Water and Sewage Regulation (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, for precipitating this debate. I declare an interest as a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee and as a farmer who holds some irrigation licences.

As you will see from the report our committee published on 23 September, to any objective eye we are in a very poor place, be it by security of additional supplies, through population growth, behavioural habits or hotter weather; poorly maintained infrastructure, perhaps best and most recently illustrated through Thames Water’s failure to bring the only significant desalination plant on stream during one of the hottest summers on record; or the financial health of the sector, which has been consistently raided for dividends and executive bonuses, while racking up ever-higher levels of debt. Thames Water alone has a whopping £14 billion of debt; it was debt free when it was privatised.

Meanwhile, sewage releases, politely called storm overflows, are running at extraordinary levels because the sector has failed to invest in adequate mitigation. According to the Defra consultation document published in March last year, in 2020 there were 400,000 sewage discharges, totalling over 3 million hours of sewage flow. Some 10% of those overflow points pumped out raw sewage more than 100 times each. All of this was under the supposedly beady eye of two large regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency. Even the regulators’ regulator, the Office for Environmental Protection, as recently as five weeks ago announced

“possible failures to comply with environmental law … in relation to … sewer overflows”.

It is interesting that, in the Government’s response to an Urgent Question triggered by the OEP’s intervention, they said that they started monitoring sewage overflow 10 years ago. If that is the case, what has this monitoring achieved when, in 2020, there were still 400,000 discharge events?

It is my contention that buried in this ocean of complacency is the more disingenuous excuse that it is all too expensive to deal with. In 2020, the Government optimistically created a thing called the Storm Overflows Taskforce. In November 2021, it reported that it would cost between £350 billion and £600 billion to solve the problem. This is equivalent, at the bottom end, to 15 more Elizabeth lines or—dare I say it?—at the top end, to six more full-fat HS2s. This is ludicrous, because numbers like this attempt to shut down the debate, as they are utterly unaffordable. The reality is that so much could be done affordably.

At its simplest, a sewage overflow is activated when the volume of water is more than can be handled by the sewage treatment plant, into which the water flows. Our infrastructure has been and continues to be built to comingle sewage and rainwater, so this is a constant problem. The solution is to reduce the amount of rainwater that hits the sewage plant in a concentrated period of time. There are at least two effective and simple solutions to help achieve this, and one alternative to expensive, hard-infrastructure treatment plants.

First, in a pilot scheme on the Isle of Wight, households were given water butts with slow-release valves, enabling water to be held in the butt until after the storm and then released, in a measured way, over hours and days. As of this month, Southern Water had agreed to extend the pilot to the whole of Cowes. This tiny intervention has, so far, delivered a 70% reduction in sewage releases. In a year, this could be rolled out across the whole of England and Wales at minimal cost. Perhaps the Minister could explain why his department is not pushing this small and elegant solution far harder.

Secondly, certain areas of farmland could be designated to be inundated during heavy storms. With an increasing trend for environmentally led farming, such as overwintered stubbles, this is becoming more and more viable. The Government were considering this in 2016; perhaps the Minister could update us but, rather than giving us a cursory reply today, I ask him to write with some detail. Over 50 million gallons of water flow through my own farm a year, ultimately ending up in the sea, in a system that cannot cope with inundation. It would be perfectly feasible for me to hold areas of land under water for a week or two, while the local drainage system recovers. To put this volume of water into perspective, it is equivalent to about half the annual drinking water requirement of Norwich. So one farm, of a couple of thousand acres, could make a real difference. It would require lateral thinking and proper co-ordination between the regulators and water companies. Perhaps the Minister could tell us if such dexterity of mind exists inside the bureaucratic machine.

The third solution, which now has credible pilot sites, is the use of wetlands in place of hard infrastructure. I recently visited a site in north Norfolk where the cost of construction was £250,000 and the annual running cost £10,000, against a treatment plant of £1 million with running costs of £100,000 a year. With the imminent arrival of biodiversity net gain regulations next year, the opportunity to incorporate more wetlands, and pay for it, becomes possible.

I have tried to show that there are innovative but proven ways to solve these problems without breaking the bank. Lastly, I ask the Minister whether his department is on target to provide a full and unambiguous response to our committee’s letter, due a reply on 27 October, covering this and other issues.