THE Government has called pollution in Windermere 'outrageous' and has agreed a meeting with United Utilities, representatives of the Lakes tourism industry and the local MP.

The Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron led a Westminster Hall debate on water companies after a BBC investigation found United Utilities, which serves millions of customers across the north-west, illegally dumped more than 100 million litres of raw sewage into Windermere over a three-year period. 

Mr Farron said: "I am deeply angry that the failure of the water company and its regulators to identify and solve these problems is not only beginning to damage our environment, but doing damage to the precious brand of the Lake District." 

Mr Farron placed his comments in the context of the Lakes hospitality and tourism industry, which uses the image of Windermere to market their services.

Later in the debate, water minister Emma Hardy called the level of pollution in lakes such as Windermere 'outrageous.' 

READ MORE: Lake District: Millions of litres of sewage 'illegally dumped'

"It is right that that has become more of an issue as time has gone on. That is a positive thing. We need to value our nature to a far higher level than we ever did before, and change is needed," she said. 

Mr Farron then addressed the minister. He said: "It is important that we tackle this issue from a national perspective, but there is also an issue in my local area that I think we can fix. Windermere receives an awful lot of coverage and rightly so.

"A fifth of the pollution in Windermere comes from septic tanks, including 89 package treatment works around the lakes, all of which could be relatively easily connected to the mains.

"I wonder whether the Minister would agree to meet me, United Utilities and representatives of the tourism and hospitality industry to see whether we could make that migration, up the standards and do something genuinely useful at the bottom level to improve the water quality of Windermere."

“In the spirit of collaboration, which I have just spoken so much about, of course I will meet the honourable member," Ms Hardy replied. 

United Utilities said that it had fixed an engineering issue which meant that the discharges recorded by its monitors in the Windermere catchment were potentially non-compliant. 

A spokesperson added the company had implemented engineering changes to the system to prevent a reoccurrence and that it had reported the discharges to the Environment Agency as soon as it was made aware of them.