Thames Water have been fined more than £3m after admitting polluting rivers.
The company, which supplies one in four people in Britain with water, had pleaded guilty to four charges relating to illegally discharging waste.
It was fined £3.3m at Lewes Crown Court on Tuesday.
The court heard “millions of litres” of undiluted sewage was pumped into the Gatwick Stream and River Mole between Crawley in West Sussex and Horley in Surrey on 11 October, 2017.
The hearing was told that the spill turned the water “black” and killed more than 1,000 fish.
Image: More than 1,000 fish died as a result of sewage in rivers
Judge Christine Laing KC said that she believed the firm had shown a “deliberate attempt” to mislead the Environment Agency over the incident, by omitting water readings and submitting a report to the regulator denying responsibility.
The company has previously been fined £32.4m for pollution incidents in the Thames Valley and south-west London between 2017 and 2021.
During the first day of the hearing on Monday, the court heard how a storm pump at Crawley Sewage Treatment Works site was unexpectedly diverting sewage to its storm tank for 21 hours and went “unnoticed”.
Prosecutor Sailesh Mehta estimated untreated sewage was spilling into the river for six and a half hours after no alarm was raised.
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When an alarm was raised the lead technician was unreachable as they were waiting for a new mobile phone.
Eyewitness accounts read in court said how they saw the river turn “black” and “grey”, with “huge numbers of dead fish” visible in the water.
Nearly 1,400 dead fish were recovered from the rivers by the Environment Agency following the incident.
In a statement released after the verdict, interim co-CEO of Thames WaterCathryn Ross said: “We are deeply sorry for the entirely unacceptable pollution incident into the Gatwick Stream and River Mole six years ago.
“The incident occurred due to the running of a storm pump in error. The pump activated when there was no operational need for it to do so. This had never happened on this site before and it has not happened since,” she said.
“It should not have happened, and we deeply regret the incident. I would also like to express my sincere apologies for those aspects of our response to the incident six years ago that led to the finding that we misled the regulator.
“We fully accept that we made significant errors and exercised poor judgment at the time, and we are genuinely sorry for that.
“To make up for the harm caused, so far as it is possible, we have made voluntary payments totalling £1m to three local organisations to fund projects including the development of a local catchment plan and carrying out fish passage and habitat works.”
A £33m plan to improve the Crawley site has been put in place since the incident, according to Ms Roberts, with aims to complete it by the end of March 2025.
New systems have also been rolled out across other Thames Water sites to prevent such incidents happening again.
The fine comes as the company faces concerns over its future amid a mounting £14bn debt.
Thames Water’s chief executive Sarah Bentley stepped down with immediate effect last week after she gave up her bonus due to the company’s environmental performance.
In 2021, Southern Water was fined a record £90m for nearly 7,000 incidents of illegal discharge of sewage across Hampshire, Kent and Sussex.
Major car manufacturers and two trade bodies are to pay a total of £461m for “colluding to restrict competition” over vehicle recycling, UK and European regulators have announced.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said they illegally agreed not to compete against one another when advertising what percentage of their cars can be recycled.
They also colluded to avoid paying third parties to recycle their customers’ scrap cars, the watchdog said.
It explained that those involved were BMW, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Peugeot Citroen, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Toyota, Vauxhall and Volkswagen.
Mercedes-Benz, was also party to the agreements, the CMA said, but it escaped a financial penalty because the German company alerted it to its participation.
The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (Acea) and the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT) were also involved in the illegal agreements.
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The CMA imposed a combined penalty of almost £78m while the European Commission handed out fines totalling €458m (£382.7m).
The penalties were announced at a time of wider turmoil for Europe’s car industry.
Manufacturers across the continent are bracing for the threatened impact of tariffs on all their exports to the United States as part of Donald Trump’s trade war.
Within the combined fine settlements of £77.7m issued by the CMA, Ford was to pay £18.5m, VW £14.8m, BMW £11.1m and Jaguar Land Rover £4.6m.
Lucilia Falsarella Pereira, senior director of competition enforcement at the CMA, said: “Agreeing with competitors the prices you’ll pay for a service or colluding to restrict competition is illegal and this can extend to how you advertise your products.
“This kind of collusion can limit consumers’ ability to make informed choices and lower the incentive for companies to invest in new initiatives.
“We recognise that competing businesses may want to work together to help the environment, in those cases our door is open to help them do so.”
A household energy supplier has failed, weeks after it attracted attention from regulators.
Rebel Energy, which has around 80,000 domestic customers and 10,000 others, had been the subject of a provisional order last month related to compliance with rules around renewable energy obligations.
The company’s website said it was “ceasing to trade” but gave no reason.
Industry watchdog Ofgem said on Tuesday that those affected by Rebel’s demise did not need to take any action and would be “protected”.
Customers, Ofgem said, would soon be appointed a new provider under its supplier of last resort (SoLR) mechanism.
This was deployed widely in 2021 when dozens of energy suppliers collapsed while failing to get to grips with a spike in wholesale energy costs.
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Why is the energy price cap rising?
The last supplier to go under was in July 2022.
Ofgem said new rules governing supplier business practices since then had bolstered resilience.
These include minimum capital requirements and the ringfencing of customer credit balances.
The exit from the market by Bedford-based Rebel was announced on the same day that the energy price cap rose again to take account of soaring wholesale costs between December and January.
Tim Jarvis, director general for markets at Ofgem, said: “Rebel Energy customers do not need to worry, and I want to reassure them that they will not see any disruption to their energy supply, and any credit they may have on their accounts remains protected under Ofgem’s rules.
“We are working quickly to appoint new suppliers for all impacted customers. We’d advise customers not to try to switch supplier in the meantime, and a new supplier will be in touch in the coming weeks with further information.
“We have worked hard to improve the financial resilience of suppliers in recent years, implementing a series of rules to make sure they can weather unexpected shocks. But like any competitive market, some companies will still fail from time to time, and our priority is making sure consumers are protected if that happens.”
Harrods is urging lawyers acting for the largest group of survivors of abuse perpetrated by its former owner to reconsider plans to swallow a significant chunk of claimants’ compensation payouts in fees.
Sky News has learnt that KP Law, which is acting for hundreds of potential clients under the banner Justice for Harrods, is proposing to take up to 25% of compensation awards in exchange for handling their cases.
In many cases, that is likely to mean survivors foregoing sums worth of tens of thousands of pounds to KP Law, which says it is working for hundreds of people who suffered abuse committed by Mohamed al Fayed.
Under a redress scheme outlined by the London-based department store on Monday, which confirmed earlier reports by Sky News, claimants will be eligible for general damages awards of up to £200,000, depending upon whether they agree to a psychiatric assessment arranged by Harrods.
In addition, other payments could take the maximum award to an individual under the scheme to £385,000.
A document published online names several law firms which have agreed to represent Mr al Fayed’s victims without absorbing any of their compensation payments.
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KP Law is not among those firms.
Theoretically, if Justice for Harrods members are awarded compensation in excess of the sums proposed by the company, KP Law could stand to earn many millions of pounds from its share of the payouts.
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‘Many more’ likely abused by Fayed
A Harrods spokesperson told Sky News on Tuesday: “The purpose of the Harrods Redress Scheme is to offer financial and psychological support to those who choose to enter the scheme, rather than as a route to criminal justice.
“With a survivor-first approach, it has been designed by personal injury experts with the input of several legal firms currently representing survivors.
“Although Harrods tabled the scheme, control of the claim is in the hands of the survivors who can determine at any point to continue, challenge, opt out or seek alternative routes such as mediation or litigation.
“Our hope is that everyone receives 100% of the compensation awarded to them but we understand there is one exception among these law firms currently representing survivors who is proposing to take up to 25% of survivors’ compensation.
“We hope they will reconsider given we have already committed to paying reasonable legal costs.”
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Further claims against al Fayed
Responding to the publication of the scheme on Monday, KP Law criticised it as inadequate, saying it “does not go far enough to deliver the justice and accountability demanded by our clients”.
“This is not solely a question of compensation but about justice and exposing the systematic abuse and the many people who helped to operate it for the benefit of Mohamed al Fayed and others.”
Seeking to rebut the questions raised by Harrods about its fee structure, KP Law told Sky News: “KP Law is committed to supporting our clients through the litigation process to obtain justice first and foremost as well as recovering the maximum possible damages for them.
“This will cover all potential outcomes for the case.
“Despite the Harrods scheme seeking to narrow the potential issues, we believe that there are numerous potential defendants in a number of jurisdictions that are liable for what our clients went through, and we are committed to securing justice for our client group.
“KP Law is confident that it will recover more for its clients than what could be achieved through the redress scheme established by Harrods, which in our view is inadequate and does not go far enough to compensate victims of Mr al Fayed.”
The verbal battle between Harrods and KP Law underlines the fact that the battle for compensation and wider justice for survivors of Mr al Fayed remains far from complete.
The billionaire, who died in 2023, is thought to have sexually abused hundreds of women during a 25-year reign of terror at Harrods.
He also owned Fulham Football Club and Paris’s Ritz Hotel.
Harrods is now owned by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Gulf state’s ruling family.
The redress scheme commissioned by the department store is being coordinated by MPL Legal, an Essex-based law firm.
Last October, lawyers acting for victims of Mr al Fayed said they had received more than 420 enquiries about potential claims, although it is unclear how many more have come forward in the six months since.