Sewers

Dear Editor,

I read with interest your recent front-page report on the sinkhole and raw sewage spill on Sandbach Road North in Alsager ("Sinkhole causing a stink on main road"). Residents like John Grint having to keep windows closed in hot weather, tankers queuing day and night, children walking past the mess on their way to school, and the failure to get timely answers from the authorities paint a depressing picture of everyday life in our town.

While United Utilities has now issued its standard statement of apology and repair, this incident should prompt wider reflection. Predictably, the quality of local infrastructure in Alsager (and many similar areas) continues to suffer. What looks on the surface like a one-off “collapsed sewer” is in reality the visible symptom of deeper, longer-term problems created by a complex chain of policy decisions at national level.

The Labour government’s approach – including aggressively pushing up the minimum wage, imposing burdensome tax increases, and prioritising DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) mandates across the public and utility sectors – has real-world consequences that many residents can smell and see, even if the causal links are not immediately obvious to everyone. Higher wage floors and added employment costs for contractors and utilities raise the price of routine maintenance and repair work. Layer on heavy taxation that squeezes budgets at every level, and scarce resources get diverted away from unglamorous but essential infrastructure renewal toward other priorities. At the same time, organisations under pressure to meet diversity targets can find themselves distracted from core operational competence and experience.

The result? Delayed responses, under-investment in ageing sewer networks, and incidents like this one that force ordinary families in Alsager to live with sewage smells, closed windows, and disrupted roads. It is not just an inconvenience — it is a public health concern and a quality-of-life failure for a town that deserves better.

Local residents understand that fixing Victorian-era sewers is expensive and difficult. What they rightly resent is a policy environment that makes such failures more frequent and harder to resolve quickly. We need infrastructure investment and maintenance to be treated as the priority it is, not subordinated to national political experiments.

Alsager (and the wider borough) deserves reliable basic services. Perhaps the Chronicle could continue to hold both local operators and national policymakers to account when these avoidable disruptions occur.

Yours faithfully,

Andy Large

Alsager West