Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for allowing me to speak in the gap. I want to make three brief points, while declaring my interests as living in the Meon Valley in Hampshire and as a volunteer warden of the St Clair’s nature reserve on the River Meon, run by Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife trust.

My noble friend Lady Bakewell, in her excellent opening speech, drew attention to the recent prosecution of Southern Water in our area. We are near neighbours. This happened on 21 July 2019. When two pumps failed, the sewage overflowed from a pumping station, and three kilometres of river were affected. Two thousand fish were killed and the legal limit for the ammonia level was exceeded by 25 times. It was a pretty serious incident, so it was shocking in what I know is quite a small stream. What is particularly concerning is that it took four and a half years for the prosecution to come to fruition and the case to be resolved, when, on the face of it, it looked like a pretty open-and-shut case.

Therefore, can the Minister say whether the Government have considered whether this expensive and lengthy legal process is really necessary in this sort of case? Is it actually helping to get the long-term issues resolved? Are the Government looking at quicker means of resolving and dealing with the problems so that the industry, the regulator and the water companies can learn lessons quickly and concentrate on improving investment levels? That is my first question to the Minister.

Secondly, is one of the problems that the Environment Agency is seriously understaffed and underresourced? Has it not actually had, over the past 14 years, quite a lot of cutbacks in resources? Did this cause a delay in bringing this sort of prosecution? I hope the Minister can address this in his closing remarks.

Thirdly, there are three significant chalk streams in my part of Hampshire: the Itchen, the Test and the Meon. The first two are pretty well known; the Meon is the lesser-known treasure. The Itchen and the Test are designated as areas of special scientific interest. This gives them extra protection. A local councillor in our area, Jerry Pett, is leading a campaign for this designation to be granted for the Meon, and he is being told that Natural England is holding back on further designations as it is short of resources to promulgate them.

Can the Minister say whether the intention is to cover this issue in the review on the chalk streams strategy that, as I understand it, is being led by the Defra Minister Rebecca Pow, when the Government finally publish their chalk streams recovery package? When can we expect that to be published?

Sewage Disposal in Rivers and Coastal Waters

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a warden of the St Clair’s Meadow Nature Reserve for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, a land trust beside the River Meon, between Winchester and Portsmouth. Like the Minister, I have the privilege of living beside a chalk stream in the South Downs National Park.

Before I start, I thank two interns who have been working with me this week: Molly Waite from Itchen College in Southampton and Ben Franklin from Peter Symonds College in Winchester and now at Exeter University. I also thank two local campaigners in the Winchester area: Councillor Margot Power and Danny Chambers, who have helped me with some of the research that I have been doing in that area. It is not a day to thank or congratulate Ministers, but I would like to say to the Minister how much I appreciate his interest in rivers and the fact that he has a particular interest in the heritage and wildlife of chalk streams. It is good to have him replying to the debate today and we look forward to his remarks. I did not start by thanking my noble friend Lord Oates for organising this debate, because I had a part in arranging it. I apologise to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, if we got our timing wrong, but I do not think we have. There are a number of working groups in this area at the moment and it is important to have this debate.

One reason I quoted the names of some of the local people who helped me with the remarks I will be making is that, although the water companies are obviously very important, I certainly agree with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, that the local approach to this very important as well and I will say why. I am a social democrat and very different from the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, in my approach: I believe in private enterprise co-operating with Government and agencies to get effective progress in this area.

I start with a number of important principles. First, we need a long-term strategy. Every Government always think they can deliver things in the period of one Parliament. It is always impossible and never delivered. Therefore, we have to have considerable investment as part of a long-term strategy. I believe it has to be a bottom-up strategy, combined with a firm handle from the Government and the regulatory agencies. The statutory framework and a strong watchdog and regulator are clearly very important in this area. When I started living in my part of Hampshire, the Portsmouth water company was locally owned, locally run and all the people on the board were local. It was felt that they had a genuine commitment to the area. I do not disparage the work of Portsmouth Water now, but I feel that local commitment is missing, given what it was. That has been very common throughout the country. I accept that privatisation was important, to a degree, in bringing in new investment resources, but we have lost something. That local connection and commitment are important.

I ask the Minister: are the Government sufficiently concerned? I am very concerned that a lot of our utilities are owned overseas now—a lot of the water companies are. I would like to be reassured that the Government, if they felt it was necessary, would be prepared to use the competition rules to prevent overseas companies taking over some of these water companies. A degree of local ownership, local knowledge and local commitment is very important.

As I was saying, the local angle is important. I believe partnerships—the combining of councils, conservation groups and local pressure groups—in the catchment area of the rivers is very important if we want progress. I also mention the local press here. My local paper, the Hampshire Chronicle, has been running a campaign on river pollution in our chalk streams. That is very important and if it is galvanised by local voluntary groups and local people, it improves information and puts pressure on all the agencies to take the vital action required. I support the catchment area focus, and I will deal with that in a moment because that is very important to keep the pressure on for change and improvements.

Information is absolutely critical. We cannot monitor things and cannot get change unless we see what these companies are doing, what their performance is in individual rivers and how they are trying to improve them. We do not just need information on sewerage bills, we also want it on extraction. I find it very difficult: I would love to know what the extraction figures are for the river that goes past my property. I know roughly where they are taking it from, but I never seem able to get my hands on the figures. It would be very good if each catchment area tried to bring all this information together. It would help public knowledge and it would help public pressure, which is probably one of the reasons that it does not happen. We need the measurement of nitrates and phosphates in our water and the public need to be aware of it. Too many of our treatment works do not have upper limits on the nitrate levels that they are creating. That sort of information is very important.

I will give a couple of examples from the Winchester area where I live. It was interesting to have the information from St Albans, but in my area—the Winchester district—in 2021, there were 250 spillages, totalling 3,500 hours of sewage going into chalk streams. That is effectively a third of a year. It is an improvement on the year before, when there was something like 7,000 hours of sewage leakage, but then the weather was better in 2021.

I have looked at 15 treatment plants in this area. Looking at the detailed figures published for the last two years, most of the problems are at two treatment works: Durley on the Hamble and Wickham on the Meon. Wickham is, fortunately, quite low down on the river. There were 1,708 hours of spillages in Durley and 846 hours in Wickham. The year before it was 1,386 hours. Over half the problem in our area is at those two treatment works. I am very suspicious of people saying that we cannot tackle this because it will cost £300 billion or whatever it is. If I was involved in this business, I would concentrate on where the main problems are. Clearly, the treatment works in Durley and Wickham in my area are the places I would start. I would put that on the agenda, which is why today’s debate is timely. Please put it on the agenda for the government task force looking at this when it reports on 1 September.

Sewage is important but it is not totally overriding. We have already had, in the debate, the issue of extractions and lowering water levels; I think we need much more information on that. We need more measuring of nitrates and phosphates in the water. Currently, there is a campaign in Alresford in my area, on a tributary of the Itchen, where there is a problem with phosphates. It is the centre of the watercress industry and it has been discovered that no limits are being set by the Environment Agency on the treatment plants in Alresford. What is happening in the local rivers just leads to a growth of algae and weeds. The amount of silt in the rivers increases, and you get a clogging up of river flows as well as a restriction of light, which affects the invertebrate wildlife in the rivers. That all contributes to a diminution of the natural life of those river areas.

I believe in the catchment area strategy, because that focusing on individual rivers raises public awareness. We need to do far more of this in schools, local media and local communities. In my own area, I sometimes wonder whether people appreciate the great heritage they have in their midst. I am appalled at the litter that is left on the roads and left by people walking along the river, which can do great damage to the wildlife if it is not picked up. Fortunately, there are people like me who go around doing that, but it is extraordinary that local people are so selfish in leaving that debris, which can only diminish the wildlife in our rivers.

Work needs to be focused locally. There are lots of bodies that want to be involved, whether it is conservation groups, fishing groups, farmers or the local authorities. We need to bring together information on the local catchment areas, which will raise public awareness and hold the bodies responsible to account. We need the commitment of farmers, fishing groups and others, even householders with cesspits in the river valleys. They all need to be co-operating and making sure they are contributing to the improvement of our environment. I would like to see our chalk stream areas declared environmental heritage areas—slightly selfishly, because I live in one—as they are that important.

In the last debate we had on chalk streams, in November, both the Minister and I combined to create the association of Viscount Grey, who was the Foreign Secretary during the First World War and had a cottage on the Itchen, and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, who joined him on a walk along the River Itchen in about 1911. Those two individuals made a record of the wildlife they saw when they went on that walk. Your Lordships would be shocked if you compared the list with what you find today. They were just looking at the bird life, but if you looked at the invertebrates in the river and saw the lack of flies and insects along the riverbanks, you would be quite shocked. That is why the debate is timely and why we need a strategy for all rivers, but particularly chalk streams, which deals with these problems, and it should have the highest priority.

Pesticides: Thiamethoxam

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Excellent work is being done and I do not think we will be having this conversation in future years. I very much hope we will not. Enormous amounts are being done through integrated pest management. There is a variety of different breeding techniques and husbandry for sugar beet. So I very much hope that there will be no need for derogations in future.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, what assessment have the Government made of the health of the bee population in this country, and what contingency plans will they consider if it is deteriorating?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Government have a pollinator strategy and work closely with the bee sector to make sure that our policies reflect the needs of pollinators right across the piece. The sustainable farming incentive, the key part of our ELMS announcement, has an integrated pest management part. These are the sorts of policy products that have come out of work that we are doing to enhance bee health across the country.

Catchment Based Approach’s Chalk Stream Restoration Strategy 2021

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Chidgey on the timing of this debate after the sewage and water vote last week, and coinciding with the COP 26 conference. The issue of chalk streams is a very valuable subject to raise, particularly this week. My noble friend gave a very comprehensive review of the issues and my colleague and noble friend Lord Addington commented on the importance of the recreational uses and plans for these areas.

It is one of the pleasures and privileges of my life that I live in the heart of the Hampshire chalk stream country, right beside the River Meon. I am actually rather disappointed that nobody else in the House lives as close as I do to a chalk stream. The River Meon is the third of the three great Hampshire chalk streams: the Test, the Itchen and the Meon. It is the fastest-flowing of the three and is remarkable for the fact that the fish have to work harder, and are smaller, slimmer and fitter as a result, than their brethren in the Test and the Itchen.

I am a warden of the St Clair’s Meadow wildlife trust on the flood plain of the Meon, right opposite my house. It is a community-owned project of over 40 acres, financed by community donations and a Biffa Award from landfill tax revenues, and it is run by the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. Before I say a bit more about the trust, I will take your Lordships back over 100 years—I think the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, will certainly appreciate this—to a man who probably did more than anybody else to promote chalk streams.

Not far from my home on the Meon, the great Liberal Foreign Secretary—also the longest-serving Foreign Secretary, from 1905 to 1916—Viscount Grey had a fishing lodge on the banks of the River Itchen. He used to catch the train from Waterloo station to Winchester and walk along the riverbank to his lodge most weekends in the summer. He wrote two books, one a very famous one on fishing and one on the charms of birds. He was an ornithologist. He was subsequently criticised for spending too much time fishing in the summer of 1914. I think this is slightly unfair. It is said that he should have been working to avoid a world war. Remarkably, the first time he actually went abroad was earlier that year in 1914, but who can blame him when he had a bolthole as idyllic as he had by the River Itchen?

The lodge no longer exists—it was burned down after the war—but I have often walked along that river footpath where the foundations still lie, and I cannot blame him for spending so much time there. It is an idyllic place, so much better than the formalities of Chevening or even Chequers, and an ideal place to relax and reflect on the cares of the world.

But I digress. Let me take your Lordships back to the Meon to reflect on how remarkable these chalk streams still are and how we should be trying to retain the idyllic environment, which would perhaps have been more evident 100 years ago at the time of Viscount Grey, without the current threats. The Meon rises in the Downs, five miles to the north of where I live. It is spring-fed, and it enters the sea in the Solent, just south of the medieval abbey of Titchfield, owned in Tudor times by Shakespeare’s sponsor, the Earl of Southampton. Every morning when I am in Hampshire, I walk along the banks of the Meon with my dog. It always makes me sad on a Monday to face the fact that I have to come up to London.

Let me share with your Lordships some of the pleasures of a chalk stream. At the start of my walk up the Downs, looking above the river, you see the skylarks springing out of the cornfields in the summer and in the hedges in the winter. The same crops have been grown in those fields since medieval times, as the Bishop of Winchester’s records show. He used to own the land. As you walk down to the river, you listen to the plop of the water voles as they scurry off the banks. You look for the trout in the river—the clear waters and the gravel beds over the chalk—and hope to see the fish rise for the surface flies. You are more likely to see them in the evening than the morning. In the sky you see the ruthlessness of nature: the circling of the herons, if they are not by the riverbank looking for the trout.

Very rarely, you might be lucky to witness the bright blue of a kingfisher coming out of the banks. In the midday sun, there is a profusion of butterflies. You will note the overnight digging of badgers searching for worms on the soft banks, and if you are really lucky you might hear, but will not see, the otters slipping into the waters. You might disturb a deer or two. You will notice now that the banks have been fenced off to allow for their restoration and to encourage wildlife, while black-horned cattle graze purposefully on the flood-plain meadows that have been there since medieval times. These cattle have been specially chosen to encourage back other wildlife and birds such as lapwings.

In the winter, the river breaks its banks on to the meadows, but in the summer the water levels sometimes fall too low. That is the first sign you have of the threats to this idyllic scene. The abstraction by the local water companies, particularly in summer, is a major problem. Sometimes in the smaller tributaries—some of which flow through my garden—you see the ruthlessness of nature as the water sinks and the stranded fish in the diminishing pools are devoured and devastated by the predatory herons.

Until recently, grazing cattle and sheep destroyed the banks of the rivers, but this has been arrested by the fencing and restrictions to allow vegetation to grow back on the banks. Intensive farming and fertilisers have damaged the draining patterns and powered nitrogen into the river, encouraging weed growth and undermining nature’s balance. We have been lucky, with the help of the Wildlife Trust, to push back some of these damaging tendencies. It is now an important pressure group against the extraction by water companies and for managing the land and agricultural practices so that they are adapted to restore the wildlife balance.

So what should we be championing as we go forward? First, we need to raise knowledge about and admiration for these remarkable chalk streams. They are jewels that are really worth preserving. They need the recognition and protection of an environmental equivalent of world heritage sites—they are world environmental sites. We need more recognition in local schools and pride in our local communities in these remarkable amenities. Often, although they live locally, people do not realise the wealth and potential that these chalk streams provide.

The environmental work of the European Union helped banish a number of pesticides and brought some control over fertilisers. But we still need to do more work on excessive nitrogen and more to counteract some of the damage from too-intensive farming. We want greater control of water abstraction. I find it frustrating that nobody in areas where water is abstracted knows what these agreements are. If local people knew the scale of these abstractions, they would be amazed and infuriated. We need publicity about what is being abstracted and when.

Where I live, there are huge water resources—artesian basins under the downlands—yet, even though we have very cheap water rates, we are still abstracting from the rivers in summer months, when the water levels are already lower.

We need more community schemes, not the Government just implementing measures. We need communities building from the bottom up to take control and respond, so that they themselves can see and benefit from the restoration work that they do.

Viscount Grey may have done much to promote interest in chalk streams 100 years ago. Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, in the 1960s was the first sign to me of the destruction we were exacting on the delicate natural balance of areas such as chalk streams, which I am now delighted to play my part in trying to protect. We owe it to future generations to acclaim them and restore them to their former glory.

Abattoirs: Non-stun Slaughter

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, as I say, we do not intend to move away from this long-standing right, but we want, with the other measures that we are considering, to ensure that all slaughtermen hold a certificate of competence, which is clearly essential, and that the official veterinarians can see from the video footage that everything done in all slaughterhouses is carried out in a proper manner. We certainly want to advance animal welfare in all slaughterhouses.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, the growth figures that the noble Lord, Lord Trees, talked about are in excess of what is needed to meet religious needs for the slaughtering of animals without stunning. We have been leaders in the European Union on animal welfare, so have the Government looked at the German system of quotas as a way of bringing the numbers down, and if not, why not?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we should get the figures in March and we will want to look at the survey, which will be put in the public domain at some point this year. It is also important to say that we want to see what proportion of this meat is going for export. We want to look at where the livestock is sourced and the market distribution, including exports. Once we know that, we will be in a position to give this issue the consideration it deserves.

Thames Tideway Tunnel

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

What an interesting suggestion, my Lords. The standard model in the water sector is for customers to pay the financing costs of the company’s capital expenditure on underground assets together with a charge to reflect expenditure required to keep them in a serviceable state. I do not think that we would find investors if we were not able to finance it in this way.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford]

My Lords, over the past two years Thames Water has paid out £650 million in dividends and £100 million in management fees. Can the Minister assure the House that Thames Water is not simply a private equity vehicle designed to save tax for its overseas investors at the expense of London customers and UK taxpayers, who are supposed to stump up for its infrastructure investment?

[Lord De Mauley]

Yes, my Lords; Thames Water pays its tax. All UK companies are allowed to claim capital allowances when they spend on capital investment programmes. Tax relief is allowable against the capital expenditure incurred with the aim of encouraging investment by companies. Water and sewerage companies have significant capital programmes in comparison with their revenues. They therefore benefit from tax allowances proportionately more than others. HMRC remains vigilant in ensuring that companies operating within the UK pay the tax they are legally obliged to pay.

Schmallenberg Virus

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford]

My Lords, given that the midges that carry this virus come from the dreaded mainland of Europe, should not today, of all days, the Government emphasise the need for partnership, co-operation and trust with our European partners? Can the Minister tell us how this country is benefiting from the €3 million that the European Union has provided for research on this virus?

[Lord De Mauley]

Yes, my Lords. The AHVLA is working closely with similar bodies across Europe and is carrying out joint research funded by national Governments and the European Commission. We are funding research at AHVLA Weybridge into the pathogenesis of SBV and the immune response to it. This will provide valuable information of its implications and impact. We will share this information, when we have it, with our European colleagues.