Welcome to Thursday’s Early Edition from i.

The figures are shocking, and the stories even more so. Yesterday it was revealed that raw sewage was poured into England’s rivers, lakes and coastal areas for 3.6 million hours last year – making it the worst year on record. The campaign group River Action said the latest figures were “a final indictment” for England’s under-fire water firms, which it accused of “having run amok with billpayers’ money for decades”. Anger over sewage spills and water pollution has been intensifying in recent months, as have the horror stories. Last month swimmers were told they had been bathing in sewage without realising, while in a Norfolk residents were confronted with a “sea of mashed up toilet paper and faeces” flowing into a rare chalk stream. Yesterday, there were even claims that drugs entering waterways are leading to fish being feminised by the contraceptive pill, crabs unwittingly consuming antidepressants and marine species being “full of cocaine“. So who are the worst offenders, and are there plans to fix the situation? We’ll take a look after the headlines.

 Today’s news, and why it matters

 Patients are waiting more than a month to see their GP in some areas of the country in a growing postcode lottery for primary care, NHS England figures show. In January alone, 1.6 million GP appointments took place more than 28 days after initially being booked.

A Chinese cyber attack on British MPs was more widespread than the UK Government initially revealed, i has learned. Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced on Monday that a group of three MPs and one peer had been targeted.

MPs lack the tools to properly scrutinise the ‘eye-watering sums of the public’s money’ being spent by the government, according to the chair of one of parliament’s most powerful bodies. Meg Hillier warned that a scrutiny gap had opened up which meant the government was not always being held to account over how it spent £1trn pounds of taxpayer’s cash annually but warned the “scale must never mask the need to look after every penny”.

Cost-cutting rather than “ageism” was behind Absolute Radio’s decision to axe Frank Skinner’s show, insiders have claimed. Skinner’s weekend programme, a fixture on Absolute Radio for 15 years, stood out as an expense on the balance sheet when owners Bauer Media had to make budget cuts, i understands.

The King is to stress the importance of acts of friendship “especially in a time of need” in a personal Easter message in the wake of his and the Princess of Wales’ cancer diagnoses. Charles’s pre-recorded audio – his first public words since Kate revealed she was undergoing chemotherapy – will be broadcast in his absence at a Royal Maundy service in Worcester Cathedral on Thursday.

Three key questions on sewage spills:

Just how bad is the problem? When it comes to the damage being caused by sewage spills, the word “catastrophic” comes up a lot. The data for 2023 shows a 105 per cent increase in the total hours of sewage spills since 2022, which is the highest since water companies began reporting this information in 2020. A whole range of waterways have been seriously affected by the spill. The pollution in the River Thames has been branded a “national disgrace” after levels of E coli were found to be nearly 10 times higher than levels found in bathing waters graded as “poor”, reports said earlier this week. This month the keeper of a Thames Valley river said the spills were turning rare chalk streams into open sewers. “What the sewage does is it just chokes the riverbed,” he told i. “With the high levels of ammonia and nitrates coming from the sewage, we get a filamentous algae which then smothers the weed. One of those rare chalk streams, in West Sussex, is said to be on the brink of “environmental catastrophe” after it was revealed to be the worst-hit river in England for sewage overflows. In February, i revealed how the nine-mile Lavant, which runs from the village of East Dean to Chichester, was “effectively dead”, due to Southern Water pumping untreated water into the river. Now those who care for it say the “impact of sewage is clearly seen in the visual health of the river, with trailing fronds of sewage fungus choking plants, and an obvious lack of wildlife in and around the water.”

Is anything changing? On Tuesday, the Environment Agency launched a new whistleblowing platform designed to make it easier for employees to report on serious environmental harm being caused by water firms. The Environment Agency’s director of water, Helen Wakeham, said: “No other country has the level of monitoring we do, with 100 per cent of storm overflows in England now fitted with a monitor. We are better placed than ever before to hold water companies accountable – thanks to intelligence from our new whistleblower portal, our plans to expand our specialised workforce, new enforcement powers, increased water company inspections and new tools to inform our enforcement work.” A spokesperson for Water UK said they are pushing for regulatory approval to upgrade the system so it can better cope with the weather. They added: “We have a plan to sort this out by tripling investment which will cut spills by 40% by 2030 – more than double the Government’s target.” In February, Environment Secretary Steve Barclay revealed the Government would block bonuses for bosses of UK water firms which are illegally polluting rivers, lakes and seas starting from the next financial year. Labour has also pledged to block water company bosses’ bonuses and have vowed to hit water executives with criminal charges if they oversee repeated sewage spills. But campaigners argue that Labour’s plans are “feeble” while green Tory MPs argued that the Government needed to do more to tackle the sewage crisis ahead of the local elections. They have raised doubts over how much impact a ban on bonuses will have on reducing pollution in the country’s waterways. Nick Measham, chief executive at WildFish, said: “Bonus bans are feeble gestures. We want politicians to enforce the law to force water companies to invest – at their and their shareholder’s expense – and end this off-the-scale law-breaking.” Read the full story here.

Which are the worst firms? United Utilities is the most polluting water firm according to figures, showing it recorded the highest number of sewage spills per “storm overflow”, with 45.4, releasing waste for more than 650,000 hours in 2023. South West Water was at number two, with 43.4 spills per overflow, followed by Yorkshire Water with 35.9 spills per overflow. Here i has set out how each water company contributed to polluting rivers last year – and how much they have paid out in bonuses.

Around the world

 Two people recovered from the water at the site of the Baltimore bridge collapse have been identified. Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, were recovered from a red pickup truck submerged near the bridge’s middle span.

A marine technology professor has said the crew of the Dali cargo ship would have had less than a minute to respond in “challenging” conditions after the vessel lost power. Jin Wang, of Liverpool John Moores University, said he believed it was probable that systems supporting the ship’s engine failed, and that the crew might have panicked.

I’m a Yazidi woman who escaped Isis – here’s how I get revenge. At least 5,000 Yazidis were murdered in a genocide by the terror group. Today, three women are working to extinguish their legacy. Molly Blackall reports.

Millions of women around the world who use certain hormone drugs for contraception and for conditions such as endometriosis may have a raised risk of rare, usually benign, brain tumours, researchers say.

A teenage girl will be sued by France for allegedly falsely accusing her headteacher of striking her in a heated exchange over her wearing an Islamic head-covering. The headteacher insisted that the pupil remove her head-covering inside the school, in accordance with French law.

 Watch out for…

 Sir Keir Starmer, who is launching Labour’s local election campaign in the West Midlands today.  

 Thoughts for the day

 Rishi Sunak’s latest act of stupidity exceeds even his own high standards. PM’s political philosophy appears to be dig hole, walk into it, says Ian Dunt.

I’m a GP – the way chronic fatigue patients are treated is unforgivable. Doctors need to get better at listening to our patients, explains Dr Punam Krishan.

If you smell what the Rock is cooking! Wrestling is back, baby. The industry has been completely revitalised by a combination of focused storytelling, star power and healthy competition, writes Ryan Coogan.

Culture Break

 How Greg Davies became an unlikely sex symbol. If this elevation into sex symbol status has surprised the Taskmaster comedian himself, then just imagine the impact it must have had on those who consider him their peer, writes Nick Duerden.

The Big Read

Why Sadiq Khan isn’t taking a win over Tories’ ‘abysmal’ Susan Hall for granted. Sadiq Khan faces a double whammy of a switch to the first-past-the-post system and new voter ID rules, reports Eleanor Langford.

Sport

 How ‘dead and buried’ Sheffield Wednesday fought back under Danny Rohl. The Owls looked doomed after a nightmare start but survival is now a real possibility – even if Rohl’s growing reputation could be a fresh problem for Dejphon Chansiri, writes Pete Thompson.

Something to brighten your day

 At 40, I got over my fear of swimming and riding a bike – this is how. Deborah Linton was in middle age before she got back on a bike – and conquered two decades of fear.