By: Gill Plimmer
When government inspectors turned up at Peter Rowbottom’s workplace in July 2016, it came as a shock. Such visits were rare at the Southern Water sewage treatment works in Kent where Rowbottom was employed as a site manager. The UK government mostly relied on the water companies in England to self-report sewage outflows from their plants, and several of Southern’s treatment works hadn’t been inspected in a decade.