Hugo Tagholm can clear a beach in minutes. He issues a raw sewage alert and everyone races out of the water. Swimmers hate sewage as much as sharks — no one wants to splash about in excrement. But even Tagholm gets it wrong sometimes and finds himself surfing a brown wave. “It’s pretty unpleasant paddling through effluent,” he says. “I avoid it at all costs.”
We meet at Bude beach on the border of Devon and Cornwall for breakfast at Rosie’s Kitchen. It’s half-term and drizzling, but teenagers are already pulling on damp wetsuits and grabbing their boards, and children are scrambling between the rock pools with buckets.
Tagholm orders a vegan sausage bap and an oat milk latte. He’s worried that his 13-year-old son is surfing at his local beach in Cornwall with a friend, given there has just been a sewage dump. “I don’t want him getting sick.” Last weekend the charity that he runs, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), issued 14 warnings for Devon beaches alone.
Tagholm admits that few people like talking about poo, but we need to get used to it. There have been more than 400,000 pollution events in the past year in England, with sewage pumped into waterways for more than three million hours.
“It’s hard to comprehend that we are pouring crap into the places we love to swim, surf and paddle. We are wallowing in turds, E. coli, chemicals, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and microplastics. I often pick up ear infections,” he says. “Imagine what it’s like for the fish.”
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The name SAS makes it sound like balaclavas at dawn. But Tagholm is mild-mannered and laid-back, more Cornwall surfer than CEO. He spends hours leading litter picks around the coastline with nearly 100,000 volunteers, picking up the washed-up condoms and wet wipes. “This is not a glamorous job,” he admits.
But it’s when he is relaxing afterwards and sees another dump that he can’t contain his anger. “Sometimes there is this sickly smell just as I get my board out, other times it’s a sunny day and you can see a plume of pollution coming out of the river-mouth,” he says. “The water companies say they try to screen out the big stuff, but they don’t get all the sanitary towels and tampon applicators that spew onto the tideline. They wouldn’t dump this stuff in our parks and playgrounds.”
The charity recently conducted a study it called the Beach Bums survey. “It was quite invasive, we had to take rectal swabs,” Tagholm says. “We compared surfers and swimmers to the background population, and people who used the water regularly were found to have three times more antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their guts. That’s another emerging threat.”
England and Wales’s sewage problem comes in waves, Tagholm says. “It was pretty bad in the 1990s when the charity started, then the companies were pressured to act by the regulators and the European Union, but as soon as they stopped being regulated properly and thought they could get away with it, they started behaving badly again. They are so irresponsible. But they kill this planet, they kill their businesses too.”
Everyone, he says, was excited by the new environment bill that is going through the House of Commons. “It was a fantastic opportunity to rescue our rivers and coastline from being the dirtiest in Europe. In the pandemic everyone craved the countryside, streams, rivers and beaches,” he says.
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Instead, with Britain hosting Cop26 and No 10 trying to take the lead on nature recovery and rewilding, lecturing the world on strengthening its commitment to saving the planet, 265 Tory MPs last month voted against an amendment to tackle effluent and to force water companies to own up every time they discharged raw sewage.
Even Tagholm couldn’t believe the public response. “The outrage was like a tsunami.” The MPs were horrified by the backlash against them. They were getting in touch saying: “What can we do, we have been told it will cost £660 billion of spending, fuel costs are going up, there’s inflation, our voters can’t be asked for any more.
“We explained that they didn’t need to, those kind of billions were scaremongering. The government’s own water-quality task force states that it would cost between £3.9 billion and £60 billion to stop the spillage of raw sewage into our waterways.”
Strangely, he says, that is almost exactly the same amount that the water companies have given out in dividends to their shareholders: “Nearly £60 billion since privatisation; they can pay. They can’t just use our rivers as open sewers. Water is where wildlife should thrive — I’ve surfed through dead fish.”
Faced with public backlash, last week the government announced a partial U-turn, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs tabling an amendment that “will see a duty enshrined in law to ensure water companies secure a progressive reduction in the adverse impacts of discharges from storm overflows”.
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Tagholm doesn’t feel sorry for the water companies because they blamed first an antiquated system and now supply problems and the lorry driver shortage for their inability to treat the sewage. “They have flouted endless legal obligations and been fined repeatedly. The rest of Europe wouldn’t dream of this vandalism,” he says. In England there is one river spot designated legally safe to bathe; in France there are 573 such places.
The Victorians, he says, were more responsible than this generation of Elizabethan politicians. “I often think about the Great Stink of London in 1858. I was told it’s why the MPs have such a long summer recess: they couldn’t stand being next to the river in the heat with the smell.
“They saw it as a challenge and passed the legislation for these extraordinary sewers built by Joseph Bazalgette. I’ve been in those sewers, they are amazing feats of engineering built for the future, even the brickwork is sensational.”
Nor will he blame the public, although SAS picks up hundreds of tonnes of plastic a year, much of it flushed down loos. The majority of the country uses more than 150 litres of water a day per person. Tagholm uses half that. “I don’t have much hair so I don’t need to spend a lot of time in the shower. I don’t flush much down the loo. But the industry always try to blame the public and they can’t be allowed to; they have to lead before they lecture us.”
The prime minister, he says, should seize the moment to say he will make Britain’s rivers the envy of the world and stop all raw sewage leaks by 2030. Fish will return with the beavers — which will be dead if we don’t do this.
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“It’s surprising his wife, Carrie, and him haven’t done this before. It’s a bleak time environmentally and people are feeling scared and anxious — 2050 feels far off for net zero; this would be an easy target they can see in their lifetime.”
We look out to sea and all I can now think of is churning brown water — he may be putting everyone off ever going on a holiday in Britain again. “We are not a fear-mongering charity. We have some of the best and most stunning beaches in the world, and now we have wetsuits we can enjoy them all year round,” he says.
“I want my son’s children to surf. But when you go on holiday, you don’t book a cesspit. Greece, France, Portugal and Italy understand the importance for tourism. Our beaches are at the bottom of the European league table for water quality.”
The charity has already campaigned against plastic bags, stirrers and straws. “I actually think we need a debate soon about whether we just ban wet wipes,” Tagholm says.
He was upset when the prime minister told schoolchildren last week that he wasn’t a fan of recycling. “It is broken, but we need new systems, particularly a deposit scheme on bottles to stop them washing up on our beaches,” Tagholm says. “The budget last week was hopeless: it ignored the environment, there was no ambition to cut carbon and restore nature. It mentioned cider ten times without mentioning climate once.”
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Tagholm grew up in Muswell Hill, north London. “Our capital is an ocean city. It has a tidal Thames and I spent many happy days on the banks with my brothers and father mudlarking, looking for claypipes, coins and pottery.
“There wasn’t nearly as much plastic then. I was an environmentalist first, but in my early teenage years I found surfing and became hooked.” I’ve seen videos of Tagholm threading a backside tube. He’s good. “It was great when I realised it could also be my work. We love it down in St Ives. My son is always surfing too. My brothers probably think I am a bit crazy, but I wouldn’t want any other life.”
Millennials and Generation Z, he says, are embracing a different life. “We can live a richer lifestyle, outdoors in nature, with friends.”
Prince Charles is now the patron of SAS. “He has championed these issues for decades . . . We’re not interested in woke, or politics,” Tagholm says.
We leave and I drive back to Devon as the rain pours down. That night I look at the SAS app, horrified that there are red warnings slashed across almost every West Country beach as sewage gushes forth. I wonder how the wildlife is coping with the onslaught. “These are dark days,” Tagholm texts. “But anger is good. I think everyone now feels enough is enough.”
