Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS) has written to Scottish Water and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) to welcome their commitment to work together to develop a new analytical tool to identify instances where storm overflows in Scotland may be spilling in dry weather.

Citing “flawed methodology and inaccurate interpretation of data”, the water industry has strongly rejected claims in a recent article by the BBC which highlighted data as ’potentially indicating’ dry day storm overflow spills from all water companies in England.

A BBC investigation has found that three water companies – Southern Water, Thames Water and Wessex Water, discharged sewage into rivers last year on hundreds of occasions - at a time when it was not raining.