Environment Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

At face value, these clauses alarm and unsettle those farmers and growers who will be affected. Assurance of proportionality is essential, together with close engagement between all parties and clear guidance.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, particularly as I agree with a lot of what he had to say, although, as he will see a minute, I come to some slightly different conclusions. Where I agree with him is that this is a tricky problem, and I speak as a farmer who grows and irrigates potatoes—or at least my son now does. I am aware that you can hardly sell unirrigated potatoes nowadays. It is all about skin finish: in the old days, you could, because mostly, of course, we peel the skin off our potatoes before we eat them, so the skin should really not matter. It should be the taste of the flesh underneath that is important but, apparently, or so we are told by the supermarkets, skin finish is king, and for that I am afraid that you need irrigation.

The second thing that makes this a tricky problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, referred to, is the huge capital involved in most of the crops needing irrigating. Returning again to the humble potato, you need stone separators, potato planters, ridgers, harvesters, grading lines and cold stores, not to mention the underground and overground pipes, as well as the pumps and irrigation equipment itself. All this could easily come to well over a million pounds, which huge sum most farmers will have had to borrow from the bank. The threat of all that borrowing going to waste or not returning the required interest is indeed frightening, although if your abstraction licence dates back to the 1960s or 1970s, as some of them do, and your capital is all paid off, it is slightly less frightening.

A third factor that makes this a tricky area is that whereas a water company has a network of pipes and many different sources of water, and so can juggle its extraction plans to cater for where the water might be in abundance, the farmer can get his or her water only from or adjacent to their own land. They cannot abstract water from a different catchment or a different aquifer from the one they farm on.

Why, might the Committee ask, am I wanting to shorten the leeway allowed to farmers from 2028 to 2023? The answer is that I am not; what I am saying is that no compensation for amending an abstraction licence should be allowable after January 2023. However, the Environment Agency should be able to extend the enforcement of the necessary licence modification for several years if it believes time is required by the individual business—for the building of a reservoir, for instance. This should be done on a case-by-case basis, and in that way most modifications can probably happen sooner rather than later. However, and this is my key point, the days when you can be compensated for not causing environmental degradation have, in my view, long since gone: you cannot be compensated for not causing environmental degradation.

At the risk of straying into the realms of the bleeding obvious, I should state that, as has been made clear again and again in our discussions on this water chapter, some of our rivers are in a pretty poor state: sewage overspills, road run-off, agricultural run-off and generally just having too many people or too much livestock per square kilometre all contribute to ever more damaging stuff—to use a highly scientific technical term—entering our rivers. Unless we can ensure sufficient water in the river to dilute that stuff, then trout, grayling, carp and perch, dragonflies, mayflies, shrimps and dippers could all disappear, along with irises, water violets and multi-fruited river moss, to name but a few lifeforms that are important inhabitants of our rivers. This dilution is important, and it must have been obvious to all farmers for years that anyone causing environmental damage by overabstraction was going to have to change what they did and how they did it; but, in some cases, very little has happened, and too many farmers have taken no action at all. There are still people extracting from rivers in the middle of summer.

It is possible for a farmer to build one, two or even three small on-farm reservoirs to ensure that they abstract only during the winter months. It is possible for farmers to share reservoirs. It is possible for licence sharing to exist between abstractors in a single catchment. It is possible to use precision irrigation systems which save huge amounts of water. There are a variety of possible solutions and it is to be hoped that all abstractors will be able to find some form of compromise on rivers and waterways where the environment is threatened. I gather from data produced by Defra last year that this amounts to some 18% of our rivers and waterways and over a quarter of our groundwaters. We cannot just go on allowing abstractors to continue to cause environmental degradation.

My proposal is that the Environment Agency should start talking now to farmers on an individual basis with a view to modifying licences which are deemed to be damaging rivers, especially where there are habitats of particular biodiversity importance. This obviously includes SSSIs, referred to in my Amendment 179A, which largely speaks for itself and I would have thought was indisputable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I apologise in advance since I shall probably speak for too long on this group, but many of the amendments are either in my name or of interest to me.

My Amendments 188A, 188B and 188C really speak for themselves. To some extent they are probing amendments. The question of water quality, how such quality is defined in relation to current and future possible pollutants and how these substances should be dealt with is clearly important to businesses and individuals across the country whose lives are in many ways touched by our rivers and waterways. As my explanatory note says, there is significant public interest in water quality, so we feel that the Secretary of State should set up a technical advisory group with the purpose of providing independent—I stress that word—advice to Ministers on the measurement and improvement of water quality standards. It is only in this way that the public will have confidence that the regulations, introduced by the Secretary of State and properly discussed by Parliament under the affirmative procedure, will be fair and equitable to all parties, including, most importantly, to the rivers themselves.

I turn to Amendment 189 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and others. I particularly support subsection (4) of the proposed new clause, the bit on compulsory smart metering; I was going to table my own amendment on that subject but they beat me to it. The 2009 Walker review, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, gave a clear message that metering is the fairest way of charging for water, and that after meters were installed the majority of households found that both their water charges and their consumption of water fell.

I believe there is no other commodity for which we do not pay according to use. That seems strange to me, particularly as we know that the commodity can be in very short supply. I am told that we are the only country in Europe that does not charge for water by volume. Metering also has the benefit of making people realise that water is not a free good of which there is an endless supply.

In 2014, during the passage of what is now the Water Act, Southern Water, the leader in this field at that time, reckoned that 100% metering would result in a 12% saving in water. As I said then, that is a gigantic amount of water to remove from the system day in, day out. I also said, thinking of people who might be detrimentally affected, that

“if there was a universal tariff for every litre of water used, some poor households with large families”

might suffer from such a change.

“However, with transitional tariffs, social tariffs and even block tariffs and the like, and with the meter in the house and not at the end of the garden, it is perfectly possible for everyone to benefit from 100% metering. There is absolutely no doubt that the environment would win hands down”.—[Official Report, 27/1/14; col. 1028.]


That is what I said then. Now, however, with smart metering, not only have the costs come down but the benefits to the environment are considerably greater. For instance, last year Thames Water announced that its smart metering programme in London has helped it to locate and repair 200 leaks across its network every week, leading to a reduction in overall leakage of 15% in one year—the biggest reduction in a century, I believe. Anglian Water has also said that in its trials it appeared that smart meters could reduce consumption by an average of 18%, considerably higher than the 12% being put forward by Southern Water seven years ago.

Meanwhile Arqiva, which has probably been lobbying us all—and one should always take private lobbying with a pinch of salt—said that its analysis shows that fitting just 1 million smart water meters in the UK each year for the next 15 years could result in saving at least 1 billion litres of water—one thousand million litres— per day by the mid-2030s. That is the most enormous amount of water and it would be the most enormous boost to the environment that we could possibly give.

Bearing in mind the conversations that we have had in this chapter about the excess demands on our sewage treatment works and the problems of storm overflows, we should think about the reduction of household outflows into sewage treatment works that universal metering would have. If the use of water goes down, that will inevitably be reflected in the amount of water sent down the drains. Maybe that figure of billions of pounds that the Minister was talking about to sort out CSO issues could be dramatically reduced if less water arrived at our sewage treatment works in the first place.

So, what has to be done? The first thing to do is to remove the link between metering and the water-stressed area classification; that is vital. Secondly, we should ensure that the 2024 price review investment planning process is used to enable water companies to accelerate the rollout of smart water meters. Thirdly, picking up on Philip Dunne’s Private Member’s Bill, I believe the Government should regulate, and I quote from his Bill,

“requiring by 2025 all domestic properties to have a metered water supply when being leased, rented or sold”.

I would add the word “smart” before the word “metered” because of the evidence that I have already quoted from the Thames and Anglian water authorities.

Lastly, the Government should mandate the rollout of smart water meters to every household and business by 2035 at the latest. These are all firm government measures that would not only benefit the consumer but give back to the environment—and, for that matter, other abstractors, bearing in mind the last group of amendments—literally billions of litres of water.

I will not say much about Amendment 189A in my name because in many ways its length and detail speak for itself. The Bill has a lot of new strategies and plans in its water chapter: water resources management plans, drought plans, drainage and sewerage management plans, and now of course storm overflow discharge reduction plans. However, this is the Environment Bill, which we hope over the next few days will give us a vibrant, sustainable and well-managed environment in terms of our air, soils, seas, countryside, woods and other habitats. Although we have discussed the management of our water over our recent groupings and how it affects water companies, farmers, anglers, canoeists and other users over the short term—and by the short term I mean anything under 10 years—we do not seem to have an overall long-term strategy for creating a high-class water environment that will ensure that our aquatic biodiversity flourishes.

In the context of the myriad human uses of our waterways, how do we ensure that we have enough water for the flora and fauna that should rightly belong to our aquatic world, including the 500,000 hectares of wetland habitat promised in the 25-year environment plan? From the smallest of bugs through amphibians, fish, mammals, birds and our rich aquatic flora, we need an all-encompassing water strategy for England and its nature, as my amendment proposes.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. I have added my name to several of those tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. I shall speak to my Amendment 189, which is about reducing household water usage, and I am grateful for the support for it from the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Young of Old Scone, and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.

It is predicted that by 2050 there will be an increase of 7 million people in the UK and our water level supplies will be down by 15%. Indeed, a recent report from the climate change adaptation sub-committee said that tackling water metering is one of the issues that we need to address urgently, that it would deliver some of the best cost-benefit ratios and that the sooner we started tackling it, the better. We need to do it so that there is enough water for people and for our rivers; I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, are no longer in their place, because clearly our chalk streams also need all the water they can get. It is right for tackling our climate change emissions because heating water in homes accounts for 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Equally, farmers, whom we heard from so eloquently in last debate, need the water to maintain successful farming and other business. We need the Government to act.

I was therefore pleased to see the announcement in the Secretary of State’s Written Statement in the House of Commons last week that the Government intend to introduce mandatory labelling on the water efficiency of household appliances. That is a positive step and I congratulate the Government on making it but, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, so eloquently said, we will not make the cuts we need in amounts of household water—down from around 142 litres to 110 litres per person per day, which the Government say they want—unless we have labelling and minimum standards, combined with changes to building regulations. It was notable in the comments of the Secretary of State last week that he did not definitively commit to minimum standards or changing building regulations. There was a vague date and “We might look at it in the future”. We cannot get the figures we need without those.

Frankly, I am coming to the conclusion that the Government will not go anywhere near changing houses, because of the influence of various property developers. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who is not in his place, made a point in the debates last week about the influence of Taylor Wimpey on this Government and on housing developments. It is a scandal that we are not building houses that are carbon efficient and water efficient now. We are leaving the tab to be picked up by the environment, in the future, and the Government should be ashamed of that.

I partially congratulate the Government on taking up part of my amendment on labelling appliances but they have made no commitments on compulsory water metering. I raised this back in 2014 with an amendment to the then Water Bill. That is the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, spoke so passionately about. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, that when you are a junior partner in a coalition, you do not always get what you want, whether about water abstraction or metering.

Since then, people who are more significant than me have added their voices to the cause for compulsory water metering. In addition to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, the Climate Change Committee is now saying we must introduce compulsory metering. The majority of respondents to the 2019 Defra consultation on reducing household waste supported compulsory water metering, and even the National Infrastructure Commission, which is not well known for supporting measures in this area, is in favour. I will not repeat the figures that were so well articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, but will say that, at the moment, only half of UK houses are on compulsory water metering. We need to reduce usage hugely, and the only way to do it is through compulsory metering.

I ask the Minister if he can give the Committee any idea how the Government intend to meet their target of 110 litres per person per day, if they do not accept all the recommendations of my Amendment 189.