Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville for her excellent speech and for securing this important debate. It follows on from the one held in the Chamber on “Water and Sewage Companies: Directors’ Remuneration” on 22 February. I urge your Lordships to read that debate closely.

I will talk about my local river, the River Swale, said to be the fastest-flowing river in England. It is supposed to be watched over by Yorkshire Water. This company was privatised in 1989, at which time it had no debt; that debt is now £6.1 billion. It wants to increase our water bills by 6%. I will speak more about it later. I am indebted to a number of individuals and organisations who have helped me with my research, among them the Save our Swale group, the Rivers Trust’s State of Our Rivers report, the Sustain alliance, Daniel Callaghan, and the Local Government Association, to name but a few.

In Richmond, we are fighting back. In July 2023, the Save Our Swale group was founded by a local resident, Deborah Meara. She held a meeting in our town hall, which was attended by more than 100 people. Microbiologist Keith Thomas addressed the audience, as did Ron Wood from a local angling society; there was also a representative from the Rivers Trust. The meeting was told that the sewage treatment works on the Swale at Richmond had discharged untreated sewage into the river for a total of 1,113,013 hours; that the number of releases was 371; and that the average time per release was 3.8 hours. This was during 2022, which, as your Lordships will recall, was a drought year. Indeed, the standard precipitation index between March and August that year stated that the Swale was severely dry. Dry dumping is illegal.

The Save Our Swale group is applying for designated bathing water status—DBWS—as this is its only way, if it is successful, of forcing the Environment Agency to test the Swale’s water quality regularly. This is not a simple task, especially as Defra has recently changed the criteria yet again to make ultimate success less likely. The application will go in at the end of this year and the end of the bathing water season. A mass of volunteers, a number of whom are scientists—here I must declare an interest as my husband is one of them—will be doing the Environment Agency’s job for it by testing the water quality at various points along the Swale.

This monitoring has been going on at seven sites along the river on a monthly basis since September 2023. The volunteers have found unexpected and as yet unexplained spikes in phosphate levels above what are regarded as safe levels. It is clear that the River Swale is polluted yet neither the Environment Agency, Ofwat or Yorkshire Water appears to be doing much about it. Since the Environment Agency began criminal investigations into non-compliance by water companies back in 2021, we, the public, are no nearer to understanding just what is going on. Can the Minister advise me? Ofwat has also indicated that it has enforcement cases against six water companies, including Yorkshire Water, but those still have not been made public. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what is happening and when we might see some transparency.

Before we left the European Union, we were signed up to the water framework directive. This required member states to have good chemical and ecological status in their waterways by 2027. We were promised huge improvements to our way of life by leaving the EU, so can the Minister tell me where we are on those timescales? Can he also help me on what the Government mean by saying that there is an exemption on this timescale until 2063? The Liberal Democrats put down an amendment to the Environment Bill that would have placed a legal duty on water companies to make improvements. We are also calling for a sewage tax, as we have heard. I quote my noble friend Lady Bakewell:

“This would be a 16% tax on pre-tax profits, providing a £340 million fund to clear up the rivers that have been damaged and to fix the sewerage system”.—[Official Report, 22/2/24; col. 754.]


That may be one solution to this burgeoning problem. We should transform England’s water companies into public benefit companies, abolish Ofwat and put in its place a new regulator with proper teeth to tackle sewage dumping, as we have also heard. I am yet to see where the many improvements the Government say they are making are being demonstrated.

On 22 February, the Minister said:

“The Environment Agency and Ofwat have recently launched the largest ever criminal and civil investigations into water companies’ sewage discharges, and into over 2,200 treatment works, following new data coming to light as a result of increased monitoring”.


It is citizen scientists who are providing data and doing their work for them. Why did it take those agencies so long to see what should have been before their eyes? They have known about these discharges for many years. The Minister went on to say that

“this Government are going further and faster than any before to protect and enhance the health of our rivers and seas. We are holding water companies to account on a scale never seen before”.—[Official Report, 22/2/24; cols. 759-60.]

Of course it has never been seen before; the water companies have been allowed to get away with committing environmental vandalism on a huge scale, all on the Conservatives’ watch.

I fear that this all comes down to a board of directors who are perfectly happy to take huge sums of money, paying out £62 million in dividends in 2022-23 to its parent company—the Kelda Group—to

“cover costs including debt interest”

but going on to say that the money did not go to external shareholders. Who are they kidding? They have paid £1.2 billion in dividends to shareholders over the past 10 years, as we have just heard, while not even carrying out their primary functions of maintaining and investing in sewage infrastructure—improvements that we were promised in 1989. In August 2022, the Yorkshire Post reported that the Yorkshire water bosses paid themselves more than £3 million in bonuses despite leakages running at 283.1 million litres a day. That is absurd. Bonuses should be banned today.

It is said that, in the 7th century, St Paulinus baptised thousands of people in the River Swale. I wonder whether he would have been happy to baptise people in there now as sewage dumping in the Swale continues to be legal until 2050.