NORTHUMBRIAN Water has been fined £15,000 over procedures at a Teesside treatment plant.

The company pleaded guilty at Teesside Magistrates Court yesterday to failing to provide a discharge sample, and two charges of failing to comply with the limits of its discharge consent, at the Bran Sands effluent treatment works near the Tees estuary.

The court also took into consideration 25 other similar offences. The firm was also ordered to pay £3,463 costs to the Environment Agency, which brought the case.

Jill Fogg, for the Environment Agency, told the court that Bran Sands is an effluent treatment works, discharging into a small watercourse running into the Tees estuary 1km downstream of Tees and Hartlepool foreshore and wetlands, and Seal Sands - sites of special scientific interest.

As a condition of the permission to discharge, samples of discharges from the works are taken by Northumbrian Water, to be collected and analysed by the Environment Agency. The aim is to ensure the effluent is being treated correctly before being discharged, and that the watercourses are kept free from pollution.

The Environment Agency visits the Bran Sands treatment works to collect these samples 48 times each year.

But on 17 of 56 sampling visits, from January 2005 until February 2006, Northumbrian Water failed to provide full sets of samples for analysis.

It meant the agency was unable to assess if Northumbrian Water complied with the discharge consent at Bran Sands on these occasions.

The court also heard that on February 3, 2006, the Environment Agency received an email from Northumbrian Water informing of a breach of the discharge limits on the quality of the effluent at Bran Sands on January 27. A similar report was received from the firm on April 20, 2007, relating to discharge quality limits from April 18. Similar breaches of the works' discharge consent occurred in 2003 and 2004.

In mitigation, Northumbrian Water Ltd accepted the sample hadn't been available to be collected, but that their own research indicated no harm had been done to the watercourse from any discharges.

The firm accepted they were in breach of the discharge limits and that was caused by faults within their system.