Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]

Lord Deben Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a riparian owner and as the chairman of a company which helps businesses, including water businesses, to improve their environment and their safety. Normally I am very questioning of additional requirements for information from companies, because it can be very expensive and divert people’s attention. But in this case I support the general run of these amendments, which ask for the public to know what is happening.

First, a series of them ask the water companies to tell the public only what they have to know, because, if they do not know it, they cannot do what they have by law to do. Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, is right that the information has to be presented in a way that is easy to find. The comparison with the Modern Slavery Act—again, we debated modern slavery, so I know how it works—is that it is so easy to find it difficult to discover the facts. The whole idea of the Modern Slavery Act was that the public and the campaigners would be able to see how people were behaving, and check against it. This is an extremely important thing.

I also want to refer to a comment by the noble Baroness who spoke on the subject of fat. I do not know whether the Minister has had the pleasure of going down a sewer, but it is one of the most important acts of any Minister. I did it when I was, in some part, doing what she is doing, and you learn a great deal.

My worry about the Bill is that, if we are not careful, we will take away from some of the things that ought to happen—not in this Bill about water companies—to make the way in which we deal with sewage much more sensible. You can go down a sewer and tell exactly where the fast-food restaurants are, and you can tell which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. I would recommend to the Minister that she looks at what happens in Canada, where they insist that you measure the oil that comes in and then show how much oil has been taken away by an approved waste collector. We have to look at a number of things of that sort if we are going to make this legislation work. Do not expect the Minister to add to this legislation, but I think she will find that, unless we do some of these things, we are not going to deliver what is needed.

My last point is about telemetry. One of the things I think government is very poor at—and that is all Governments—is recognising how much they can change costs by insisting on necessary machinery. If this Government said, “We are going to monitor every river and we want the telemetry to do it”, the price would fall very considerably, as the noble Lord rightly said. Unless we do something like that, this Bill is frankly time-limited, because it will not deliver what we need, which is a constant measurement of our rivers and for that information to be provided, where we have suggested, to the public. If we do those things, we can both recover support for what is happening and do what my noble friends have put forward, which is to make it possible for water companies to say honestly that things that have happened were nothing to do with them. That is also important because, otherwise, we are laying a burden on them which, even with their current reputation, is an unfair one, and I would much prefer to be tough but fair.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I rise to speak to Amendment 87 in this group, and I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Browning, and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for their support. I agree with all that has been said, in particular what the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Deben, said. We do need a step change here, rather than just trying to fix the system—although I do want to talk about fixing the system.

The water companies are completely uninterested in transparency. It echoes so much of what we talked about: who is winning in this game, nature or money? Rather too often, the money seems to win out. According to the Observer at the weekend, they have been passing pollution tests that were not even carried out. The system is so clearly not working that it seems an obvious one for the Government to reset.

Amendment 87 would require the proactive publication of both regulatory and what the water companies call “non-regulatory” or “operational” data about their sewage works and their associated discharges of sewage effluent. Specifically, it defines water companies as “public authorities” for the purposes of the Environmental Information Regulations, amends the regulations to make clear that public authorities must make the information they hold on effluent or wastewater monitoring data completely public to anybody. It amends the appeal and enforcement provisions in the 2004 regulations to allow members of the public to complain to the Information Commissioner where such info is not proactively published.

This will cut through all the delaying tactics and refusals by water companies, by ensuring that data is proactively published, so that the public and campaigners will not have to keep asking for information and be endlessly given the runaround. Water companies will be required by law to publish it up front, without anyone having to ask. I support my noble friend’s amendment that this must all be in one place and easy to find. I feel that this is complementary to Clause 3 of the Bill, which requires discharges from emergency overflows to be published accessibly and immediately, so that action can be taken.

It is important to outline a little history of the context. Despite the success of the leading Fish Legal case, which went to the European Court of Justice a few years ago, in securing a decision that water companies are “public authorities” for the purposes of the Environmental Information Regulations, over the last few years the water companies have tried many different tactics, under the Environmental Information Regulations, to try to avoid disclosing data to those requesting access that shows how poorly performing their sewage works or CSOs have been. They have been extremely successful. The ICO has, in the past, supported various water companies in their refusal to provide data to a range of campaigners, due to the long-running investigations into them by the regulators themselves. The ICO’s mind seemed to change on this after the CEO of Ofwat announced that they did not consider the investigation by Ofwat and the Environment Agency as a reason to not publish. So now we are in a weird situation where the water companies, specifically United Utilities, are currently appealing against an ICO decision that went the other way, in which the ICO decided that information, specifically about how poorly a sewage works in Cumbria was operating, should be disclosed to the public. This case is ongoing, but we have an opportunity to send a parliamentary reminder that we are in no doubt that this information should be made publicly accessible.

This has highlighted to me not only the clear lack of transparency but the real lack of willingness. Despite several years of this very public scandal, companies continue to obstruct. This is what the Bill is really about: forcing them to change where they will not. We are well past simply asking them to do this.

Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]

Lord Deben Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 28th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 100. The issues of water pollution and the supply of clean water to everybody are ones I clearly care a lot about. But this Bill is just papering over the cracks. If we are going to paper over cracks, we could at least try a radical departure; perhaps we could try to bring some democracy into the regime.

I take issue with the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and the noble Lord, Lord Remnant. I have chaired a board and it was extremely successful. Part of that was because I invited people who thought very differently on to the board. We had 20 members or so. It was called London Food and we were tasked with writing a report for the Mayor of London on a sustainable food strategy for the city. It was successful, I would argue, partly because of my charm—obviously —but also because we had extremely good reports from every single aspect of food and food supply for London. We had a member from the City who was obviously a Conservative, we had an organic farmer and so on. We had a huge range of people, but we agreed on the strategy and we came to some very useful conclusions. This is what we need: we need some democracy in the systems that try to keep us safe.

Honestly, given the scale of the challenge that the water industry faces at the moment, in trying to make a system work that has proved not to work, we need to ensure that there are some new voices that can represent other parts of society that use the water system and care very deeply about it. We should also involve the people who actually do the work. My amendment brings in people from the workforce.

At the moment, the CEOs and senior staff are more focused on delivering dividends than they are on delivering a quality service, so having worker representatives on the board would provide a constant voice for those whose job it is to provide a service. The regulators have been captured by the industry they are meant to be keeping an eye on, so they are almost useless. This system should not be a national scheme but one based on the geography of the water systems themselves.

I am a believer in democracy and this would be an extremely useful way of making sure that a crucial industry for our society has some resonance with people out there. I am sure that this would be welcomed by the majority of people, just as I am sure that the Minister is aware that polls suggest a majority of people would prefer public ownership. Failing that, however, let us get the public in there, talking and being listened to.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments, particularly those placed before us by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. To the last speaker I have to say that there is a fundamental difference between chairing a committee to produce a report and running a business, which is what the water company has to be. She is absolutely right, however, that this Bill does not properly address the fundamental problem that we have two regulators and they have failed to produce a co-ordinated programme for the water industry.

I speak as somebody who knows a bit about it because, until 10 or 11 years ago, I was chairman of a water-only water company—so do not blame me about sewage as I never had anything to do with that. However, I do therefore know a bit about water companies. It was always impossible to meet the requirements of both the Environment Agency and Ofwat. Ofwat was under pressure from the Government to keep bills down and the Environment Agency, perfectly rightly, was saying that we should do more for the environment. As chairman of a water-only company, I was interested in doing something about the pollution of the water sources right from the beginning instead of having to clean them up, which is a very stupid way of dealing with it. Ofwat, however, would never allow one to do those things, whereas the Environment Agency was much more sympathetic.