The nation’s worst corporate polluters should face fines which put a “major dent” in their bottom lines and have their bosses jailed, the Environment Agency has said.

This comes amid anger over environmental problems such as the state of England’s rivers, which the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee said were suffering a “chemical cocktail” of sewage, agricultural waste, and plastics - including those in Worcestershire.

An interactive map produced by The Rivers Trust shows how sewage is being emptied into rivers and bathing water across the county.

The trust produced the map using data from the Environment Agency to show where the sewerage network discharges and overflows into rivers during storms and flooding.

They have advised people to avoid entering the water downstream immediately after these overflows, especially after it has been raining.

The brown circles represent overflows on the map, with the larger yellow boxes indicating whether water companies are responsible.

As revealed by the data, there are a number of grot-spots across Worcestershire's rivers, with Severn Trent responsible for a large amount of the overflows - especially in the Severn.

The full map can be seen below.

In December, Severn Trent was fined £1.5 million for discharging sewage into Worcestershire's watercourses. 

Prosecutors told of how the company failed to respond to alarms at its works in Blackminster near Evesham warning of sewage discharge.

A blockage caused about 360,000 litres of sewage to be illegally discharged to the nearby Broadway Brook.

Meanwhile, Southern Water was handed a record £90 million fine for 6,791 unpermitted sewage discharges last summer, while the Environment Agency and watchdog Ofwat have launched a major investigation into sewage treatment works.

The Environment Agency’s chief executive, Sir James Bevan, has now set out his vision for post-Brexit regulation, arguing for higher standards, greater punishment for rule-breakers, and industries shouldering more of the cost burden of regulation.

In a speech to the Westminster Energy, Environment and Transport Forum conference, he is set to announce he wants to see changes which would see regulators “speak softly” at first but ultimately carry a bigger stick.

Sir James will say: “It would make regulated industries pay the full cost of their regulation which they currently don’t. Quite a lot of it is subsidised by the taxpayer.

“It would make them pay the full cost of repairing any damage they do to the environment. They currently don’t do that, either.”

“In cases of extremely harmful and reckless pollution – and we’ve seen far too much of that in the last few years – that would include fines so large they would put a major dent in companies’ bottom lines and sentences that would put their bosses in jail.

“That would greatly concentrate the minds of boards and chief executives and have a powerful deterrent effect.”