By Mike Garner, Thanet District Councillor for St Peters and Town Councillor for Broadstairs
As I’m sure you are all aware, Southern Water have been responsible for a number of incidents around the coast resulting in sewage spills which have been extremely damaging to our coastal environment. This has a knock-on effect on tourism which has a detrimental impact on local businesses. This has been going on for years and will continue to happen while Southern Water put profit for their multinational shareholders before fixing their infrastructure.
Back in the early part of the Summer we were promised that Ian McAulay, the Southern Water Chief Executive, would meet Councillors to update us on their plans to fix things and answer our questions. We now know that this is going to happen in a ‘virtual’ meeting next Monday 13 September at 5.15pm.
One area I’ll be pressing him on is how the infrastructure is going to be upgraded, not just to cope with the current number of houses in Thanet but also the needs of the 17,000 new houses planned over the next 10 years. Maybe all new big developments need to be halted until we can be sure the infrastructure can manage without having to pollute our coastline..