A Bromsgrove mother whose daughter died after contracting E. coli on a beach has joined campaigners at Downing Street to hand in a petition calling for reform of the water industry.
Julie Maughan’s eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died in 1999 while on holiday in Devon. Her story was dramatised in Channel 4’s programme, Dirty Business, earlier this year. South West Water said an investigation found no source of her infection.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) said it was working on the “biggest overhaul of the water sector in a generation”.
But the petition, by the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage, says the Clean Water Bill must end the privatised water industry altogether.
It says the current bill does not go far enough to force water companies to work in the public interest and risks “locking us into the same old broken system”, adding that safe, clean water should be treated as a “fundamental right, not a revenue stream”.
Maughan questioned why water companies “think it’s acceptable in the 21st Century to discharge sewage into our water system”.
“It chokes me a little bit that Heather’s death wasn’t enough to get change”, she said.
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