Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Environment Agency. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, although I would not agree with the entirety of his analysis of the problem. I fully support the Bill and the most important reason for that support is that, through the contingent support and underwriting it puts in place, it will enable the Thames tunnel project to go ahead. The Thames tunnel is desperately needed. The problem has been mentioned on several occasions by other noble Lords. In an average year, at the moment, 39 million cubic metres of raw sewage, mixed with surface water run-off, discharges into the River Thames. That will reduce a bit with the Lee tunnel and with other work that is under way, but it will remain a hugely significant problem. The reason, of course, is the combined sewer overflows.

Most of London is served by a combined sewerage system that collects sewage from toilets, waste water from sinks and washing machines together with rainwater run-off from roads, roofs and pavements. The system was designed so that overflows would discharge into the River Thames to prevent the back-up of sewage flooding into people's homes and streets. The system does this through a network of combined sewer overflows, stretching along the River Thames. During the course of a normal year, these discharge into the river something like 60 times. This is simply unacceptable in the midst of our capital city, not to mention the potential dangers of infraction from Europe under the urban waste water treatment directive. The fundamental reason is that we have a modern city of 8 million people, and many more during the daytime, which has been heavily paved and concreted over during the past few decades and is sitting on top of a Victorian drainage and sewerage system.

The Thames tunnel, I firmly believe, is the only sensible solution to the problem. Doing bits and pieces with local solutions for particular spots of difficulty would get us some way towards a reduction of discharge into the Thames; it would not provide the overall solution to the problem. Yes, there will be issues about the precise location of work that has to be done in order to construct the tunnel, which needs to be carefully chosen in order to cause minimum disruption. The noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Fowler, are absolutely right to draw attention to the need to ensure that that disruption is kept to a minimum, but the tunnel itself has to go ahead.

The tunnel will not only stop most of the sewage pollution that we have at the moment but will also help the sewerage network to cope with future impacts that will come from increased population and from what climate change will bring. We know, for example, that climate change will bring more frequent, concentrated downpours of rain over a sustained period. That will cause the problem to magnify if we do not do something in order to address it.

The tunnel will help to reduce health risks to river users and it will help to bring the river up to the healthy condition that it can attain. One of the great success stories of the past 25 years has been the improvement of water quality in the River Thames. Twenty-five years ago the Thames was a dead river but it now supports over 100 different species of fish. We have made huge progress over the course of those 25 years but the one major remaining problem is the combined sewer overflows and the pollution problem that they bring.

There is another reason, as well as the Thames tunnel, why I support the Bill. Its provision to allow support for major water infrastructure work more generally, not just for the Thames tunnel, could be vital as we seek ways to cope better with drought in the years to come. Because of two exceptionally dry winters, south and east England at the moment are already in drought conditions. Some river flows and most levels of groundwater are perilously low. The period from October 2010 to February 2012—the past 16-month or 17-month period—has been the driest since 1922. Rainfall in the south-east for the month of February just past was only 40 per cent of the average for a February. We are going to have to work very hard over the course of the next six to eight months to balance the needs of public water supplies, agricultural irrigation, the industrial use of water and the ecology of rivers and fish stocks in order to ensure that all those needs can be properly met.

In the longer term, if we look forward to the prospect of more extremes of weather patterns as a result of climate change, there is a need for water companies to do more to sort out the problems of leakage—frequently another problem that they have inherited from Victorian pipework systems—but there is something else that is desperately needed. Water companies and water regions need to get better at sharing water between each other. Interconnections are already in place and in use in some instances, but more are needed and every support needs to be given to water companies to put them in place. I am not talking about a national grid for water, which would not make any sense at all, but we need to get water better shared region to region and water company to water company, in local places and particular locations—short interconnections that will make it possible for wetter areas to assist dryer ones. Crucially, this will need to be a high priority for the next Ofwat price review round. The sooner that the capital schemes to put greater interconnectivity in place can be prepared and put together, the better, and it may just be the case that in some instances the provisions of the Bill might help. I wish it good speed.