Sewage Disposal in Rivers and Coastal Waters

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my entry in the register. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Oates, on securing this debate and thank noble Lords for their contributions.

The noble Lord, Lord Oates, was absolutely right to mention the late Lord Chidgey. I remember having a very good debate about chalk streams with him in this Chamber just before he died. He saw my passion for them and raised me his. He was a great fighter for river health in this place.

My wife refers to my local river as my mid-life crisis; I suppose it is better than a fast car or soaring political ambition. I share noble Lords’ indignation and frustration that our rivers are not of the quality they should be and not in the state they should be in. That 14% figure is shaming. It is a high bar to reach. One wonders how many rivers there were in the past. One fact we must always remember is that we have been putting sewage, in one form or another, into our rivers for decades—centuries, even—but it has gotten out of hand and must stop.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, talked about her eponymous sewer: “Sarah’s sewer”. In my former life as the Water Minister, I remember being shown “Prescott’s sluice” in the East End of London. I am not sure that I want to have a sluice named after me; the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, who was here earlier, may be able to tell me whether it was named after him. I am trying to think of alliteration; perhaps my sewer should have been called “Dick’s drain” because, when I arrived as Water Minister in 2010, everyone was opposed to it. The chairman of Ofwat took me on to Westminster Bridge, pointed to the river and said, “It won’t be a different colour if you spend billions on a new sewer. It will look just the same but will have cost water customers an enormous amount of money”. It was opposed right across politics. The noble Baroness is right that her former colleague, Simon Hughes—the former MP for Bermondsey—fiercely opposed it. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and many others used to come and see me about it. Indeed, like a student going in front of a don, I had to go right to the top of the Government to tell Oliver Letwin why his fears were not to be realised. I am glad that I now see it under construction and that this iconic river, in one of the great cities of the world, will be cleaner as a result.

A healthy water environment is fundamental to a thriving economy, to abundant biodiversity and of course to public enjoyment of our beautiful rivers, lakes and bathing waters. The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, made the very good point that this is not subject to the four-year or five-year electoral horizons that most politicians look to; we want to see generational and multidecadal change. The Government’s 25-year environmental plan includes a commitment to restore three-quarters of our water bodies to close to their natural state, but we know that we need to do more to meet this rightly high bar. That is why we are going further and faster than any Government in protecting and enhancing the health of our rivers and seas. This has included ground-breaking action to massively reduce the harm caused by storm overflows.

The noble Lord mentioned the importance of civic society. Politicians can hold Governments to account but the public can too. A huge breadth of civil society groups stand up for their rivers, and I remember from when we ran a campaign called Love your River how important it is to give people their sense of place.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, I can admire the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, but I can disagree with his points. He talked about privatised ownership being some sort of fetish. Actually, I would say that £150 billion of investment in our water sector would not have been reached by any degree if it had still been in public ownership. The owners of those companies would have had to get in the queue behind the health service, pensions, the police, hospitals and so on. Renationalisation would require a future Government to buy out the pension funds that pay perhaps his and perhaps my pension, and perhaps the pensions of many people on low incomes. The cost of buying Thames Water was estimated a year or two ago—my figures might be out of date—at £12 billion. To buy out the entire water sector would be a terrible shame. It would be the wrong thing for investment.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

The numbers that the Minister quotes have little or no substance. If water companies had to meet their statutory obligations, the chances are that their income streams would actually be negative. They would be begging the Government to buy them out; we would not have to pay them anything.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I do not agree with that. I also believe it is good that international sovereign wealth funds want to invest in our regulated utility sector, but it has to be a regulated sector that cracks the whip when it needs to—that is, when those companies do not do what they are required to.

The noble Lord, Lord Oates, asked the House to take note of the impacts of current sewage disposal rates in UK rivers, and further noted the responsibility of water companies to alleviate these impacts. There are two main types of sewage discharges into the water environment by water companies: treated and untreated. Discharges of treated wastewater into our waterways are one of the most significant pressures on the water environment. Treated sewage is the biggest source of phosphorus within the water environment, and excess phosphorus is the most common reason a water body fails to meet good status. Water companies are required to reduce phosphorus loads into the water environment from treated sewage by 50% by 2027. We have recently consulted on a proposal for an Environment Act target to deliver even more progress and deliver an 80% reduction by 2037.

However, it is the untreated discharges that are understandably generating the most public interest. Discharges from storm overflows not only impact the ecology of the receiving water body but can also impact public health where water bodies are used for recreational activities. We have been clear that the current use of overflows is completely unacceptable. They were only ever meant to be an emergency measure but now they are seemingly part of doing business; anecdotally, it seems that only centimetres of rain can trigger them, and that is simply not good enough. We have made it crystal clear to water companies that they must massively reduce sewage discharges from storm overflows as a priority. If we do not see the change we expect, we will not hesitate to take further action.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

I am grateful to the Minister and sorry that I missed the first minute of his response. Following the theme of my speech, can I ask that another term be used instead of “storm overflows”? It is the biggest excuse that the water companies rely on. It sounds like, “It’s an act of God; it’s a storm; we couldn’t have anticipated this”. If another term could be found it would help to shift the debate.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness may well be right. I agree that there probably needs to be a change. Just behind us, the River Thames is subject to storm overflows that we are hoping to relieve with the Thames Tideway tunnel. With just a few millimetres of rain that one could not call a storm, many other towns, cities and rivers are similarly affected. We have made it clear that the companies must massively reduce sewage discharges from storm overflows as a priority.

My noble friend Lady McIntosh raised a number of good points. I applaud the Slowing The Flow project that she mentioned in the constituency that she used to represent. Importantly, she went on to talk about flooding. There is an easy line that campaigners and politicians use: “We should never build in flood plains”. We are in a flood plain here, in York and in most of our cities. Are we honestly saying that we should never build in those communities? We need to build flood-resistant buildings and to remember the impact that buildings can have on a creaking—sometimes Edwardian or Victorian—sewage system. That is why it is vital to link the pieces together.

We are the first Government to instruct water companies in legislation to massively reduce the use of storm overflows. Earlier this year, the Government published a new set of strategic priorities for the industry’s financial regulator, Ofwat. This set out for the first time the direction from government that water companies must take steps to

“significantly reduce the frequency and volume of sewage discharges from storm overflows”,

and that the regulator should ensure funding should be approved for them to do so. The Government have also committed to undertake a review of the case for implementing Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010—a case close to my noble friend’s heart. Schedule 3 was designed to set standards for the construction of sustainable drainage systems on new developments, and to make any surface water drainage connections to foul sewers of those developments conditional on the approval of the sustainable drainage systems. This, therefore, can also seek to address the right to connect, which has been of concern to many colleagues here and elsewhere who have mentioned it.

A number of noble Lords mentioned wet wipes. The Storm Overflows Taskforce is considering wet wipes as a contributing factor to overflows and treatment works. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, talked about the importance of stopping wet wipes getting into our sewage system. We have a call for evidence that will explore a possible ban on all wet wipes containing plastic. We continue to encourage water companies and wet wipe manufacturers to raise concerns with the consumers and try to get this situation changed.

The review of sustainable drainage systems in planning policy and other developments towards reducing new burdens on the sewage system from surface water drainage from new developments really matter. My noble friend Lady Altmann mentioned nature-based solutions. These need to be understood. When I first raised them with Ofwat a decade ago, it did not like them because they could not be measured. There has been a sea-change and now nature-based solutions are much more palatable to the regulator and all concerned.

In addition to the actions that the Government are taking, we are setting out clear requirements on water companies to put in place the mechanisms to hold them to account for delivering reductions in the use of storm overflows. Last year, our Environment Act brought in a raft of new duties on water companies, which are now legally required to secure a progressive reduction in the adverse impact of discharges from storm overflows. The Act also included a duty on the Government to produce a statutory plan by September this year to reduce discharges from storm overflows and report to Parliament on progress.

On 31 March, we published a consultation on the storm overflows discharge reduction plan, which will revolutionise how water companies tackle the number of discharges of untreated sewage. Water companies will face strict limits on when they can use storm overflows and must completely eliminate the harm that any sewage discharge causes to the environment. This will be the largest programme to tackle storm sewage discharges in history.

In the consultation, the Government proposed several specific targets for water companies to achieve. One example that addresses some of the points raised is that, by 2035, the environmental impacts of 75% of overflows affecting our most important protected sites will have been eliminated. These are the most important protected sites; they are used for bathing and are valuable ecosystems that are deteriorating and need to be addressed. By 2035, there will be 70% fewer discharges into bathing waters.

The Government will also publish a report setting out the actions that would be needed to eliminate discharges from storm overflows in England. We will be very clear about the costs that this would place on consumers and their bills. Under the Environment Act, water companies are now required to produce comprehensive statutory drainage and sewerage management plans, which will set out how they will manage and develop their drainage and sewerage systems over a minimum 25-year planning horizon. They must include how storm overflows will be addressed.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans asked some pertinent questions. The water industry was privatised in 1989, with the aim of attracting much-needed investment into the sector through private capital markets, rather than by relying on core government funding. Since privatisation, water companies have delivered £160 billion of investment, including £30 billion invested in the environment. This is equivalent to around £5 billion of investment annually. The privatised model continues to attract investment, and, for the period from 2020 to 2025, water companies have invested £51 billion, including over £7 billion of investment in the environment. This will reduce pollution incidents by 30% and deliver improvements to more than 12,000 kilometres of rivers.

The right reverend Prelate talked about the importance of joining up the pollution in our rivers with our farming policy, and he is absolutely right. I was in his diocese recently at the Groundswell event, which showed how farmers can weaponise their soil to protect rivers and the environment. He will be pleased to see the Government’s riparian tree-planting proposals, which will protect river systems by planting more trees on the edge of water.

My noble friend Lord Caithness was absolutely right to raise catchments; we need to think about this landscape to protect water bodies and, of course, aquifers. I am such a geek that I check the Pang Valley Flood Forum’s data whenever it rains to see the impact on my local river. I refer noble Lords to the evidence given to the EFRA Select Committee by the Government’s preferred candidate to take over the Environment Agency, Alan Lovell, who comes from a farming family and understands the impact, both beneficial and damaging, that farming can have on waterways and rivers. We hope that noble Lords will appreciate this appointment and the other work that we are doing with public bodies to make sure that this remains a priority.

The Environment Act also includes a power for the Government to direct water companies in relation to the actions in these drainage and sewerage management plans. The Act includes duties to massively improve the monitoring and transparency of the use of storm overflows. Water companies will be required to publish spill data in near real time and monitor the water quality impacts, upstream and downstream, of all storm overflows. Water companies and the Environment Agency will be required to publish summary data on storm overflow operation on an annual basis.

The Government have been clear to water companies that we will not hesitate to take enforcement action if they are failing to meet their obligations. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, that the fines get unloaded not on customers but on shareholders. The noble Lord is shaking his head, but this is true: it is a rule that we have imposed.

Since 2015 the EA has brought 49 prosecutions against water companies, securing fines of over £137 million. On 9 July last year, Southern Water was handed a record £90 million fine after pleading guilty to thousands of illegal discharges of sewage which polluted rivers and coastal waters in Kent, Hampshire and Sussex. The fine has been paid solely from the company’s operating profits, rather than added to customer bills.

We are holding the industry to account on a scale never done before. Ofwat and the Environment Agency have launched the largest investigations into all water and wastewater companies in England and Wales in the light of information suggesting that water companies in England may not be complying with their permits, resulting in excess sewage spills into the environment, even in dry periods.

Before coming to this role I was on the board of River Action, which seeks to address the issues around the River Wye, and across many other rivers. These combine the problems of sewage in the rivers and phosphates from farming and make sure that we are holding relevant people to account, so I have some form on this.

In conclusion, the frequency of discharges from storm overflows is wholly unacceptable. I have set out the Government’s ambitious agenda to deliver huge reductions in the use of storm overflows for the first time ever. This includes: reviewing the case for implementing Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act; a direction from government to Ofwat in the strategic policy statement setting out that water companies must take steps to

“significantly reduce the frequency and volume of sewage discharges from storm overflows”,

and that the regulator should ensure funding be approved for them to do so. Further measures include: statutory drainage and sewerage management plans, with powers of direction; a storm overflows discharge reduction plan, with clear, specific and ambitious targets; and statutory requirements for improved monitoring of sewage discharges.

It is time for water companies to step up and deliver on their promises. We have all set out our expectations that they must do better, as have the public. The Government recognise that healthy and well-managed waters are a cornerstone of our economy and our well-being. We are committed to collectively addressing all of these issues alongside our action on storm overflows to deliver on our pledge to hand over our planet to the next generation in a better condition than when we inherited it.