Clean River Action is disappointed by today’s decision from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which has upheld Severn Trent Water’s refusal to disclose environmental information relating to storm overflows and wastewater infrastructure across the Leicester/ Leicestershire catchment.
The ICO has accepted Severn Trent’s position that responding to a number of detailed Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) requests would create a “manifestly unreasonable” burden on the company.
While we recognise the ICO’s role in applying the regulations, this outcome raises serious concerns about the state of Severn Trent’s environmental data systems and their ability to support transparency, accountability, and public scrutiny.
In its submissions to the ICO, Severn Trent acknowledged that retrieving the requested information would require months of work, involving multiple legacy systems, manual reconstruction of telemetry, and even “mapping historical sensor lineage” to understand how monitoring equipment has changed over time.
These admissions highlight significant weaknesses in the company’s data governance, weaknesses that directly affect the reliability of spill reporting, dry‑day spill identification, and wider environmental monitoring.
This sits uneasily alongside Severn Trent’s public Get River Positive commitments, which promise modern monitoring, transparent reporting, and improved river health.
The ICO decision suggests that the company’s internal systems are far less robust than its public messaging implies.
Although the ICO has upheld Severn Trent’s refusal in this instance, the decision does not diminish the importance of the information requested, nor the public’s right to understand how storm overflows are performing in our rivers.
Clean River Action will continue to pursue transparency through refined, targeted EIR requests and through ongoing scrutiny of Severn Trent’s published data.
Our rivers deserve monitoring systems that are fit for purpose, and communities deserve clear, accessible information about the health of the waterways they depend on.
We will continue working to ensure that happens.