Pollution from overflowing sewers, farmland and city streets means that you have a one in seven chance of getting a sewage related disease such as gastroenteritis or ear, nose and throat infections each time you swim at over a third of UK beaches. That’s why each year we publish a list of MCS Recommended beaches with excellent water quality, allowing you to find clean beaches for swimming.

Download our full bathing water report to find out about how we recommend beaches, recent water quality trends and the problems and solutions for our bathing waters.

People used to think that our vast seas could dilute and cleanse any amount of pollution, including raw sewage. In 1957, Tony and Daphne Wakefield tragically lost their six-year-old daughter Caroline after she contracted polio swimming at a sewage contaminated beach. Outraged that raw sewage was being pumped into the sea, the Wakefield’s started publishing a ‘Golden List’ of clean bathing beaches which, along with other clean sea campaigns and new laws, finally led to the clean up of continuous raw sewage discharges at most of our beaches.

Health risks from swimming are now considerably lower and water quality is regularly tested during the summer at 769 of UK beaches. But there is still work to be done and 23 years after the Wakefield’s gave us their 'Golden List' we still publish it as MCS Recommended beaches, continuing this amazing legacy in our campaign for Clean Seas and Beaches.

This year, 351 of 769 beaches tested did not meet our standards for water quality, and in the past three years water quality has been getting worst. Poor water quality today is due largely to storm pollution through heavy rainfall which washes pollutants from farmland and city streets into the sea and causes flooded sewers to discharge a mix of storm water and raw sewage into rivers and the sea through sewer overflow pipes, without any treatment to remove harmful pathogens. Over the last few years, wetter summers have made this type of pollution worse.

By 2015, MCS wants to recommend at least 75% of all beaches tested for water quality in the UK. For this to happen, we need to stop sewer overflow pipes discharging sewage under anything except true emergency flood conditions, and to severely reduce polluting runoff from farmland and city streets with  better farm management practices and mechanisms like sustainable urban drainage systems.

There are about 22,000 sewer overflows in the UK and only a fraction are monitored to see how much sewage they are putting into the sea. This information is not available to us, the general public. We want to see this entire network of pipes systematically monitored to make sure the pipes are only used in genuine flooding emergencies. Where they are being used too often we want water companies to improve the capacity and design of these pipes to stop them from polluting our coastal waters.

We want to see better public information provided at all bathing beaches on the health risks associated with short-term pollution and how to avoid these risks if you’re a swimmer.

We want water companies to improve storm water storage capacity and redesign CSOs so that untreated sewage spills occur only in flooding emergencies.

We want to see more initiatives to reduce agricultural pollution and more sustainable drainage schemes in cities to reduce the amount of polluted rainwater reaching our seas.

Find out how YOU can help us.