Water Scarcity

Debate between Anna Dixon and Tim Farron

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a joy to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Stuart. I plan to be here for the next two debates, so we will have a lovely afternoon together as we have apparently just rejoined the EU on a tied vote. The tie means that we win on the away-goals rule, which is good to hear. All legislation should be settled like that in future.

I give massive thanks and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne), who not only secured the debate but led it superbly. All contributions from parties present have been excellent, focused on their communities and on trying to solve the issue. It was great to hear the affinity between the DUP and the Liberal Democrats; after all, we are both very fond of the colour orange. It is great to get a perspective from one of the devolved nations.

The amount of water available at any time depends not only on natural supply—rainfall, rivers, aquifers—but on the capacity of the infrastructure maintained since privatisation by the water companies. Demands from households, industry and agriculture also play a significant part. In Cumbria, we have 20 million visitors a year. Those people are very welcome but that is a lot of drinking water, showers and flushed lavatories, and we need the infrastructure to provide that. On top of that, we provide fresh drinking water for millions of people in the north-west of England. Again, we are proud to do so but we are under pressure.

The Environment Agency has projected national and regional deficits in water supply. Deficits will only worsen over the next 25 years as matters are scheduled. By 2050, the shortfall could reach nearly 5 million litres per day—equivalent to more than a third of the water that we currently rely on for public consumption. Outrageous water shortages have been experienced by South East Water customers, who have been referenced by hon. Friends and championed by our hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin). Those water shortages could become the experience of people across the country, not just in the south-east region, if we do not radically reform our water industry urgently to ensure that we stop the leaking of billions of pounds of billpayers’ money into the pockets of shareholders and senior executives, when that money should be reinvested in a water infrastructure fit for the British people.

[Anna Dixon]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman—

[Tim Farron]

Not yet.

[Anna Dixon]

The hon. Gentleman—sorry. As he said, Yorkshire has also experienced water shortages. From July this year, we have had a hosepipe ban and reservoirs remain at critically low levels, given what we should expect this season. It was at about 31% of capacity in September. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that Yorkshire Water, like some of the others he mentioned, has failed to invest in the necessary infrastructure to deal with the impact of climate change, as well as rising demand?

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. All this afternoon’s interventions have been good and on the money. Talking about money, this is money leaking out of the industry and not being invested in it. Bonuses and dividends should reward success; clearly, Yorkshire Water and others have failed in their basic task, which is to provide clean water for their communities.

To focus on the scale of the problem, since privatisation the water companies have amassed £70 billion of debt. Adjusted for inflation, they have paid out £83 billion in dividends. That means that on average 30p out of every pound that people pay on their water bills is to service the debt of the water companies, which was racked up to pay dividends. That is a moral outrage.

The main drivers of this impending crisis are clear: climate change; population growth; increased housing demand; business expansion; the demands, which have been mentioned, for huge additional energy and water usage given the growth in AI; pressures on the natural environment; and the growing need to prepare for drought. Those drivers are compounded by historical underinvestment in infrastructure and insufficient demand management.

Successive Governments have comprehensively failed to take climate adaptation measures seriously, guaranteeing misery for communities affected by flooding, wildfires and heat stress. If we are to build new infrastructure, including new homes and data centres—and we must—we must also ensure that water infrastructure keeps pace. That means sustainable drainage, new supply capacity and integration of water resilience into planning from the start. For instance, we should ensure that data centres are built predominantly at coastal locations and that desalination plants are an integral part of their design and key to their gaining of planning consent. Otherwise, we simply will not have the capacity to both provide clean water for our people and be the AI superpower that we desire to be.

The Liberal Democrats have long backed an infrastructure-first approach to development. We cannot allow water infrastructure to remain an afterthought. It is not right that water companies that have failed to invest in adequate sewerage, drainage and water supply infrastructure are able to get away with telling the local planning authority that there is no need for further investment and, at the same time, gain the financial benefit of the extra water bills from new households, while not laying out the extra investment needed to provide for them.

Sewage

Debate between Anna Dixon and Tim Farron

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I completely agree, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point, particularly given the experience she has in her constituency. She rightly fights very forcefully for her communities and to clean up her waterways. She will have seen, like all of us, that the principal problem is a failure of regulation. There has to be an answer to that and the Liberal Democrat proposal, which I will come to in a moment, would certainly make it more likely that this would be dealt with effectively—and if it solved the problem, that would be great.

The water industry regulatory framework is fragmented and weak. The regulators lack the resource, the power and the culture, it would appear, to make a serious difference. That is why the Liberal Democrats propose a new clean water authority so that water companies stop running rings around multiple regulators and begin to act in the interests of the British people and of the waterways that we love.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

I represent a very beautiful part of the Yorkshire dales, in Wharfedale, and Yorkshire Water has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of hours of sewage spills into the rivers. It was fined £47 million by Ofwat for its poor performance in 2023, only for that to be repeated in 2024. Will the hon. Gentleman welcome the action that the Government have already taken through the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025—which is more than the previous Government ever did to tackle this disgusting problem—and also recognise that we do see the problems with regulation and the fact that we need stronger regulation of the water industry to protect the environment and public health, and that is the role of the Cunliffe review?

[Tim Farron]

I absolutely welcome the Act, as I said at the beginning of the debate. It is a step in the right direction; I just do not think that it is enough, and the hon. Lady makes the case as to why it is not enough. Her water company, Yorkshire Water, is one of four water companies that between them owe Ofwat £164 million in fines because of their failure, and Ofwat has so far claimed zero—none of that. There seems to be an awareness among water companies that Ofwat is not a regulator to be feared and therefore not one to be responded to. That is among the reasons why we need a new, much more powerful regulator that has the power, and uses it, to refuse to sign off on spending plans that prioritise the investor over the consumer and the environment.

Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Anna Dixon and Tim Farron

2nd reading
Monday 16th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his service in a previous life, as well as in this one. He makes a very important point, to which I will turn in a moment. There is no point having great regulatory powers if we do not have a regulator with the resources to do the job that it needs to do. Nevertheless, regulation could be made better.

Water industry regulation is split between the Environment Agency and Ofwat, and that plainly does not work. We have two inadequately resourced regulators, with inadequate powers, being played off against each other by very powerful water companies that are far better resourced and able to run rings around the very good, but very harassed people whose job it is to hold them to account. I welcome the concession made in the Bill requiring Ofwat to contribute towards meeting the targets of the Environment Act 2021 and the Climate Change Act 2008. That is a step in the right direction because I believe it will be the first time that Ofwat will have proper environmental obligations, alongside its business obligations.

We have received promises, as the Secretary of State set out from the Dispatch Box earlier, that this Government will strengthen Ofwat’s powers in ways that we do not see on the face of the Bill. For instance, Liberal Democrat peers asked the Minister to confirm that the Government would ban water company bosses getting bonuses when their company had had a major category 1 or category 2 sewage incident the year before, and the Minister in the other place said:

“These are the type of circumstances in which it would be highly inappropriate for a bonus to be awarded.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. 247.]

That is very welcome, but it is not on the face of the Bill.

I pay tribute to my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place, who forensically engaged with the Bill to make it much better. I also pay tribute to the collegiate and constructive manner in which the Minister, Baroness Hayman, worked with them. To be clear, though, the Liberal Democrats would go even further and create a unified and much more powerful regulator, the clean water authority, absorbing the regulatory powers of Ofwat and the Environment Agency, but with many additional powers, including revoking the licence of poorly performing water companies swiftly, forcing water companies to publish the full scale of their sewage spills, reforming water companies to put local environmental experts on their boards, and putting robust, legally binding targets on sewage discharges.

On the issue of discharges, we welcome the change to require data from emergency overflows to be published within an hour of a discharge. That will require companies to monitor all emergency sewage overflows and to ensure that data is reported to the Environment Agency within the hour. To pursue the point made by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), my concern is that the Environment Agency is already massively overwhelmed. In my constituency, I see good people working very hard, but with Coniston, Windermere, the River Eden and the River Kent competing for time, attention and resource, as well as the ongoing work of building flood defences in Kendal, it is hard for them to be able to focus.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the Environment Agency being under-powered and under-resourced. With rivers like the River Wharfe, it has clearly failed to address illegal discharges and to enforce the law. Does he, like me, welcome the fact that the Bill will introduce more support for enforcement by allowing the Environment Agency to recover the cost of any enforcement from the offending water companies?

Farming and Inheritance Tax

Debate between Anna Dixon and Tim Farron

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I have heard that from land agents in my own constituency, and my hon. Friend makes a really interesting point. We obviously do not know what will happen unless and until it happens, but that could be exactly what happens, in which case there would be no money to invest in businesses and people would end up not being able to pay back their loans. Also, the Government would not make anything like the amount of money that they think they are going to, so whatever the outcome, it is bad news for farmers and also for the Exchequer.

It is also worth bearing in mind where the money that the last Government spent has gone. It has gone on landscape recovery and other schemes mostly taken up by very, very large estates, where either smaller farmers got nothing or tenant farmers had to do exactly are they were told. In my part of the world, we have seen something akin to lakeland clearances over the last three or four years as a result of all this. So let us not forget that before 4 July, the farming economy was under enormous threat and in enormous danger, either by accident or design, due to the failures of the previous Government, and the Conservatives need to take that on the chin.

[Anna Dixon]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned tenant farmers, and I know that he will have some in his constituency, as I do in mine in Shipley. Nationwide, a third of all farmland is managed by tenant farmers. Last month, the Department announced the appointment of a new commissioner for the tenant farming sector in England, which I hope that the hon. Gentleman will welcome. Does he agree that the last Government were operating much more in the interests of large landowners than of tenant farmers?

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Lady makes a good reference to the outcome of the Rock review, which took place under the last Government, although they took too long to put those things into practice. I am pleased that this Government have said that they will implement the recommendations of the Rock review. Baroness Rock deserves enormous thanks and praise from all of us for her work defending tenant farmers, and the fact that she has not been replaced is very regrettable. We are talking today about farming and the consequences of the inheritance tax issue. It would have made so much more sense, given the impact on tenants, if the commissioner and their framework had been put in place before this policy was brought into practice. This feels like putting it the wrong way around.