“FOR all those tweeting about sewage pollution on ‘British’ beaches,” one tweeter declared recently, “they mean England. Scottish Water is publicly owned. Our water is clean.” I was concerned to see this statement, and many others over the past week, from Scots who have been keen to make the point that all the fuss about sewage relates to an English issue, not one in Scotland.

I can understand why all this happened. Scottish Water began trending on Twitter partly because people saw something to celebrate in its public ownership, or as an independence argument. But the truth is in Scotland raw sewage is released into our rivers and seas. Here we do have pollution – even if it may not be as great as that in England - and I don’t think it’s right, whether in the name of making a case for independence or public ownership, to erase that fact.

The recent outrage was triggered by stories in the UK press which incorrectly declared that water companies had pumped raw sewage into “Britain’s” seas and rivers for nine million hours since 2016. Don’t tar us with that dirty sewage brush, Scots were saying – quite correctly, since the data referred to was the Environment Agency’s figures for England and Wales. Our beaches are clean, Scots declared, and I’m paraphrasing here a little, our waters are not dirty.

Now, I am a celebrator of the fact we have a single publicly-owned water company, rather than the collection of private companies they have in England and Wales, but this story that we don’t release raw sewage into our waters, and it’s all pristine here, is very wrong. I know – I’ve swum in waters around Scotland and helped clean up beaches and I’ve seen the evidence of sewage entering the water. I’ve stared into outflow pipes in the River Almond and observed the wet wipes hanging on nearby low-hanging branches.

I know, whatever some might like to think, that we too have an untreated sewage discharge problem.

I’ve also followed Scottish data – for instance, the fact that, in August last year, Scottish Water reported that in the period from 2016 to 2020, spills had increased by 40 per cent, and that in those five years the equivalent of 47,000 swimming pools of sewage had entered the water. This percentage increase, of course, is nothing like that described by the Environment Agency for England and Wales, which saw a 29-fold increase. The 10,892 spill events that took place in Scotland in 2021, are also a mere fraction of the 372,533 that took place in England and Wales. But 10,892 events is not nothing.

It’s also not nothing to learn that one of the worst places has been Helensburgh, where the treatment plant there dumped sewage into the Clyde 1,244 times in 2020. It’s not nothing to hear, as I did earlier this year, from Charlie Allanson-Oddy, the man behind the only Scottish contribution to a significant Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) Water Quality report last year, that one of his test-sites, the Figgate Burn by Portobello beach, was worse than any of the sites SAS tested in England and Wales.

Comparisons are difficult. It’s not easy to work out how Scotland scores against England because we do not monitor as much. On this, Scotland is way behind England, monitoring only 10% of sewage overflows by comparison with England’s 80%. When earlier this year, I asked Scottish Water about its plans to increase monitoring, I was told the ambition was “to install 1,000 new event and duration monitors”.

It should be said that England and Wales don’t monitor as much as they promise and the Environment Agency has revealed that sewage monitors installed at some popular beaches in England and Wales are faulty or uninstalled, resulting in a quarter of sewage discharges going unmonitored. My point here is that there is data missing from the portraits for these different parts of the UK. The picture on both sides of the border is murky and incomplete.

That said, it seems to me that people are right to celebrate the fact that in Scotland, we have a single public water company, Scottish Water, not a series of private companies that they have in England and Wales. At least we don’t have to hear stories of 20% salary rises for bosses even as our seas and rivers are flushed with raw sewage by their companies.

But we here are not perfect. We have a raw sewage discharge problem too. The system here, just as it is in England, has been designed to, when storms flood it, release untreated sewage through what’s called combined sewer overflows (rather than allow it to back up into homes) – but it’s meant to do that very rarely, and it’s not doing it nearly rarely enough. We need to find new answers to this problem, and work harder to integrate those we have. It’s not just England and Wales that need to do better; it’s us in Scotland too.