'My daughter's death wasn't enough to stop sewage spills'

A Bromsgrove mother whose daughter died after contracting E. coli on a beach has joined campaigners at Downing Street to hand in a petition calling for reform of the water industry.

Julie Maughan's eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died in 1999 while on holiday in Devon. Her story was dramatised in Channel 4's programme, Dirty Business, earlier this year. South West Water said an investigation found no source of her infection.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) said it was working on the "biggest overhaul of the water sector in a generation".

But the petition, by the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, says the Clean Water Bill must end the privatised water industry altogether.

It says the current bill does not go far enough to force water companies to work in the public interest and risks "locking us into the same old broken system", adding that safe, clean water should be treated as a "fundamental right, not a revenue stream".

Maughan questioned why water companies "think it's acceptable in the 21st Century to discharge sewage into our water system".

"It chokes me a little bit that Heather's death wasn't enough to get change", she said.

Her daughter had become ill after a family walk on the beach. An investigation initially looked at food and other possible sources of E. coli, but did not identify a cause. Maughan said she later came to believe Heather had been exposed to sewage on the beach at Dawlish Warren.

"She did tread in a discharge from a combined sewage overflow, so the only place she could have got the infection was from sewage," she said. "She became very ill and within two weeks she died."

At the time, more than 100 environmental and sewer samples were taken as part of an investigation, but South West Water said no source of the strain of E. coli Heather contracted had been found.

It said wastewater infrastructure and regulation in the 1990s were "very different from today", and that it had since invested in improvements like its Clean Sweep programme, which brought waste treatment to Dawlish after decades without it.

Singer Becky Hill, from Bewdley, has also become a prominent water-quality campaigner, and was at Downing Street on Thursday with Maughan and Surfers Against Sewage to deliver the petition.

"She is absolutely passionate," said Maughan. "She watched Dirty Business and it got her deep."

"When I sat and chatted with her she said, 'it could have been me'."

For Maughan, revisiting the events that led to Heather's death for the Channel 4 drama was extremely difficult.

"One of my wishes was for it to be real," she said. "It was very real for me. It's like post-traumatic stress really for me."

Defra said: "The water industry hasn't been working in the public interest for far too long and it's totally unacceptable to see the scale of discharges polluting our rivers, lakes and seas.

"This government has already taken action against water companies who are failing to perform, making it a criminal offence to cover up illegal sewage spills," it added, adding that it was working to improve water quality and create "a powerful new regulator".

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