midlands not achieving good ecological status will be down to other sectors.’’