Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Member of Parliament for the Cotswolds visited a group of very concerned residents in Meysey Hampton to see first-hand the serious sewage problems in the village which has been ongoing for the last 9 months. 

He has been in correspondence with Thames Water (letter enclosed) who informed him that it would take at least another 3 months to resolve. The mains sewage pipes between Meysey Hampton and Poulton has a blockage, but Thames Water seems totally incapable of locating it. They now propose to lay a temporary pipe through woodland and over an arable field to a location opposite a mobile park home site on the A427. This is merely shifting the noise and disruption from one group of residents to the mobile homeowners at ‘Country Park’.

This has caused considerable inconvenience for some of the residents from the village of Meysey Hampton involving tankers required 24/7 to pump out the substation situated in the village, the noise of tankers entering and leaving the site, and considerable pumping to empty the substation. This is completely unacceptable.

Commenting Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP said:

“There is a suspicion amongst my constituents that the reason that this matter has not been dealt with more expeditiously is because there is a problem with the capacity for the mains sewage plant in Poulton village. There has been extensive national coverage of the level of discharge of sewerage from that station into the Ampney Brook near another village called Ampney St Peter, and that this whole exercise is so that the volume of sewerage into the Poulton plant is reduced.  I have therefore asked Sarah Bentley the CEO of Thames Water whether the problem linked to the spill on the Ampney Brook received national publicity, if necessary, under an FOI Act request.

“I have also asked why Thames Water can’t, with all its resources, identify where the blockage is, and repair it in a much shorter timeframe, which would have saved your company a huge amount of costs. If that’s not possible why not simply abandon the old pipe which is apparently well over 50 years old, and lay a new one which might possibly have better capacity and certainly a longer life expectancy? I will make publicly available the response I receive from Thames Water.”