Five Hampshire beaches have been given a clean bill of heath following water quality tests carried out by the Environment Agency.
The beaches at Calshot, Hill Head, Lee-on-Solent, Lepe, and Milford-on-Sea have all been rated "excellent" after sampling carried out over a three-year period.
But Stokes Bay at Gosport has done slightly less well, receiving a rating of "good".
It comes after years of controversy about water quality in parts of Hampshire - with much of the blame being directed at Southern Water.
Bathing water quality at Calshot and four other beaches has been rated 'excellent' by the Environment Agency (Image: Newsquest)
Campaigners have repeatedly complained about the amount of untreated sewage being discharged into the River Itchen and other waterways.
READ MORE: Campaigners demand answers after new tests show Lymington River still being polluted by raw sewage
Hampshire county councillor David Harrison described the latest water quality ratings as "mildly encouraging news at best".
He added: "Southern Water have repeatedly been responsible for pollution incidents, and the regulators have often proved ineffective in making sure that our environment is properly protected.
"They'd do better to allocate all their resources towards improving performance and forget about trying to improve their public image with press releases. The public lost all trust in them long ago."
Bathing water quality at Calshot and four other beaches has been rated 'excellent' by the Environment Agency (Image: Newsquest)
New Forest councillor Jack Davies added: "I'm not convinced by Southern Water's glossy press release.
"Given the scale of the problem with local rivers being polluted, Southern Water must do more. They need to be proactively surveying sewer networks, especially in areas of outstanding natural beauty like the New Forest."
A Southern Water spokesperson said its Clean Rivers and Seas Task Force was helping to improve bathing waters.
The company had also fast-tracked sewer repairs as well as checking more than 250 pumping stations and treatment works before summer 2025.
The spokesperson added: "We have doubled the size of our illegal connections team - the 'Sewage Sherlocks' whose job it is to find where private wastewater pipes have been wrongly plumbed into surface water drains."
Lepe and four other beaches have been rated 'excellent' by the Environment Agency (Image: Sarah Webber)
Earlier this year it emerged that toilets at a block of flats in Southampton have been emptying sewage into the Itchen since the 1980s.
Pipes at Royal Court in Upper Grosvenor Road were wrongly connected when it was built, resulting in residents unintentionally flushing nearly 11m litres of wastewater into nearby drains.
A similar issue in the New Forest has resulted in dangerously high E.coli levels building up in the Lymington River, which flows into the Solent.