Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Anthony Mangnall Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jim McMahon]

One minute. That will mean that where a discharge station is not in place or is not working, the water companies will pay a standing charge, assuming that sewage is being discharged. Automatic fines for discharges will end the idea that people have to go through a costly and protracted investigation and prosecution to hold water companies to account. Water companies will pay on day one, the second that sewage is discharged. Legally binding targets will end the sewage discharge scandal by 2030. We will give power to the regulators and require them to properly enforce the rules. Critically, and in black and white, we will ensure that the plan is funded by eroding shareholders’ dividends, not putting further pressure on householders by adding to customers’ bills.

Let me be clear: any Tory abstentions or any votes against the motion or the current Bill are yet another green light to continue the Tory sewage scandal.

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has made the fatal error of thinking that we are supporting the water companies, when we are holding them to account. That is exactly why we have threatened them with unlimited fines; exactly why Ofwat has passed new rules to restrict dividend payments; and exactly why we now have the most stringent measures on water companies in Europe. What did the Labour party do, because it did not hold water companies to account?

[Jim McMahon]

The hon. Gentleman is definitely currying favour with the Conservative Whips Office, and I give him credit for energetically reading out the Whips’ top lines—[Interruption.]

The hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) said earlier that her office was not informed about our visit to her constituency, when we met our fantastic candidate, Helena Dollimore. I have been handed a copy of an email that proves not only that her office was informed of the visit, but that that email was acknowledged by her office.

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[Jim McMahon]

I will come straight to the point: had the Conservative Government, in their 13 years in office, treated this issue with the importance that is needed and dealt with the water companies—

[Anthony Mangnall]

Will the hon. Gentleman answer my question now?

[Jim McMahon]

The hon. Gentleman can answer this question for his constituents: over the last 13 years, why has an average of £1.8 billion every year been taken in shareholder dividends and not invested in water infrastructure? That is a record. [Interruption.] I do not care what the Whips Office has briefed; I care about the evidence. That is what every debate in the House should be based on. I respectfully ask him to go away and test the evidence, rather than reading the top line.

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[Dr Coffey]

What can I say? When the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) ran for the leadership of the Labour party, he suggested that there should be common ownership, which I would describe as nationalisation. We are seeing yet another flip-flop from the Labour party when its members realise that it is one thing to get into power and another thing actually being in it.

We need to continue with what we are trying to do to cut sewage discharges. We have heard about the target of 90% by 2030, and it is a headline-catching figure, but there has been no credible, costed plan in any previous media scrutiny or, indeed, today. That is why I suggest that the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton is detached from reality and trying to pull a fast one with the public.

Our storm overflows discharge reduction plan outlines the largest infrastructure programme in water company history, and will deliver the toughest ever crackdown on sewage spills, transforming our Victorian sewerage infrastructure. The plan sets targets that will be underpinned by legally binding changes to company permits, designed to front-load action in particularly important areas such as bathing waters. To ensure that these ambitious targets are realised, I have also asked the water industry to produce a detailed action plan for every single storm overflow in England by June.

A critical element in the development of these targets and our plan was an assessment of technical deliverability and cost, which is why the Government published a full impact assessment and an additional report on the costs of eliminating discharges from storm overflows. If the shadow Secretary of State wants to deliver a 90% reduction by 2030, it would have been helpful for him to inform the House how he plans to practically deliver £56 billion worth of capital projects in the next seven years, let alone separate enough combined pipes to go almost two and a half times around the earth in those seven years, or indeed build the equivalent of 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools of additional storage capacity. What will the Labour party’s proposals really mean for customers’ bills? Even the hon. Gentleman is not naive enough to think that there is a magic money tree to pay for this.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The Secretary of State has just mentioned the important issue of water companies producing plans. Can she reassure me, and all the people of the south-west and south Devon in particular, that those plans will have to be enforced, and that we will be keeping a very close eye on their implementation?

[Dr Coffey]

I can indeed give my hon. Friend that assurance. We will continue to ensure that the licence fees and the costs of permits cover inspections, and we will consider further what additional funding changes might be needed for that purpose.

Perhaps Labour intended to introduce a sewage tax or something similar, as proposed by the Liberal Democrats, although it would take such a tax some 500 years to fund the level of investment required. That is, dare I say, another classic Liberal Democrat policy—all soundbite but detached from reality. Meanwhile, we have an ambitious, credible and realistic plan.

As for mandatory sewage outlet monitoring, the Government are already doing that; 91% is already in place, and the rest will be completed by the end of the year. The Environment Agency will also ensure that water companies carry out monitoring in line with their permit conditions. The monitoring requirements introduced by the Government have been instrumental in enabling the regulators to undertake the largest criminal and civil investigations of sewage discharges in water company history, covering more than 2,200 treatment works. Through powers in our landmark Environment Act, we are also making it a legal requirement for the near real time data on discharges to be available to the public, and the consultation on those regulations is live now. We are going even further by placing a duty directly on water companies to monitor the water quality impact upstream and downstream of all their assets—not just storm overflows but wastewater treatment works as well.

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[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans). I welcome what he said about trying to work cross-party to solve this problem. That is what I have been doing since this Parliament began. I do not want to dwell on the private Member’s Bill that I introduced over three years ago, but it is surprising that it has taken the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) three years to come up with his own private Member’s Bill. Having read it, it seems to me that he has not read the Environment Act 2021, introduced by this Government a year and a half ago. The Water Quality (Sewage Discharge) Bill is one of the weakest documents I have ever seen, and it was clearly concocted and manufactured purely for the purposes of this debate. As he said in his opening speech, the Bill was introduced to benefit Labour candidates in the next parliamentary election, whenever it comes, and in next month’s local elections. The political opportunism is shameful.

However, in the spirit of seeking to focus my remarks on something useful, I will dissect some of the specific errors in the Water Quality (Sewage Discharge) Bill. First, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, clause 1 talks about water quality monitoring requirements. Two years ago, the Environmental Audit Committee’s “Water quality in rivers” report specifically called for the improved monitoring of our waterways. We have heard that Lord Benyon, the Conservative rivers Minister at the time, introduced monitoring as a result, and we are nearly at 100%. We called for upstream and downstream monitoring of the impact of discharges into rivers, which is precisely what was included in the Environment Act. Clause 1 of the Bill seeks to accelerate the measure to bring it into effect from 1 October, which is completely unrealistic. We have not yet agreed the technical specifications to be able to test water for the four parameters, so there is no supply chain in place to do that. Hopeless.

Clause 2 of the Bill talks about adverse impacts and seeks to accelerate and define the progressive reduction of sewage discharges, which are also covered by the Environment Act, to try to prevent 90% of such discharges by 2030. The Secretary of State has said there is no clarity on how much that would cost, but we know that it could cost hundreds of billions of pounds, adding £1,000 to customers’ bills and diverting the entire construction industry to fix the problem. Over the next seven years, which hospitals and schools would not be built as a result of Labour’s proposal?

[Anthony Mangnall]

My right hon. Friend is making an extraordinarily important point about finding a balance between attracting investment and ensuring that work is delivered to address the problem. Can we go further in encouraging water companies to keep that balance in order?

[Philip Dunne]

I will come on to that in a moment, but my hon. Friend makes the valid point that there is not enough dividend income for the water companies to pay for the billions of pounds in the storm overflows discharge reduction plan, as the Labour party fancifully suggests. The companies cannot pass the whole bill on to customers, so they have to be able to go to the markets, which are actively looking to invest in green projects of this nature. The money is there, but it will only be delivered through the private sector.

Clause 3 of the Bill talks about financial penalties. Labour is calling for penalties for the use of storm overflows. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, this is a question of degree. We already have penalties, and it is the Conservatives who introduced the water restoration fund, on which we are currently consulting, so that the proceeds of any fines resulting from the 2,000 permit breaches that are currently being investigated by Ofwat and the Environment Agency, as a result of this Government’s direction, will make the polluter pay. That is happening. The Labour motion suggests that it could happen instantly, but that would put the entire water system in disarray. This is another completely unrealistic proposition.

The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton is calling on the Government to produce a discharge strategy, so he clearly has not read the storm overflows discharge reduction plan that the Government published a year ago. He also calls for a legal obligation to consult Welsh Ministers. Frankly, we have just heard about the appalling performance of Welsh Water under this Welsh Government. For further clarity, the 83,000 spills in Wales represent almost 22% of the total number of spillages across England and Wales. The last time I looked, Wales represented about 5% of the UK population, not 22%. That is a hopeless example, and the last thing we should do is take advice from the Welsh Government.

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[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. The Opposition have attempted to pretend that the Government do not care about sewage, or about water companies being held to account, and yet in every instance, in every debate, and with every measure that we have introduced, we have shown that we care about the quality of water in our rivers and on our coastline, that we care about bathing-water status and, above all, that we care about holding water companies to account. This is not a moment to say, “Job done. Well done. Move on to the next issue.” It is a continuing, rolling issue that we have to address to provide reassurance to constituents and ensure that they have a reassured view of water companies.

All the measures that we have introduced to date have put in place exactly what the Opposition propose in the Bill they want to introduce. They talk about dividend payments—those are already restricted by Ofwat’s new measures. They talk about a new regulator—a costly thing to try to change—yet we have given Ofwat the teeth to take action against water companies that fail to deliver. We have implemented the ability to impose criminal fines and to put directors and CEOs in jail if they do not deliver. We have also offered the opportunity to impose unlimited fines on water companies under the “polluter pays” principle. The Opposition say that we take no action, yet we have proven legislative delivery that is already having an impact and being implemented across our constituencies. The £56 billion investment that we have asked for requires the water companies to take action, rather than putting the costs on our constituents at a difficult time. That is a balanced approach that will enable us to deliver and clean up our waterways, ensuring better biodiversity and even more areas with bathing-water status.

It is extremely easy for the Opposition to pat themselves on the back about 2009 and 2010, when there were limited monitoring systems across the United Kingdom. Now there is 90% monitoring—set to be 100% by the end of the year—and we can point to the problem and to the solutions, and show that we are delivering them. That is exactly what the Government are doing. My hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) said that this is a Tory solution to the sewage problem, and we should be proud of that.

I have taken South West Water to task, and I will continue to do so. It has a lot more to do to regain the confidence of the British public, especially in the south-west. I have taken its officials to do town halls in Brixham. This Thursday, I will take them to Totnes—I will let the House know how I get on—to talk about what is being done in the local area, to try to rebuild confidence, to show that work has been done. I have to say, however, that when we politicise this issue we do so to our detriment, because there is a proud record to show.