Amenity and Public Health

Bathing Waters & Beaches

Clean waters are important for safe recreational bathing and watersports. Access to clean bathing waters provide restorative physical and psychological benefits to users and positive impacts for local businesses through increased trade.

A designated bathing beach is an area of a natural or artificially constructed pond, lake, stream, river, bay, tidal waters, ocean or other body of fresh or salt water, which is used for bathing and swimming purposes. Swimfo allows you to look up details of a designated bathing water by name or location including information on water quality. 

The safety and quality of designated bathing beaches and beaches can be reduced by the presence of harmful bacteria. Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci can cause illness if ingested, and they are used as indicators of faecal pollution from humans, livestock and wildlife. Poor livestock waste management and raw sewage discharge into water bodies contributes to the presence of these bacteria in bathing waters. 

All storm overflows operated by water and sewerage companies wholly or mainly in England are now fitted with event duration monitors (EDM). These allow water and sewerage companies to report on the frequency and duration of storm overflow discharges in near real time.

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Solent Context and Issues

Southern Water's Rivers and Seas Watch map allows you to see real time data on Combined Sewer Overflows. Long term water quality trends can be viewed on swiminfo.

The Solent Forum's Solent Plastics Pollution hub provides information on beach cleans and litter picking with links to resources and local community groups. Its associated Facebook page gives details of events and the latest news.

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Seafood (shellfish)

Shellfish water protected areas protect water help to ensure the safety of public heath from seafood consumption. In the Solent these include Chichester, Langstone, Portsmouth, Southampton Water and the Western Solent, you can view the areas spatially via Defra's Magic map.

Clean waters are important to ensure seafood doesn't lead to human illness from ingestion of contaminated seafood through:

1. Raw, undercooked or poorly processed fish and shellfish contaminated by pathogens can cause diseases such as hepatitis A, cholera or typhoid. 
2. Consumption of seafood that has been contaminated by industrial chemicals such as mercury, lead and pesticides. 
3. Consumption of seafood contaminated by natural algae-related toxins, such as domoic acid, ciguatoxin and saxitoxin.

Shellfish harvesting areas for human consumption are classified on the basis of concentrations of the faecal coliform indicating bacteria, Escherichia coli, within shellfish flesh. The Food Standards Agency sets the overall policy for monitoring and classification.

Classified:

• Class A - molluscs can be harvested for direct human consumption (80% of samples ≤ 230 E. coli/100g; all samples must be less than 700 E. coli/100g).
• Class B - molluscs can only be sold for human consumption (90% of samples must be ≤ 4600 E. coli/100g; all samples must be less than 46000 E. coli/100g):
  • after purification in an approved plant, or
  • after re-laying in an approved Class A re-laying area, or
  • after an EU-approved heat treatment process.
• Class C - molluscs can be sold for human consumption only after re-laying for at least two months in an approved re-laying area followed, where necessary, by treatment in a purification centre, or after an EU-approved heat treatment process (≤ 46000 E. coli/100g).

Prohibited - prohibited for human consumption.

Unclassified - the specific waters have not undergone the necessary assessments and monitoring required for classification, so have not been evaluated for potential contaminants, pollutants, or toxins that could affect the safety of shellfish.

Solent Classifications

 Classifications in the Solent are as follows. Precise individual classification (A,B,C etc.) can be found on the Cefas website.

• Chichester Harbour - Unclassified since 2013
• Keyhaven -  Unclassified
• Langstone - Classified for consumption of clams and oysters
• Lymington - Unclassified
• Medina - Prohibited for clams and oysters
• Newtown - Unclassified
• Portsmouth - Partially classified. Prohibited in northwest harbour
• Solent - Classified for consumption of clams and oysters
• Southampton Water - Partially classified. Prohibited above Marchwood & Itchen 

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Initiatives/Resources

• Rivers Trust map of sewage network discharges treated effluent and overflows of untreated effluent and storm water into rivers. 
• Environment Agency  designated bathing water sites.
• Southern Water Sandown Pathfinder Project
• Sewage and swimming in rivers.
• Event Duration Monitoring - Storm Overflows
• Swimfo: Find a bathing water
• Analysis of more than 40,000 hours of sewage discharge into the Solent during 2020 – Solent Protection Society
• Sandown Pathfinder Technical Report Sept 22

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