6th March 2025 By-election
Whitstable has a by-election for a council seat on 6th March. SOS Whitstable are not affiliated to any political party. We remain independent so that we are able to speak and fight for an end to sewage pollution of our sea and rivers.
We are happy to work with local councillors who are willing to stand up to Southern Water, to take meaningful action for change and help us against the public being made to pay through higher prices for the decades of our water payments going to inflated dividends for shareholders instead of investment in clean water plant and systems. We continue to fight for the water industry to be brought back on the public control and removed from the imperative to make profits, rather than serve the public good.
As the by-election looms we have been sent this blog by an SOS Whitstable supporter who is standing for the Green Party— who currently have policies that are most likely to lead the kind of change, we want to see. We are happy to publish this to open a debate on what policies and actions we need locally to keep the pressure on Southern Water to clean up our sea.
If we receive equally short responses from the other parties, we will be happy to share those also— and hope that you will consider how to make our sea, local brooks and swales and the land around them really safe for marine life and humans, when you use your vote next week.
UPDATE: We have since been sent a statement from Valerie Kenney who is standing for the Labour Party. Please see below.
Candidate statement from Stuart Heaver
Gorrell Whitstable by-election on Thursday 6 March
21 February 2025
Time to tackle sewage pollution locally
Stuart Heaver, Green Party candidate for Gorrell Ward
Perhaps like me, you are frustrated and angry about the sewage pollution, which continues to degrade our marine environment, threaten public health and damage our coastal economy.
I am not a career politician. I am just an ordinary resident who loves Whitstable and loves to swim, sail and enjoy the local estuary. My reason for joining the Green Party was to help in their citizen science water-testing programme. As a journalist, I have had several articles about sewage pollution published in local and national media and been interviewed about the subject on TV. I have attended every SOS Whitstable protest Tankerton slopes.
Sadly, despite all our efforts, the problem is only getting worse. Much worse.
Southern Water was responsible for 29,494 sewage discharges in 2023, up from 16,688 the previous year. Southern Water's average discharge duration was 10.76 hours the second longest among water companies in the UK. Yet, the company is hiking household bills by 53% over the next five years. They also threaten local residents with legal action for boycotting payment of their water bills in protest over the unacceptable pollution levels.
Southern Water have recently built a bigger discharge pipe at Swalecliffe to enable even more pollution. This is not a solution—it’s an insult to local residents and water users.
Given the scale of the scandal, Canterbury City Council seems remarkably silent on the issue. Of course, you can’t solve this massive national problem overnight, at local level—but that is not an excuse for doing nothing.
The UK is a G7 nation and Whitstable a proud maritime town. Yet in 2025, we do not even know whether it is safe for our children to swim and play in local bathing waters. We have no idea how many swimming pools of untreated human waste are being pumped into the Swale Estuary every year. We are only told the duration of the discharge. That is simply not good enough.
We need to know how much sewage is being discharged and when. We need to have adequate warning and advice on bathing water quality for water users. A few blackboards and some chalk would be a start.
New housing developments should not receive planning consent unless Southern Water can provide legally binding guarantees that there is adequate wastewater provision for those new dwellings, or the developer constructs suitable wastewater treatment plants on site. That just seems to be common sense.
We need to keep the pressure on Southern Water to clean up its act. Less investment in Public Relations and window dressing, and much more investment in modern wastewater treatment infrastructure.
If you live in the Gorrell ward of Whitstable and use the sea or just enjoy living near the sea, I hope very much you will vote for me on Thursday 6 March, so I can represent you at Canterbury City Council as your Green Party councillor. I can’t fix this on my own but I will use your support to work with my Green Party colleagues to put pressure on this Labour/Liberal led council and on Southern Water to take some real action to tackle the sewage pollution scandal, which blights our town.
Thank you.
Stuart Heaver
Candidate statement from Valerie Kenney
2 March 2025
I am Valerie Kenney and here’s a photo of me with Fergal Sharkey last summer. When I was last a councillor in this ward, I addressed the SoS second mass protest and have stood with politicians of all political parties who care about our seas.
As a local resident what I now value is not just a councillor who raises the profile of an issue but someone who gets things done. People deserve politicians who do more that wade into water with a test tube to highlight a problem. They deserve politicians able to build coalitions of different groups to get things done; and who care about the detail, who avoid stunts and easy policy statements particularly when doing so could put local fishing jobs at risk or deprive young local people of homes to live in.
I am so proud of what our current Labour led council has managed already in its time in office. The task is vast but we are on the right path. Across Kent, water quality in Deal and Margate has dropped significantly over the last few years; ours has not.
There is evidence of real investment and real change as a result of public campaigning here and a Labour led council who won’t let up on this issue. Behind the scenes, we’ve seen missed connections blocked up, pipework sealed and the capacity and flow at the treatment plant increased. Southern Water have started work to triple the capacity of water they can treat.
The new investment at Diamond Road and Tankerton Circus allows the water company to backfill the pipes at times of heavy rainfall to ‘slow the flow’ and there are over 940 water butts installed in gardens and schools across the catchment.
When the Tory led KCC have dragged their feet, local Labour councillor Chris Cornell has been instrumental in clearing permissions for both the new urban drainage systems at Cornwallis, Westmeads Recreation Ground and Whitstable Library. When in place they will prevent hectares of surface water from running directly into the sea.
In contrast to other local authorities, Labour are putting forward an ambitious local plan which means that all new homes will have to be built in a way where residents use less than 90 litres of water a day rather than the average of 110. Just this month they have started piloting ways we can reduce water pressure in accommodation blocks in a way that goes unnoticed to tenants but stops thousands of litres of water flushing down our drains.
I’m glad that the new national Labour government has passed legislation to give regulators new powers to take tougher and faster action on water companies failing their customers and polluting our seas. The bill includes a ban on the payment of bonuses to executives of polluting water companies, the independent monitoring of every sea outfall, automatic fines and a criminal responsibility for perpetrators. There are plans to see statutory water testing all year around in consultation.
There are many demands on councillors' time; and indeed some find the pressure greater than they expected and are overwhelmed as they find it too hard to juggle being a councillor with work and family commitments. I have done the job and I know what it entails.
So, if elected on the 6th March, whilst I know there is still much to do, I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and press on with the plan of action our Labour led council is already committed to. I know I’ll have the support of SOS Whitstable in continuing to deliver cleaner seas for us all.