Causing a stink: Danny Dyer, his daughter Dani and Becky Hill join forces at sewage protest
Rivals star Danny Dyer, his daughter Dani, and singer Becky Hill have joined a protest demanding public ownership of the water industry.
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The “stop the sewage” protest took place in Leysdown-on-Sea, Kent, on Sunday, as more than 315,000 people signed a petition calling for the water industry to be returned to public ownership.
Ed Acteson, co-founder of SOS Whitstable and creator of the petition, said: “The public has had enough of being asked to accept polluted waterways, failing infrastructure and rising bills while shareholders and senior executives continue to be rewarded.
“Water is an essential public service, not a vehicle for private profit.”
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He added: “We want an industry run in the interests of people and the environment, with its income reinvested in the system rather than extracted from it.”
Cliff Roney, a GMB activist who has worked in the water industry for more than 40 years, said: “I have seen this industry at its very best and now at its very worst.
It comes after the rate at which water companies discharged the “most toxic” sewage more than doubled at the start of 2026, new data obtained by LBC suggests.
In the first five months of 2026, there were 7,280 incidents of water firms in England and Wales dumping sewage, chemicals, and other pollutants on days of little or no rainfall.
“Infrastructure is falling to pieces, there has been a lack of maintenance and investment, no reservoirs are being built, and staff are on their knees trying to keep the system running.
“If the industry is not brought back into public ownership quickly, we are heading towards a national catastrophe.”
It comes after the public were encouraged to clean up after themselves following a spike in plastic pollution in the wake of the hottest summer ever recorded last month.
Until Sunday, September 27, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) is hosting an initiative to clean our coastlines as a result of soaring plastic pollution after millions flocked to the coast over the summer.
The event will include teams recording the rubbish they collect, with the findings reported into MCS’s dataset, which has tracked marine litter since 1994.