Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. The first opposes Clause 3 standing part of the Bill, and the second is Amendment 75. I am grateful to the Minister and the Bill team for the meeting we had. The earlier amendment in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and those in my name and others, possibly reflected the fact that the meaning of “emergency overflow” in Clause 3 is not quite as clear as it should be. This is simply an attempt to ask the Minister and, through her, the department, whether they are entirely convinced that the Bill is as clear as it might be in this regard.

I shall focus my remarks on Amendment 75. I am grateful that it has been included in this group, where it is most relevant. Doing so saves a separate debate on it at a later stage, where I felt it did not fit in. Subsection (2)(d), under the heading “meaning of ‘emergency overflow’”, concerns

“blockage of a sewer downstream of sewerage disposal works.”

That brought to mind the typical problem we encounter: fatbergs associated with restaurants and intense food production, which is very regrettable indeed. Are the Minister and the department minded to foresee an exemption from the provision for an emergency overflow and the conditions flowing therefrom? For example, such an issue is not within the power and authority of a sewerage undertaker or water company, which cannot be held responsible for fatbergs from cooking fat, wet wipes, et cetera. I welcome the fact that we have now banned wet wipes. That is a great development, but I do not know what the solution is to fatbergs entering downstream, causing these blockages and potentially leading to an emergency overflow. Does the Minister agree that it is very difficult to link that to the responsibility of a sewerage undertaker or water company, given that it really is not within their power to prevent it?

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 59 follows on very neatly from those put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. It too is very much a probing amendment and is largely designed to expose an issue or problem, and to alert the proposed industry review to possible solutions. It arises from a worry that I have had for many years: that we do not really know what is going on in our rivers. A decade or so ago, I remember hearing about a farmer who reportedly said that the chance of his small river being inspected by the Environment Agency was roughly one in 200 years, and thus he was not worried about what he or others might be doing to that river. This may have been an exaggeration, but the point he was making has a ring of truth to it even now, some 10 years later.

Then, the problem was that the Environment Agency had been starved of funds and, in many respects, chained to its desk. The number of staff deployed on the actual rivers had dropped away to the point of insignificance. However, the agency has always monitored our rivers, and certainly does nowadays. Specifically, it monitors downstream of major sewage works and CSOs, but it does so on a random basis. I should say at this point that it is a very skilled job taking a water sample and ensuring that it is a true sample and not contaminated either by the sampler—disturbing the river bed, for instance—or by some very localised issue in or near that point of the river.

Let us say that, in your sampling programme, you aim to take a sample once a month where it matters. That does not sound very much, but if noble Lords think about the hundreds of rivers in England and the literally thousands of sewage works and other licensed discharge points, even that would be a mammoth task for a whole regiment of inspectors. As a result, there is probably only a one in 100 chance of any sample being taken in any river which would coincide with the sort of event we need to know about.

The science of river quality shows—I am sure we all know this—that rivers are constantly changing. We all know the Chinese proverb: you can step into the same river only once. When we get a wet weather downpour, not only do we get overflows from sewers and CSOs, which can be very damaging to the aquatic environment; we also get discharges from urban run-off, often containing severe chemical pollution, including the possibility of persistent chemicals, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, in her amendment. Of course, during this same wet weather incident we also get agricultural run-off and pollution, which I know, as a farmer, is as damaging as anything else to our biodiversity, particularly when it involves excess phosphate or silage effluent.

On the subject of biodiversity, I should say at this point that the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology— I declare an interest, as I am about to retire as its chair—reckons that since 1970 there has been an 83% decline in our freshwater populations, which is a pretty devastating figure.

As I say, the chances are in excess of one in 100 of any random river sample being taken immediately after one of these wet weather incidents, especially when it happens to be a night-time storm or incident, so we never really know the true condition of any of our rivers; nor can we calculate the short-term or long- term ecological consequences of all those wet weather discharges—except that there has been an 83% decline in our freshwater populations. But there is a solution: continuous monitoring using telemetry. Install a monitor in a river and it can record the state of that river every hour, or even every half hour. Before noble Lords think that hundreds of monitors reporting every half hour would provide an excessive amount of information that would overwhelm the watchers, I should say that these machines can be preset to produce an alarm only when a particular parameter is broken. In other words, you are woken up in the middle of the night only when, for example, there is a shortage of oxygen in the river or an excess of E. coli.

The real point is that we can find out more about the long-term state of our rivers from continuous monitoring in, say, two weeks than we would probably find out in many years of random sampling. But—and this is a big “but”, which is why this is very much a probing amendment—although this technology is developing fast, I am afraid it is still very expensive. The price goes up according to the number of pollutants being monitored. Each pollutant needs a different way of measuring, and each sensor, for each pollutant, can cost an average of about £10,000. If you want a machine that monitors and reports on just five key pollutants, it would currently cost about £50,000, while a machine that monitors almost everything would cost around £100,000.

That is an awful lot of money, especially if you think about our desperate need for hundreds of these machines. There is no doubt that, if we were to develop and order hundreds of them, the price would fall dramatically. I put the amendment out there largely for the new independent water review commission to consider. Bearing in mind

“The water sector needs a complete reset”,—[Official Report, Commons, 23/10/24; col. 279.]


it has to ask itself what price we put on the cleanliness of our rivers and our ability to truly monitor them.

Rural Communities

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, on introducing this debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, on his maiden speech.

There is a perception, in our towns and cities at any rate, that people in rural England lead a picture-postcard existence, but for the majority this is certainly not the case, and many struggle to live decent lives. In 2017, the Social Mobility Commission reported that social mobility and inter-generational poverty was as bad, if not worse, in rural England than in some of our most deprived urban slums. One of the reasons for this sad reality is the gross imbalance in the funding provided by government for nearly all our rural services. For example, in central government support for local government, urban areas get some 45% more per head than rural. This means that rural council tax payers pay an average of 17% more than their urban cousins —nearly £100 per head more. It also means that the services now provided in our rural shires are the bare minimum.

In education, our average rural LEAs get fewer grants per pupil than the urban LEAs. This is not fair on our rural young. Turning to health, I say that the most expensive time for anyone medically is from 65 to death. While the over-65s represent 16% of our urban population, in the countryside that figure is 24%—a big difference. In Devon, an attractive county to retire to, some 26% of the population are over 65. Why is funding for public health services in Devon some 40% lower per head than the national average? A similar nationwide discrepancy means that there are fewer than half the medical professionals per 1,000 people in rural England than urban England: 50 versus 109. That is quite a difference.

There are almost no magistrates’ courts left in rural England. To get justice in our countryside costs the individual a lot of time and money. Also, as has already been mentioned, reliable buses are pretty hard to find. Thus ordinary life in rural England— shopping, doctor’s visits or even sports for the kids—is immensely hard when your only, but vital, family car has to go to work with the breadwinner.

For me, the worst aspect of rural deprivation is that there are almost no affordable homes to be found in rural communities, either to let or certainly to buy. Rural houses sell at a huge premium. In rural Cornwall, where I live, the average house price is some 12 times the average wage. The young just have to leave. This Labour Government were right, in their election campaign, to major on this shortage of housing. I was as pleased as punch, but I hope that they actually deliver—not only in towns but, vitally, in rural communities—and maybe even create completely new rural communities.

I realise that Defra will not be able to solve any of the problems I have mentioned so far, but I sincerely hope that it is seriously engaged in rural-proofing and in driving an understanding of the difficulties of rural living in all other departments. That is the key to the future of our rural communities.

I move from the problems to my dreams. In the words of the old Mars advert, I believe that all rural communities should be places where you can work, rest and play, so we need workspace, first, to create local jobs within the community. It used to be the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker—and still could be—but now you can add to that the possibility of online services in almost every field known to man, including to man on the other side of the world. For that, we need fast broadband in every community and possibly a change of planning rules.

Above all, for our work, rest and play we need housing, especially affordable housing. As I have said before in this House, we need to restore council houses. After all, local authorities have lots of land available, but we have to abolish or at least amend the right to buy. My favoured amendment would mean that occupants have to live in a council house for at least 10 years, or even 12, before they can exercise their right. Above all, the money then raised has to go back to the local council to build more houses and not to the Treasury.

Given more time, I would have spoken on the huge potential for economic growth in our countryside, which we know is a priority for this Government. I just say this: a recent report said that, if our rural economy could rival the rural economies of Scandinavian countries in GVA per head, the Treasury could expect to see £9 billion to £19 billion extra revenue per annum. That is quite a lot.

If the Government want growth in our countryside, they have to provide workspace for new innovative businesses, good broadband, housing for employees, good roads and infrastructure, as well as a medical service that can cope and local authorities that are not on the point of going bankrupt.