Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]

Andrew Pakes Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 16th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)]

Phew! Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. [Laughter.] I am privileged to speak on Second Reading of a Bill that is of huge interest to my constituents and the country. After 14 years, the new Government have inherited record levels of illegal sewage dumping in our rivers, lakes and seas, an Environment Agency budget halved since 2010, crumbling infrastructure, with bursting pipes and record spills, and unaccountable water companies.

It is time to change that. It is time to hold our water companies to account and to start fixing the problem. That is why this Government have made the Water (Special Measures) Bill a priority. We need immediate action to end the disgraceful behaviour of water companies and their unruly bosses. We had more than 3,000 hours of sewage poured into our rivers in my constituency alone last year. A lot of sewage came out of the last Government, but certainly not the sewage we are talking about tonight.

After our sewage discharges, Anglian Water, which I know is many Members’ provider, belatedly had to pay £38 million to Ofwat. The year before, Anglian Water’s chief executive received a £1.3 million package in pay and bonuses, despite the company’s poor performance. Despite overseeing the catastrophic failure, water chief executives have paid themselves more than £41 million in bonuses and incentives since 2010. It gets worse: Thames Water’s boss took a £195,000 bonus at the end of March for just three months’ work. That is the unacceptable face of unaccountable privatisation.

Little wonder, then, that constituents writing to me are angry and that people have so little faith in the power of accountability and regulation, when so little was done by the last Government. I asked Ofwat these questions directly when it appeared before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee recently. The answers were wanting. That is why the Bill is so needed, and why Ministers have brought it forward so quickly. It sets out new powers to make water companies accountable, to ban bonuses for CEOs and senior leaders unless high standards are met, and criminal liability for water executives, and it sets out a new approach to ensuring that water companies live up to their environmental obligations and serve the public good. I want to put on record my thanks to those public servants who have been fighting hard against the water companies, despite the cuts of the last decade: those in the Environment Agency, the public servants in our water utilities, and members of GMB, Unison and Prospect who know what looking after our water and nature is really about.

The Bill treads where the last Government failed to go. Let us be clear about the Conservatives’ legacy: they failed to invest in broken infrastructure and let consumer money be spent irresponsibly on bonuses and shareholder payouts. The Bill rightly calls time on that unruly behaviour. It begins to restore trust in the management of our waterways and in public service and accountable regulation. I commend the Bill.