Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, yesterday we learned that water companies failed, for the fourth year in a row, to meet critical pollution reduction targets and that last year over 3 million hours-worth of sewage was flowing through our waterways in England. And yet, like the noble Duke, the Duke of Westminster—

[Noble Lords]

Wellington.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

I heard on Radio 4’s “Today” programme that the response from the regulator was that what was needed was a change in culture. Now, putting aside that it seemed strange that the regulator would say culture change was the answer, the issue is that these companies have had the chance over decades to show that they can change, and they have not. Now is the time for the Government to intervene.

Like others, I welcome the strong manifesto commitment by the new Labour Government to clean up our waters, rivers and beaches, and I welcome this first step. It is not going to do it on its own, as indeed the Minister said in her opening remarks, but it is a welcome first step which will do something to help regulate these failing companies and extend the remit of this sadly ineffective regulator. At the same time, it will hopefully allow the Government to undertake a broader review where they can identify a way forward for this broken model of managing our precious water resources.

The special measures Bill is welcome, but there are a number of areas I would like to see strengthened. I find it very concerning that there is not a public interest remit for the regulator Ofwat. I think the general public would find it very surprising that the regulator for our water companies does not have any need to look at issues of ensuring clean water or improving the environment. However, it does have binding, legal duties to improve the economic performance of companies. Over time, this has allowed them to sweat assets and put profit before public interest. That must change. Again, as the noble Duke, the Duke of Westminster—

[Noble Lords]

Wellington.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

I am so sorry: the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington—it is not easy to muddle the two, so apologies for that. He rightly made the point that this situation was actually made worse by the last Government when they introduced the legislation that made Ofwat have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth when it was undertaking its duties. We have to redress that balance. Of course, water companies have to make a profit—we cannot have companies that do not make profits; they would not be in existence—but there is an imbalance between focusing on the bottom line and ensuring that public interest in our water is delivered by these companies. That must be redressed. The special measures Bill, by changing the remit of Ofwat remit to have a public interest duty, is a way to do that.

I very much welcome, in a spirit of hope rather than expectation, the pollution incident reduction plans that will do what they can to ensure that we see less pollution in our rivers and waters in the future. Like other colleagues, I feel very strongly that it should be a duty not just to produce and publish them; there must also be a duty to implement them. It must also be a duty on all water companies, both straight water companies and water sewerage companies. We would like to see some amendments on that.

We need to make sure that those pollution incident reduction plans do not just end up being stuffed full of the cheapest and quickest options to tackle combined sewer overflows. If we allow that, all we will end up with is downstream proposals for end-of-pipe storage, such as concrete storm tanks, at water recovery centres, rather than looking upstream to find sustainable—admittedly more expensive—options that will deliver sustainable drainage and other nature-based solutions. These will not only deal with the combined sewer overflows but will offer other benefits to society more broadly, in terms of flood alleviation and liveability for communities, if we are talking about sustainable urban drainage systems, for example.

So I hope that, in Committee, we will have the chance to ensure that those pollution incident reduction plans are not just stuffed with the quickest and the cheapest but actually move companies towards looking towards the sustainable and the best.

Like other noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Russell, who spoke so well earlier, I want to add my voice to say that I hope that, in summing up, the Minister today will be able to say a bit more about the review on which we are all pinning such high hopes. Like others, I would very much like to see a very clear and firm look taken at the operating and financing models of companies. My party has long and strongly argued for social and environmental purposes to be incorporated in water company corporate articles of association. I very much hope to see that sort of aspect looked at.

We need to make sure that all areas across government are included, because there are so many areas which impinge on how we manage our water, including talking about planning rules for new homes and the right to connect for developers, or incentivising sustainable agriculture so that we help farmers to do what we need them to do and not contribute to some of the run-off that the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey spoke so powerfully about, and really starting to prioritise catchment-scale planning for water. We need to look at all the areas in that review and ensure that we have an enforcement regime that is worthy of the name. Without that, it is not worth the paper it is written on.

I will add one thing that no other Member has yet mentioned this afternoon. I hope that the review will look at the role of consumers, of us as individuals, in paying for all the new infrastructure that will be required to deliver the water services we want and need and also at our responsibility to save water, which for too long has not been articulated strongly enough. I remember that 10 years ago, during the passage of what became the Water Act 2014, I made the case for compulsory water metering and better standards for installations in homes. The case for compulsory water metering with social tariffs has not gone away; it is still here. However, I hope that the Government will at least look at the role of what consumers are expected to do and pay for in this whole review, because they must be an integral part.

I was very pleased to hear the Minister say that there will be public consultation on this, because it is our water system. It is a problem that all of us know about, wherever we live, whether it is on the Wye or me by the River Wey in Surrey. We have all had our water stopped and have all seen slurry in the rivers. All of us have a say in this and the public will want us to do the best we can to help the Government make this special measures Bill and the review what they need to be.

Environment and Climate Change Committee Report: An Extraordinary Challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our Land and Sea by 2030

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Parminter]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Environment and Climate Change Committee An extraordinary challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our land and sea by 2030 (2nd Report, Session 2022–23, HL Paper 234).

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to open this debate as the past chairman of the Select Committee on Environment and Climate Change, as we debate the issue of how we in the UK meet our target to achieve 30% of our land and sea to be restored to nature by 2030. When we launched our report last year, we called it an extraordinary challenge, and that title is as apposite today as it was then.

When I look at noble Lords in this Room, I can see that I do not need to tell any of them that this global target for biodiversity for 30 by 30 was agreed at the nature COP, COP 15, back in 2022. But I put on record my thanks to the past Government, who showed considerable leadership in securing that global agreement and, in particular, to the noble Lord sitting behind me, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who was instrumental in achieving that. I thank him and welcome that the new Labour Government have already committed to meeting their international biodiversity obligations.

We put our report together over a year ago—God knows why it takes over a year in the House of Lords to report a Select Committee, but it does—and the recommendations that we made on securing the land in England are as relevant today as they were then. That has made it even better for us to debate it today, given that we face the opportunity next month of COP 16 in Colombia, which I hope is focusing the minds of our own Government, as well as Governments right around the world, on their shared biodiversity targets.

Frankly, we should not need an international gathering on biodiversity to redouble our efforts to protect nature. This month alone we have seen five more UK seabirds added to the red list for extinction: Arctic terns, Leach’s storm petrels, common gulls and the great black-backed gull, and the great skua have all been added to that list. We know that protected species survive and thrive best in protected areas such as SSSIs and SACs, as well as the SPAs—the sites of special scientific interest, special areas of conservation and special protection areas. But there is a great swathe of other protected sites around our country, whether they are areas owned by environmental NGOs, managed for nature conservation, or national parks or national landscapes, which we have come to term AOBs, or wildlife reserves, national nature reserves or national forests—to name but a few. They are all important, but the question for us as a committee when we looked at our report was what counted towards that 30 by 30 target.

We were very clear that we accepted the international definition that was put together by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which was agreed at COP 15, that to qualify for 30 by 30 the area should be:

“a clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values”.

We took “long term” to mean more than 30 years. Taking that definition, we listened to the advice from the Government’s own nature advisory body, the JNCC, and the other environmental groups, as well as from other stakeholders. We concluded that, at that time, the amount of land in England that could count towards 30 by 30 was 6.5%. That means that, by 2030, there remains 23.5% of land required to meet the target, which is a massive amount of land. To give it some context, that is more than 3 million hectares of land, or an area of land more than 1.5 times the size of Wales. The noble Lord, Lord Harlech, might want to challenge me on that—I do not know. Those were the figures that we identified.

In December, the Government—as was—argued that, in their delivering 30 by 30 on land and at sea, that figure was not 6.5% but 8.5%. However, they included in their definition land that is not compliant with what we take to be suitable for inclusion in 30 by 30 as compliant with the international guidance. Irrespective of arguing over those amounts, what is absolutely clear is the scale of the challenge. But we all know that it is not just size that matters; it is also about the quality and condition of the land, as is articulated in the COP 15 statement that it should be effectively conserved and managed.

When we asked Natural England for an update on the quality of those SSSIs, it indicated that only 37% were in favourable condition and that there had been no improvement in the past 13 years in improving the remaining SSSIs. When it came to monitoring, it said that less than a quarter of our SSSIs had been assessed in the past six years. Although I acknowledge that Natural England has made some extremely welcome changes since December in how it assesses and monitors SSSIs, this does not get away from the fact that we are not looking at and assessing our protected sites anywhere near enough for land managers and others to make appropriate management decisions—let alone the fact that, in February 2026, we as a country will have to report internationally on how we are doing against the 30 by 30 target. We as a committee were clear that, despite the financial implications, a proper management assessment needs to be done for every piece of land that constitutes 30 by 30, and that it should be assessed every six years.

That is the state of our best-protected land in England. What about at sea? When we asked the JNCC, we found the deeply worrying situation that only two out of our 76 MPAs—most protected areas—receive any form of monitoring, despite the threats that they face from overfishing, bottom trawling near the seabed and energy infrastructure. We think that this is insufficient. We argued very strongly for there to be more monitoring of our MPAs, both inshore and offshore. We also argued for better regulation of bottom trawling—that is, I think, an issue that several Members may wish to return to later. Like the EFRA Committee, we argued that there needs to be speedy resolution in designating more HPMAs—highly protected marine areas—because the pace of change has been glacial, to say the least.

Let me explain what I mean by “glacial”. One of the things we asked the Government to do was produce a map of how they saw themselves bringing together all the land needed for the 30 by 30 target, along with an action plan. We said—I remember it clearly—that one thing that would be invaluable in helping the Government draw up that map would be the “forthcoming” land use framework. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, may wish to say something more about the forthcoming nature of the land use framework, which we still need to see in its entirety. It is good to see that the new Government have committed to produce one of those.

However, what the Government did do in December was produce a map, along with some indications of how they saw themselves delivering the 30 by 30 target on land, but with no indication of how they saw themselves doing it at sea. In no sense could this be called an action plan because, as the Government themselves said, the map was only indicative as they had not yet agreed the criteria for what would constitute 30 by 30. There was glacial progress too by the last Government on getting any OECMs—other effective area-based conservation measures—up and running, which would have been a really important way of helping farmers, woodland managers and others voluntarily contribute towards the 30 by 30 target.

I am pleased that the Government have now committed to produce a plan for nature protection and recovery, which is to be informed by this rapid review of the environmental improvement plan. That is to be welcomed. It should be a starting point for driving nature recovery right across government departments. I suspect that if I ask the Minister now, she might say that it is probably too early for her to say how the Government see themselves securing this huge extra amount of land that we are going to need if we are going to meet 30 by 30. But it is not unfair for us to ask her today whether the Government will commit to abide by the internationally agreed guidance in drawing up the criteria for determining what will be part of those areas contributing towards 30 by 30.

I have one further question. Will the Government’s laudable plans for new homes for people be accompanied by new streams of funding to provide more homes for nature to thrive and survive?

I am sure that other colleagues will have many more questions; I do not want to go on for too long. I just want to say a particular thanks to those Members here today with whom I shared the privilege of being on the committee—it was a real honour to serve alongside them. I also thank the ever-diligent staff, who deal with us with professionalism, kindness and decency.

In conclusion, our report made it very clear that there is a long way to go if we are going to make a reality of 30 by 30. We need to do it. If our recommendations fall on stony ground, it is quite clear that 30 by 30 will be no more than a catchy slogan for international political summits, and meanwhile our precious nature will be lost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

All that remains at the end of this long, thoughtful and valuable debate is, on behalf of us all, to wish the new Minister and her colleagues well in delivering on this important target. The interest this afternoon and early evening shows that there are people around the House who will keep her feet to the fire. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.