Sewage Disposal in Rivers and Coastal Waters

Lord Brougham and Vaux Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for securing this debate and for the excellent and comprehensive way that he has set the scene, listing the litany of disgraceful discharges and highlighting the prioritising of dividends, profits and shareholder interests above public safety. I have no problem with companies making profits or paying bonuses or high salaries, but not when they do so by behaving irresponsibly. I thank Surfers Against Sewage, River Action and the Rivers Trust for their helpful briefings. I will have some questions for my noble friend at the end, but I just briefly make a few, and I hope important, remarks.

Untreated human sewage is, as the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, being regularly discharged by water companies into rivers and coastal sea bathing waters—not just routinely but in a way that has been, for far too long, unregulated and not even properly monitored. I am pleased to see the recent changes in legislation, with water companies being required to take their obligations to avoid dumping sewage into our waters far more seriously, and the latest pronouncements from the regulator Ofwat that it will require greater investment in sewage treatment and wastewater treatment.

Noble Lords across the House can be proud of the amendments that we managed to secure in the passage of the Environment Act. I see my noble friend the Duke of Wellington in his place; he was so instrumental in driving forward the cross-party agreements. I thank my noble friend, and I thank the Government for accepting those. It is a great start, but we clearly and urgently need further action to halt this decline in water standards, both for the health of the aquatic ecosystem and, of course, to prevent poor quality water reaching our drinking water.

Indeed, the issue is also a real threat to the health of citizens or visitors who either live near, or swim in—or want to swim in—our rivers or seas. In January 2022, the Environmental Audit Committee said in its report that

“it is vital that the public can trust regulators to ensure … high levels of water quality in rivers”.

The committee also confirmed that placing a new statutory duty on water companies, to secure a progressive reduction in the adverse impact of discharges from their storm overflows, is a positive step. It recommended that the Government should ensure that the Environment Agency set “specific targets and timetables” for water companies’ statutory drainage and sewage management plans, and also said that Ofwat must prioritise long-term investments, such as storm overflows, in its price review process, especially championing the idea of nature-based solutions—quite right too. The actions of many of our water companies are truly shameful and investment is long overdue, with the fines for illegal sewage discharges often seen as an acceptable cost of doing business, rather than a shameful example of corporate behaviour.

I focus on the fact that it is not just human sewage disposal causing problems. A considerable element of the pollution is caused by agricultural sewage, often from factory farms whose effluent contains antibiotic-resistant bacteria, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in these farms’ intensive livestock rearing. Sewage and wastewater affect 36% of water bodies, and urban diffuse pollution affects 18%. Consequently, our rivers are now failing quality tests due to not just human sewage, but agricultural, or some element of industrial, pollution. We need to address both the human and agricultural sewage discharges. Some 26,000 tonnes of phosphorous ends up in UK waters each year, and the Environment Agency found that agricultural run-off was responsible for 40% of the damage to waterways. So even if we reduced or eliminated all the water companies’ sewage discharges, there would still be a significant problem of pollution in our waterways.

I have three questions for my noble friend. First, will the Government set an overall target for restoration of water quality in our rivers to include both human and other elements of sewage and other pollution? Will the Government accept the need to ban flushable wet wipes, which all the water companies agree are a considerable problem in causing some of these overflows? Finally, will the Government strengthen the proposed target of just a 40% reduction in agricultural pollution of our rivers by 2037?

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will be contributing remotely. I invite him to speak.

Pig Farming

Lord Brougham and Vaux Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

That this House takes note of the state of the pig farming industry in England.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will contribute virtually.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to bring before your Lordships once again the state of the pig farming industry in the UK. In January this year, I asked a Question about the terrible situation pig farmers were facing in my county of North Yorkshire. I now know that my concerns apply countrywide, and still nothing has changed.

Let us start with a few statistics. The National Pig Association, to which I am indebted for its excellent briefings, both written and verbal, tells me that the UK pig industry is worth £1.6 billion at the farm gate, £5 billion at retail, and around £14 billion in external sales and export values. I understand that the UK is the world’s 11th biggest pig producer, which is amazing, considering the small size of our country.

In 2020, more than 400,000 tonnes of British pork were exported around the globe to over 40 export markets, in a trade worth £655 million, so pig production, from farm to plate, is a very big and very important part of our national export market. We also rear our pigs to some of the highest welfare standards in the world, so it is no surprise that British pork is in demand across the globe.

However, the industry is suffering an unprecedented crisis. A perfect storm of labour shortages, Covid, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen pig farmers lose £500 million since October 2020. Many have been losing more than £50 per pig, some have had to cull and dispose of healthy animals, and others have gone out of business altogether. A recent survey undertaken by the NPA revealed that four out of five farmers will not survive another 12 months unless their finances improve.

When the Government finally intervened in October last year, they introduced temporary measures that benefited processors, not farmers. These farmers, through no fault of their own, have borne the brunt of this crisis. It is high time that the Government gave them the direct support they desperately need.

To add insult to injury, the Government are again delaying border checks on goods moving from the EU to the UK. British producers have been subject to quite significant non-tariff costs since January 2021 because of the requirement for export health certificates and lots of other bureaucratic hurdles that British businesses have had to deal with as a direct result of our leaving the EU. This has cost them tens of millions of pounds and left them at a disadvantage. Products from the EU are still allowed to move the other way without checks, though, thus making its pork products cheaper than ours.

This “open border” approach must be an absolute gift to unscrupulous businesses that can see a way to avoid customs duties and taxes, let alone the extremely serious biosecurity problems that could well arise if we inadvertently allow African swine fever, which is now sweeping across Europe, to get here because of our lax practices and lack of checks at borders. That is a terrible prospect because, if this disease reaches our shores, animal movement will immediately be restricted and enormous culls will have to take place. This would have the same devastating effect on pig production as it did on cattle during the awful foot and mouth outbreak some 20 years ago.

Pork is a staple for many UK households. Such an outbreak would be catastrophic for an industry already reeling from labour shortages, specifically in the processing sector. Those have been brought about because of Brexit, when thousands of EU workers in the abattoirs simply went home, believing that they had no future here. They were skilled workers—skilled butchers—whose training takes around 18 months. You simply cannot fill these highly skilled jobs from the domestic workforce overnight or give them to unskilled labour. This issue should have been foreseen a few years ago when we left the EU but, sadly, nothing has been done about it—or, if it has, it is too little too late.

The Government’s temporary pork butcher visas, which were intended to bring in 800 workers, were largely ineffective. They were given only a grudging six-month visa, so very few were taken up. Can the Minister tell me how many of these ungenerous visas were taken up? Can he also tell me why the Government continue to omit skilled butchers from the shortage occupation list, ignoring the advice of the Home Office’s Migration Advisory Committee? There are still an estimated 100,000 vacancies in the industry, so what is being done now, today, to mitigate this looming disaster? Or does the Minister believe that it will be all right because we will import more low-quality, sometimes illegally traded, meat from areas where the African swine fever virus is prevalent? Where are the safety checks at our borders?

Will the Government undertake to follow the example of Scotland, where the authorities use sniffer dogs at ports of entry to detect products of animal origin? This would be a very sensible protection for all of us. The complacency with which this whole industry has been treated is breathtaking. How did we reach a point where farmers had to cull over 60,000 healthy pigs? How can farmers be expected to survive if they are losing more than £50 a pig? How many more farms must go out of business before the Government act?

We know that we must become more self-sufficient in our food production now, following the catastrophic war in Ukraine and its effect on grain prices worldwide, so this is not the way to go about reaching that goal. It might help if the Government revised how they present their annual “Total Income From Farming” statistics, taking out those parts, such as subsidies and other irrelevant income statistics, which they use to puff out their policies.

All pig farmers ask is that they be treated fairly. They continue to have a backlog of around 100,000 pigs on farms across the country and still around 200,000 pigs a week are being produced, mainly for sale to our supermarkets, so it is easy to see the problem. Like any supply chain, if there is a weak link—in this case, an inability to get pigs slaughtered in a timely way—then the remaining pigs must still be fed and cared for, and the bigger they are when they get to slaughter, the more the abattoirs want to be paid for slaughtering and butchering them because, ironically, they say that their contract with the farmer was for a certain weight of animal. It is a perfect storm indeed.

Is there a solution? Well, the producers of pigmeat want the supermarkets to pay a fair price for homegrown pork. Some have already put up their prices a little, and the industry is very grateful to them for that, but others, including some of our largest supermarkets, have done very little, despite having made massive profits during the pandemic. It is time for them to step up and help our pork industry.

Finally, the Government must play their part. The Government Food Strategy, published just this week, states that

“successful domestic production is what gives us national resilience in an uncertain world.”

It is time to see action to match these words. The entire pork supply chain, from supply to retail, needs investigating urgently so that we never see this situation arise again. We need a commitment to improve visa schemes for skilled butchers while rapidly recruiting and training people from here into the profession. Action is needed by Defra and the Home Office because nothing has changed since I asked my Question back in January.

I hope that the Minister can assure me that help is on the way so that we can continue to enjoy fantastic British pork into the future.