Yorkshire Water will hand over £235,000 to a wildlife charity for polluting a beck – taking the total it has given to the organisation to almost £1m in two years.
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust will get the latest donation following an investigation by the Environment Agency, which found that the water company had illegally polluted a Harrogate watercourse with sewage in August 2015.
The company’s Stray Road combined sewer overflow was found to have illegally discharged the sewage into Hookstone Beck.
While it has an environmental permit to do this when the facility is fully in use due to rainfall or snow melt, the breach was found to have happened during dry weather.
In response, Yorkshire Water submitted an enforcement undertaking to the EA – a voluntary offer made by companies to make amends for an offence, which was accepted.
It means that Yorkshire Water has agreed to donate a total of £935,000 to the trust over separate incidents since 2022.
A spokesperson for the trust said: “Nature is in crisis and we firmly believe polluters causing damage to the environment must make amends, including through clean-up operations and fines.
“Pollution events are one of the biggest threats to our freshwater wildlife, while they also take up huge amounts of time and money.
“These incidents are unacceptable and companies need better processes in place to minimise possible risks to the environment.
“Yorkshire Wildlife Trust welcomes the deterrent effect that enforcement undertakings have on polluters.”
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust will use the donation to make environmental improvements in North Yorkshire, including reed bed management at Ripon City Wetlands and native crayfish conservation.
A Yorkshire Water spokesperson said: “We have made significant improvements in our operations since this incident in 2015, including installing telemetry across 98 per cent of our combined sewer overflows with the remaining CSOs to be monitored by the end of this year.
“This helps to monitor our network and identify incidents of this nature so they can be corrected quickly.”
They added: “When things go wrong, we understand we have a responsibility to make it right.”
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, which was registered as a charity in 1946, looks after 111 nature reserves across Yorkshire.
Claire Barrow, area environment manager at the Environment Agency, said: “Sewage pollution can be devastating to human health, local biodiversity and our environment.
“We are holding the water industry to account like never before and, while we will always take forward prosecutions in the most serious cases, enforcement undertakings are an effective enforcement tool to allow companies to put things right and contribute to environmental improvements.”
In February this year, Yorkshire Water donated £300,000 to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust in an enforcement undertaking after breaching an environmental permit.
Last year, the water company agreed to pay Yorkshire Wildlife Trust £400,000 for polluting watercourses in separate incidents.
It was also fined £233,000 at Leeds Crown Court in January 2022 for polluting a beck in 2017.
The water company received another fine of £150,000 in 2021 for a pollution incident at a nature reserve.