Rivers and Coastal Waters: Sewage

Lord Oates Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, like all public bodies, the Environment Agency had to make difficult spending decisions in 2015. However, since 2015 the agency has brought nearly 50 prosecutions against water companies and secured fines of over £136 million, including a £90 million fine for Southern Water. Defra and its agencies also received a £1 billion increase in overall funding at the spending review and, given that this is a government priority, much of that resource will be spent tackling this issue.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

Can the Minister tell the House what calculation the Government have made of the economic and ecological cost caused by the continued discharge of untreated sewage into coastal waters and inland waterways? Does he recognise that, if the Victorians had taken the approach of the Government, and apparently of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, they would have determined that laying the original sewage network was prohibitively expensive, and we would still be throwing our waste into the street?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I think the noble Lord is wrong about that. I am sure he would be the first to applaud the use of nature-based solutions in treating sewage run-off around the country. I think my noble friend Lord Moylan was advocating a continuation of that approach, because it is much cheaper and has all kinds of benefits that go beyond simply purifying the water. That is preferable to spending potentially unprecedented sums of money in other ways.