Ash Smith. Part I: Where it all began

The last time I met up with Ash Smith and his dog Archie for a walk along the river Windrush, it was 2021. The sewage scandal had just become front-page news, in large part thanks to Ash’s campaign Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP), and I was keen to see the issue first hand. He showed me the impact illegal sewage releases by the water company Thames Water were having on the River Windrush, once a famously pretty – now an infamously murky – Cotswold river that Ash and his neighbour Peter Hammond happened to live next to.

Today, five years on, we meet at the spot where the Windrush meets the River Thames. And in one sense I find that little has changed. Standing on the bridge above we can see the Windrush’s brown, sorry water meeting the relatively clear Thames, like a doll’s house recreation of the Rio Negro meeting the Amazon. But in another sense everything has changed. Ash’s campaign has just triggered a Parliamentary debate, a water company boss faces prison and Ash and Peter’s story became a three-part television drama starring Harry Potter’s David Thewlis as Ash (Dirty Business – which we covered in detail in episode 27 of the podcast).

Standing on a gravel bank on a bend of the river, as Archie, now an elderly dog, tentatively paddles in the shallows, Ash brings me up to speed. “The tributaries take the hit. Most of the sewage works discharge into the tributaries of the Thames, very few directly to the Thames.” The rivers themselves are treated as part of “the biological treatment” process, much to the detriment of the water quality, plants and wildlife. The Windrush used to be crystal-clear, full of water plants and fish. Now, even in this narrow, shallow bend, you can’t even see the bottom. “It’s a tragedy”.

“Things started to go downhill around 2010”, explains Ash. “It was roughly the time that the water industry was given permission to do its own monitoring.” This wasn’t just the Windrush. “This is [happening to] loads of rivers. The Windrush is not unique. This is absolutely everywhere.” In 2010, only 27% of rivers in England were classified as being in ‘good’ ecological health; by 2026, it is just 14%.

Following years of campaign work, freedom of information (FOI) requests and digging into Environment Agency data, it became apparent around 2020 that “untreated sewage was being dumped” into rivers, totally contravening the licence water and sewerage companies have to operate. “What we discovered is it's just routine standard practice, a way to cover up underinvestment”, explains Ash.

In the latest full-year figures for 2025, 500,554 sewage spill events were recorded across the country, largely into tributary rivers such as the Windrush – including those that run into lakes, such as Windermere – totalling over 3 million hours of discharges. Even designated bathing spots aren’t safe. In 2025, more than 35,000 sewage discharges affected designated bathing areas.

The nearest sewage overflow pipe upriver from where we’re standing, on the Windrush at Standlake, run by Thames Water, discharged 98 times last year for a total of 2,214 hours (the data is freely available here – you can, and should, check out your local river too). Whitney, where much of Ash and Peter’s early research began, spilled 37 times for a total of 576 hours last year. Given that everything is now out in the open and the scandal full exposed – even Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently said that shareholders “have syphoned out easy money, while the public picked up the bill for the sewage in our seas. It stinks” – how are they still doing it, and still getting away with it?!

“They can’t help it – it’s their business model”, explains Ash, bluntly. He doesn’t blame water company staff, who do a tough job in difficult circumstances. But he does blame the bosses and shady investment structures that siphon out the cash at the expense of our water bills, water system and waterways. For them he doesn’t pull any punches. “They are making money from the proceeds of crime”, he says. And as an ex-policeman, he knows the accuracy and weight of those words. Our money is “extracted as a result of this institutionalized, regular, illegal pollution.”

The Labour Government’s attempt at a quick fix was The Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, which gave regulators new powers including to ban the payment of bonuses to water bosses if they fail to meet standards, prison time for the worst offences, and quicker automatic penalties.

However, says Ash, over one year on from the Act coming in, the idea that they can “sort this out with new regulation” doesn’t stack up. They already had the “regulation to do it”, and they weren’t using it, he says. And if they did, “the companies would not be solvent anymore, and they would all be taken into Special Administration and into public ownership, which is where we know they have to go if we're ever going to see this river clean again.”

One of the most shocking aspects in Dirty Business was just how complicit the Environment Agency were in all this, introducing the concept of operator self-monitoring, letting water companies report on themselves, effectively – surprise, surprise none of them did.

“They let the water companies decide by classifying a pollution incident [themselves]. If it was classified as a category three or four, with one and two being the most serious, then no one would go [to investigate]. So they just classified everything as a three and a four. And I've got some good examples of really disgusting pollution, killing everything, classified as a four, which is ‘no environmental impact’. That was happening a lot.” Rob Forrester, a whistleblower at the Environment Agency, worked with Ash and Peter to expose the truth – Forrester worked at the EA until January this year. “He saw it all… They still have not done anything about their absolute absence of meaningful corruption control.”

Dirty Business ends with Ash’s character calling for an investigation into the Environment Agency. “I'm still pursuing the effort to get the Environment Agency to be open and declare the financial interests of its area and regional directors”, Ash tells me. “That's an ongoing case now.”

Also capitalising on the publicity from Dirty Business, Ash set up a parliamentary petition to ‘Hold a referendum to bring the water industry into public ownership’. Reaching 100,000 signatures would trigger a parliamentary debate amongst MPs; it in fact received 213,751 signatures, and the debate has since happened, taking place on 14 September. The full debate is available to watch on YouTube. The first thing you’ll notice is that the room was packed – which is not always the case for debates triggered by petition. The second thing you notice, if you watch any of the three hours of the debate, is how much in agreement the 71 MPs in attendance are. All had stories to tell of water and sewage mismanagement in their constituencies, and all were regularly contacted by constituents clamouring for change. As summed up by Rosie Duffield MP, “all my constituents agree: we need public ownership now.”

A week before I meet Ash for this interview, Prime Minister Andy Burnham gave a very well received speech at the Labour Party conference in which he said: “Water is a symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain. A service where the shareholders never lose and the public never win. From which some have syphoned out easy money while the public picked up the bill for the sewage in our seas.” It seemed like all the stars were aligning, building momentum from the parliamentary debate. Perhaps we, and Ash, would finally get the announcement we’ve been waiting years to hear.

Burnham continued, “Today I can confirm Angela Eagle will present a strengthened Water Bill to Parliament… It will start a 10-year journey to a very different water system”. So, more of the same then? If so, why? And what are Ash’s next steps in response? Ash, Archie and I walked down river to a river-side pub by the Thames, and will continue the discussion in Part II of this blog and podcast.