TL;DR: English water and sewage is handled by private, for-profit, companies that have majority ownership outside britain.

Furthermore the current chairman of the regulatory comission has previously been accused of misusing funds for Network Rail, abusing staff, accepting what amounts to bribes, etc.

No, UK beaches were increasingly becoming the cleanest in Europe.

However that stopped around 13 years ago and the water companies keep emergency dumping waste water.

The news about this has been around for a while, I'm pretty horrified that it's taken people this long to keep out of the sea. 🤮

Avoiding being in the water might not have been, but sewage runoff during rains has been in most older cities; it's a result of having combined sewers. Cities started moving to having seperate sewage and rainwater systems some time back, but older cities won't do that.

Over here in the US, cities in the western part of the US -- the youngest ones -- generally don't see it, but ones in the eastern part still do. In Europe, where cities have generally been around for a while, it's a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_sewer

A combined sewer is a type of gravity sewer with a system of pipes, tunnels, pump stations etc. to transport sewage and urban runoff together to a sewage treatment plant or disposal site. This means that during rain events, the sewage gets diluted, resulting in higher flowrates at the treatment site. Uncontaminated stormwater simply dilutes sewage, but runoff may dissolve or suspend virtually anything it contacts on roofs, streets, and storage yards.

Combined sewers can cause serious water pollution problems during combined sewer overflow (CSO) events when combined sewage and surface runoff flows exceed the capacity of the sewage treatment plant, or of the maximum flow rate of the system which transmits the combined sources. In instances where exceptionally high surface runoff occurs (such as large rainstorms), the load on individual tributary branches of the sewer system may cause a back-up to a point where raw sewage flows out of input sources such as toilets, causing inhabited buildings to be flooded with a toxic sewage-runoff mixture, incurring massive financial burdens for cleanup and repair. When combined sewer systems experience these higher than normal throughputs, relief systems cause discharges containing human and industrial waste to flow into rivers, streams, or other bodies of water. Such events frequently cause both negative environmental and lifestyle consequences, including beach closures, contaminated shellfish unsafe for consumption, and contamination of drinking water sources, rendering them temporarily unsafe for drinking and requiring boiling before uses such as bathing or washing dishes.

Mitigation of combined sewer overflows include sewer separation, CSO storage, expanding sewage treatment capacity, retention basins, screening and disinfection facilities, reducing stormwater flows, green infrastructure and real-time decision support systems.

This type of gravity sewer design is less often used nowadays when constructing new sewer systems. Modern-day sewer designs exclude surface runoff by building sanitary sewers instead, but many older cities and towns continue to operate previously constructed combined sewer systems.

Some US cities have undertaken sewer separation projects — building a second piping system for all or part of the community. In many of these projects, cities have been able to separate only portions of their combined systems. High costs or physical limitations may preclude building a completely separate system.