Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is such a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, who really does his homework. I advocate to the Government Benches reading his speech in Hansard just to make sure that they have got the full picture.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, on bringing this topic up again. When I was thinking about what to say, I wondered whether I should just print off my speeches from six months, a year or two years ago. We have debated this issue a lot; there is strength of feeling here. The Minister might stand up and say, in his innocence, “But we’re doing more than any other Government have ever done on this issue”. That may be true but, unfortunately, the situation has got worse and the Government are not doing enough.

We have had some really good briefings on this issue. The Rivers Trust produced a very good report saying things such as this:

“No single stretch of river in England or Northern Ireland is in good overall health”.


That is shameful. It also said that 85% of river stretches in England have failed to reach good ecological health, and that toxic chemicals pollute every stretch of English rivers. What a legacy this Government have left us. This will come up on doorsteps—I am going to make sure that it does if I have anything to do with it—and the Government will be shamed.

We also had a very good briefing from Sustain. It made the point that the main cause of river pollution is livestock farming—that of chickens and other animals. This is perfectly true but it does not mean that sewage will not be important; somehow, the general public have heard the word “sewage” and will ask questions about it.

We had a briefing from Windrush Against Sewage Pollution. It talks about the inadequate monitoring and the fact that there simply is not enough data to know the full picture. This is something that the Government have not taken seriously. The Freshwater Future briefing called for the regulation of private water companies.

Clearly, we are all tired of talking about this and of the Government replying in platitudes, saying how it is going to be fine and that they have done everything anyone could possibly do. They have not. I think that even the two noble Lords on the Front Bench know that water regulation has failed; I would be very disappointed if they did not know that basic fact.

I have all sorts of facts and figures here but, quite honestly, I will have to cut those bits out of my speech because the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, has used them all. It is time that all politicians of all political parties question and reject the ideological belief in water privatisation; it has failed. Once you are free of that ideological straitjacket, when the water companies say, “We’ll go bankrupt if you don’t let us raise the average water bill by £150 a year”, you can say, “No problem. We can take you over; that is fine. You failed. We’ll buy you for 50 pence”, or whatever.

The water companies had the public money to invest but, instead, they paid it out in dividends. Either they can do what they were paid to do already or they can go bankrupt. As I say, we can buy them. An even better solution has been put forward by the charity We Own It, which suggests that, instead of the stupid, paltry fines that the water companies keep getting thrown at them—they pay them quite happily because they just do not care; it is not much money—we could take shares from them every time. We could be quite strict and tough about it, then we would have them in no time.

The water companies are saying that they need the predicted £150-a-year rise in bills with which they are insulting us at the moment in order to invest over the next 27 years. However, the £57 billion that the Government are offering is the same amount of money that those water companies have paid to shareholders in the previous 27 years. Where is the guarantee that any money we give to these water companies will actually be spent on the things we care about? I would argue that we have absolutely no guarantee.

Of course, Ofwat has failed and the Environment Agency has failed. I feel very sad about that. Instead of our regulators acting years ago to clamp down on CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends, they are still going to private dinner clubs with the water industry to discuss how to quell the public anger at sewage and rising bills. As I said, there will be anger over this at the next general election. The cost of living will be the major concern but sewage will come up.

I have had quite a lot of people saying to me, “Oh, we should just take all these CEOs and top execs to court, throw them in jail and forget about them, basically”. I am not a big fan of putting people in prison. What we should do with all these top execs is give them community service. They should be out there on the riverbanks and the beaches clearing up the mess that they have made. A couple of years of doing that and possibly other CEOs would learn that you cannot carry on polluting our natural resources in that way.

I will cut huge chunks of my speech out now, which I am sure everybody will be very happy about. Local campaigners in West Oxfordshire have worked with the district council to ensure that planning applications have conditions set for Thames Water to upgrade illegal sewerage systems before accepting the occupancy of new housing. The effectiveness of the conditions is being tested, with the first examples under way. The Environment Agency has been prodded into action, and on one application of 1,450 houses north of Oxford it said clearly that the Oxford sewage works is operating illegally and has failed to upgrade, despite the water company having had the money years ago.

I do not want there to be a shortage of housing. I do not want us to stop building new housing; I want to stop our polluting some very precious ecosystems. The same rule that I have just talked about would apply to any new housing served by the Oxford sewage works and every other illegally operating sewage works in the country. It will stop a new deluge of sewage being dumped into local rivers due to overloaded systems.

How many sewage works around the country are currently operating illegally and do not have the capacity to handle the existing levels of sewage? This is a very important question. If we do not have the data on that, we really ought to. Perhaps the Minister can write to me and to everybody about that, because it is a crucial question. You cannot fix a problem if you do not know what it is and how big it is.

Lastly, can the Minister explain how water companies that are blocking new housing from being occupied and have never invested the money given to them to produce a modern sewerage system can now be expected to do so? We have let the water companies run rampant over our very precious land, rivers, waterways and all sorts of ecosystems. It is time we stopped them.