Water and Sewage Regulation (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my entry in the register and start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, and the members of the Industry and Regulators Committee, for the report. This has been a thorough and wide-ranging inquiry and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, showed, it was extremely timely, given the current focus on the water industry and the role of government. I also thank the committee for the recommendations from its follow-up inquiry, to which the Secretary of State will respond very shortly.

If the noble Lord or any member of the committee feels that our response was terse, I deeply regret that. If Defra had a fault, it was that in the past it used to indulge in reams of replies on this. We have tried to condense the points. Where something is in another document—for example, the Plan for Water—we have referred committees, individuals and others in our responses to those documents. That is perhaps a more economical way of doing this, but if people have confused it with a lack of respect for the work that has been done, I regret that.

However, I do not share the committee’s conclusion that there has been complacency or a lack of leadership from the Government on the topic of water regulation. No Government have done more to tackle the pressing issues facing the water industry. Back in 2013, as Minister for the Natural Environment and Fisheries, I set out that water companies should introduce monitoring for the vast majority of combined sewer outflows by 2020. This will be at 100% by the end of this year. The fact that we did not know where these outflows were is an example of complacency and one that we have set about dealing with. The increase in monitoring has meant that the Government and regulators better understand the scale of combined sewer outflow discharges, so that we can take stronger action to improve the situation.

I am delighted that this information is available not only to informed and determined Members of this House but to the wider public. A very good point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on monitoring. A wonderful citizen science project has been launched called the Riverfly project, which encourages people to assist the Environment Agency in monitoring. However, technology is moving very fast in our favour. It is now possible to put telemetry in our rivers that can give us, on our phones, real-time information on pollutants. We can then work with statutory bodies such as the Environment Agency to improve and deal with particular sources of pollution.

Just last month, we expanded our Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan, first published in 2022, to cover all overflows. We also added marine protected areas and shellfish water protected areas to the sites that are prioritised for early action. This is the largest infrastructure programme in water company history, with £60 billion of capital investment by 2050.

We have also requested action plans from water and sewerage companies on how they will improve every storm overflow in England. These will be published shortly. In April 2023, we published the Plan for Water, our comprehensive strategy to transform the water environment. The plan contains all the actions we must take to meet our water goals and transform the water system, and provides the leadership and long-term thinking that the noble Lord’s committee and others in this debate say is required. These are but a few examples of the comprehensive action that this Government have taken on water, and I will take the opportunity to address some of the specific points raised by noble Lords.

First, the committee raised crucial points about investment in the sector and the impact on consumers. This October, the water industry announced a planned £96 billion of investment between 2025 and 2030. This represents the largest investment in infrastructure ever made by our water industry, and an 88% increase in investment compared with the current five-year price review period. It shows that the sector is responding to the actions of this Government to clean up our rivers and seas, drive more investment and jobs in the UK, and ensure stronger regulation and tougher enforcement to achieve a step change in the water industry.

This investment comes at a cost. Noble Lords will have seen estimates from the water sector suggesting that water bills will rise by an average of £156 a year by 2030 to fund the increased investment. It is important to stress that these are not final figures; they are an opening pitch. It is important to remember that the current average water bill in England is lower than that in many European countries such as Spain, France and Norway.

For many years I have been talking to members of environmental NGOs and to parliamentarians from all sides who have told me that water bills need to rise. I have said to them, “By how much?”—and I get a prominent, audible silence from them, because nobody is prepared to say how much water bills should be. For just over £1 a day, households in this country receive all the water they need and have all their dirty water taken away. I know that all Members of this House are very mindful of the cost of living crisis for some communities. We have to balance that with our bills. But, if people are to tell Ministers and policymakers privately that bills should rise, they need to say by how much and show how they are going to reduce the impact on hard-pressed families.

Examples of the kinds of support and innovations that my noble friend Lord Agnew raised are there to be seen. I do understand the points he made; there are some wonderful schemes that are now receiving Ofwat’s approval and driving innovation in the sector. For example, Southern Water has £35 million to explore innovative options and pilot sustainable interventions to reduce storm overflow spills by, for example, building and constructing wetlands. I will come on to talk about that key point, which was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell.

Ofwat will now undertake a robust scrutiny process to ensure that these plans meet statutory requirements and government targets, to check that families are not paying for what companies should already have done and to give customers the best value for money. The Government are mindful that this announcement will raise concerns from consumers about their bills. In developing their business plans for 2025 to 2030, water companies have considered the impact of increased investment on customer bills and developed schemes that best suit the needs of local customers.

I was pleased to see Anglian Water proposing a new medical needs discount to provide direct financial aid to those whose medical needs require more water. This will be funded by the company owners and will help to support the most in need without adding to customers’ bills.

Therefore, while I note the committee’s disappointment in the Government’s decision not to proceed with a single social tariff scheme, it should be confident that this Government continue to work with industry and consumer groups to protect those struggling to pay.

Moving on to the topic of securing the investment needed to deliver our plans, I would gently challenge the committee’s view that the water sector will not be able to raise the required investment to meet our ambitious targets—a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and others. The water sector continues to attract international capital and there are examples of companies that have already secured additional finance to deliver their 2024 price review business plan. For example, Severn Trent Water announced on 29 September it had raised £1 billion of new equity from its investors. Investors have made clear that a reset is needed in the water sector, and the proposed £96 billion investment presents a clear step forward in that direction. It is now for Ofwat to review plans to ensure they strike the right balance of pace, while protecting customer bills. Companies must deliver value for money. Any increase in customer bills must be justified, efficient and deliver significant improvements in river quality and water resilience. Customers should only pay for new investment, not for companies’ past failings.

I will address very quickly some of the points raised in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, in moving this debate, talked about dividends, as did others. The average dividend payment represents 3% to 4% of the gearing and I think that is not exceptional—that is why it is attractive to pension funds—and I welcome the investment of organisations like international sovereign wealth funds and others. A dividend rate of 3% to 4% is not the kind of figure that many would see as greedy, or usury, in terms of the investment.

The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, also raised the issue of water demand, as did others. Current water usage is around 145 litres per person. In the environmental improvement plan, we have a target of 122 litres per person by 2037 and 110 litres by 2050. Those are tough targets to hit, but we have set out a process, working with the regulators and water companies, to hit them.

The noble Lord, Lord Agnew, spoke about the figure of £350 billion to £600 billion—a very wide bracket—which he said is the required investment to solve the problem of pollution. It is actually the cost of separating clean and dirty water and retrofitting that into the millions of houses in this country. That is, frankly, not feasible or possible to do. I like his scheme of water butts, and other schemes, and there are plenty that are working, and we want to see them rolled out. There are agri-environment schemes that are taking on flood management and using farmland to store water.

We are seeing a massive increase in interest in the creation of new wetlands, and I challenge the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, who said that the Government are obsessed with concrete and steel. That was the case when I was Minister for water in the coalition Government and I found that Ofwat was sceptical of nature-based solutions, because it could not measure them. It liked concrete and steel because it could measure the quality of the water coming in and out and see whether the asset was working. Nature-based solutions are more complicated, but we managed to convince Ofwat to let a thousand flowers bloom. Some of them might not work, but to say the Government do not like it is 180 degrees in the wrong direction; we love nature-based solutions, we want to see more of them, we are funding them through our natural environment investment readiness fund, we want to see biodiversity net gain and private sector ESG green finance being used for this, and we want to make sure that happens soon.

I would love to debate longer and harder about whether we should renationalise our water industry. It is a very dated and slightly binary argument, but I just feel that it is fundamentally yesterday’s argument. I hope we can move forward and see that the model has been independently assessed as having seen water bills less than they would have been if it had not happened, and investment greater. The Social Market Foundation believes nationalisation would cost £90 billion, and I think there are better uses for that money. I want to see it ploughed into out natural environment and water companies investing in—

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister. Since he referred to nationalisation, could he explain why is it acceptable to the Government that entities owned by foreign Governments can own utilities here, while there is no government-owned entity here that owns the utility? In other words, the privatisation that he referred to is a bit of a sham, is it not?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I think it has been wonderful to see pension funds invest—perhaps those paying the pensions of those of us in this Room. I totally welcome the fact that people want to invest in the regulated utility sector in this country, whether water, energy or any of the other sectors. It has seen a step change in investment and has helped keep bills down.

I was interested in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, who talked about our ability to do big infrastructure projects. I was involved in trying to persuade a lot of sceptical people, within government and outside it, of the importance of building the Thames Tideway tunnel. There was opposition from the Liberal Democrats, from Members of my party in both Houses, and certainly from the Labour Party. There was a belief that it would not work and that it would put up bills by £85 in the Thames Water area. It will actually put up bills by around £22. It is being built and it was the right thing to do. The Government stepped in as the guarantor. It is an example of a very large investment in one piece of infrastructure. There are many others that are much smaller that have—

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Either the Minister is agreeing with me or perhaps I was not clear. My concern is whether the water companies have the competence to implement these sorts of infrastructure projects. He has given a very fine example of a non-water company implementing the Thames Tideway. Will there be more of that? It seemed very doubtful that Ofwat had confidence in the water companies delivering these multi-billion pound infrastructure projects.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Multi-million pound infrastructure projects are being done by water companies; I will come on to talk about reservoirs. Some are doing them better than others; it would be a very strange world if they were all the same. The Government watch this matter very closely. We require investment and we want it done in the right way.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who is shaking her head before I have even said anything, said that water companies should be fined; they are being fined record fines. One was fined £90 million last year.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Baroness would allow me to finish. We passed more legislation in the Moses Room just the other day to ensure that unlimited fines can be imposed on water companies. I do not know where she has got the idea from that we do not.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I thank the Minister for his response. My point was that water companies can pay those fines very easily; they just pay and they do not care. We should assess the amount of the fine and then take shares from the company to that amount. That would make much more sense.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We make sure that the money comes not from customers but from shareholders so that it is fair.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

Further to the noble Baroness’s point, since 2010 Thames Water has been sanctioned 92 times and fined £163 million, yet it remains a leader in unplugged leaks, sewage dumping and financial engineering. What did that fine actually achieve?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I hope the noble Lord heard me say that we have changed the rules. Fines by the Environment Agency are no longer capped at £250,000. They can be unlimited and there can be criminal sanctions for companies that break the law.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, said that £82 billion was paid. I might have misheard him. My understanding is that Thames Water paid its parent company £82 million to finance its debt, but it has not paid dividends to its shareholders in the last six years.

I will move on to the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. His recommendation for a changing landscape of regulation may well have its time. We need to review these things now and again. It is above my pay grade, but perhaps over time we should think about it.

To those who say that we are not resourcing the Environment Agency, I say that we have increased its annual spend by £2 million a year. That has produced nearly 50 enforcement officers looking at the quality of water. We want to see leaks reduced by 50%, which is an enormous number of litres of water, and have set out very demanding roles for that.

I come to the responses from the Front Bench. I have made my point about nature-based solutions and I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, understood that. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that we will continue with this work. It is continuous; this is not an issue that is of a single moment in time. Our strategic policy statement to Ofwat showed an absolute step change in how we saw the regulatory framework for water companies. I suggest that she was slightly confusing Ofwat and the Environment Agency on enforcement. The Environment Agency is the organisation that enforces water companies; Ofwat sets the parameters and is the regulator.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I was suggesting that some of the money given to Ofwat could be given to the Environment Agency for enforcement.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I will take that away. I think that they are both funded properly. I want to make sure we continue to do so and allow them to carry out the work the Government require of them.

I will just touch on the reservoir issue. The draft plans contain proposals for multiple new supply schemes, including nine new desalination schemes, nine new reservoirs including an addition to the Havant Thicket reservoir that is being built, 11 water recycling schemes, and many new internal and inter-company transfers to share resources.

It is not just water companies that need to take action to protect our water supply—it is every single one of us. That is why the Government’s Plan for Water sets out clear action to reduce demand. The game-changer in the Plan for Water makes it easier to build reservoirs. The new water resources—through the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development, known as RAPID—and securing planning consent through the DCO process, including having water resources infrastructure as a national asset, are certainly making things better on that front. I hope we will see an easier process. The noble Baroness quite rightly raises Abingdon reservoir; that has been going on for more or less as long as I have been alive. I want to make sure that very important structures like that are built. We cannot just go through a circular process of planning inquiries, with very smart lawyers who delay getting important assets built.

With that, I think I have covered most of the points raised. In conclusion, I again thank the noble Lord and his committee for their detailed work on these important issues. I welcome the opportunity to debate these matters in the House. I have confidence that the plans that this Government have put in place will deliver the greater investment, tougher regulation and stronger enforcement needed to transform the water industry and ensure that the clean and plentiful water we need is available for generations to come.