Southern Water has been fined more than £7m for dumping sewage off the Kent coast, causing widespread damage to the local economy and tourism.
The company pleaded guilty in April to 13 charges over illegal discharges at Margate and Broadstairs wastewater pumping stations between 2019 and 2021.
At a two-day sentencing hearing at Canterbury Crown Court, Mr Justice Johnson said there were “overall serious failures” by the company.
He said Southern Water’s record of convictions showed a “protracted history of non-compliance with its legal obligations, and a repeated pattern of inadequate staff training, insufficient investment in the infrastructure and a failure properly to maintain equipment”.
He added as a result of the offending, it had caused “serious degradation of environmental quality, significant interference with public amenity, potential risk to public health and damage to the reputation of an important coastal community”.
The judge told the court Southern Water had 174 previous convictions, convicted every year from 1999 to 2016, and convicted as recently as April of this year.
“This record of criminality, to the great detriment of the environment and the community in Kent, is an exceptionally serious aggravating factor,” he said.
Mr Justice Johnson imposed a total fine of £7,127,083.
It comes after the company was fined £90m for nearly 7,000 incidents across Hampshire, Kent and Sussex in a case brought by the EA in 2021.
