"I'm hoping for political lobbying, protests and people taking the government to court"
Glad to say this is starting to happen. It takes catastrophes to rile people up enough, though. Hoping it's not too little too late.
When we first arrived in Australia I was gobsmacked at how badly managed the water was, particularly considering how dry the country is. The UK manages theirs better and they get way more rain. They still get low on occasions and have to enforce hosepipe bands. Probably due to the population density. All sewage and storm water gets taken to sewage plants, cleaned and put back into the river systems. When I queried why that wasn't done here, there said that people didn't want to use recycled water. Yet the rivers that the water is taken from are probably just as polluted to start with.
I think EU legislation had a lot to do with the UK cleaning up their waterways, too.