National Policy Statement (Waste Water)

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker). I, too, welcome the debate this evening and the waste water national policy statement. In these debates, I feel as though I have died and gone to heaven when the Minister and the Opposition spokesman both say what a good piece of work the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has done. It was a privilege to carry out such a substantial body of work on the national policy statement, and we took our responsibilities seriously. I am grateful to the Committee, to those who advised us and to those who gave evidence.

I shall give the House some background information. In April 2011, the Committee published the report on our inquiry into the Department’s draft waste water national policy statement, in which we made a number of recommendations for what we viewed as the improvement of the NPS. Some time later, on 9 February this year, the Government published their response to the Committee’s report and laid a revised version of the NPS before the House. I am delighted that the Government have been able to find time for this debate tonight.

The hon. Member for Luton South mentioned the fact that we had to comply with, among other things, the European urban waste water treatment directive. May I just say, as a personal comment, that I hope that we can learn from this whole exercise—and from the essence of the Macdonald review of regulations from Europe—and that we must engage at the earliest possible stage and in the most constructive, positive manner? It will be a great step forward if we can learn from this exercise.

As the Minister said earlier, the national policy statement is critical to the new planning system. It will help developers to bring forward waste water projects of national significance without facing unnecessary delays, while ensuring that local people have an opportunity to have their say about how their communities are developed and about how the decisions are made in an accountable way by elected Ministers.

Following on from the Minister’s comments, I would be interested to know whether at this stage he has had sight of the final version of the national planning policy framework, which I understand may be revealed to the world at large later this week. Is he in a position to tell us this evening, given that this issue was raised in our evidence sessions, what the impact will be on the waste water national policy statement and the two projects falling under it?

The Minister referred to the application for planning consents. He may be interested to know that some time, regrettably, after we had taken evidence and reported, we were still receiving representations from those who had not realised that the scrutiny was taking place in the EFRA Committee. The matter of how to bring such scrutiny to the attention of the wider community is important if this were to arise again, as I understand it might if the Minister proceeds with his review. I shall return to that later.

The Committee was pleased to have the opportunity to scrutinise the draft water national policy statement last year, and we welcome the Government’s response. Although, as I alluded, it took the Department some time to publish the revised version, we were pleased that the time was used well to improve the national policy statement by incorporating many of our recommended changes. We believe that the now revised PPS broadly does a good job in setting out the framework for decision makers. Given the importance of the issue, however, we welcome the Government’s debate on it today.

Many other hon. Members will have issues to raise, particularly those whose constituencies are in the catchment area for the billing of the project, such as my hon. Friend the Minister, and perhaps also those whose constituencies lie along its route. I shall focus my remarks both on areas where the Government have incorporated our comments and on those where they did not.

The Government’s response sets out a number of areas in respect of which DEFRA has accepted the recommendations in the Committee’s report and amended the NPS consequentially. On the definition of need, I welcome the fact that in the revised NPS, the inclusion of a project in Ofwat’s asset management plan has been removed, in line with the Committee’s recommendation, as a criterion of proof of a project’s need. It was not logical to use that as a basis of proof, because its inclusion did not in itself mean that Ofwat had approved the individual plan for how it should be carried out. Indeed, Ofwat’s evidence on how it would review and consider each plan was quite compelling, so the removal of the asset management plan is a sensible approach, with retention of inclusion in the Environment Agency’s national environment plan as proof of a project’s need providing a workable criterion. I thus welcome the Minister’s comments this evening.

Some of the site-specific material in the NPS has been moved to an annexe, which is part of the document that is not to be relied on by the decision maker in reaching a decision on a project. That meets to some extent the Committee’s criticism about the inclusion of weak material on the Thames tunnel and Deephams sewage treatment works in the main NPS. In our view, the remaining site-specific sections have been improved, and the Committee welcomes these amendments because the focus of the NPS should be on establishing generic criteria that are applicable to any project falling within the threshold of a nationally significant infrastructure project set out in the Planning Act 2008, as amended.

As regards the inclusion of the Thames tunnel in the nationally significant infrastructure project planning regime, may I say that the Government have also moved to change the Planning Act definitions, as recommended by the Committee, to include sewage transfers and storage projects such as the Thames tunnel within the process for deciding applications of nationally significant infrastructure projects? We welcome that move, which is in the intended spirit of the Planning Act regime and reflects the inclusion of the Thames tunnel in the Government’s major infrastructure plans. The inclusion of sewage transfer and storage projects of a significant size, such as the Thames tunnel project, is clearly both logical and pragmatic.

Recommendation 9 deals with the approval of costs. The hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) mentioned the importance of keeping the costs of the Thames tunnel under scrutiny, and it is vital for Ofwat to be rigorous in scrutinising those costs, which, according to the evidence given to our Committee, are escalating. The Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill, which we debated last week, contains necessary provisions enabling Thames Water to ensure that it can finance the project in the most cost-effective manner, but I should welcome an assurance from the Minister about the intended use of those powers, and a reassurance for Thames Water customers that the costs will not continue to increase. It would be helpful if he also told us how Ofwat has strengthened its in-house capacity to focus on the Thames tunnel, and what advice the company is receiving on how to limit the cost of the projects referred to in the Government’s response to our report.

I am sure that Members will not be disappointed if I now turn to my personal pet subject, sustainable drainage. In recommendation 6, we

“recommend that Defra undertakes within 12 months a full assessment of the potential national impact of widespread adoption of SUDs”

—sustainable drainage systems—

“and water efficiency programmes for existing as well as new housing stock on future waste water infrastructure needs and that this be taken into account in any future revisions of the Waste Water NPS.”

I realise that there are a number of strands in DEFRA’s work on sustainable drainage, but it is disappointing that the water White Paper does not focus more on SUDS, and that more progress has not been made towards an agreement on funding for them. According to the Government’s response,

“The Planning Act allows for the partial or full review of an NPS. We aim to review the Waste Water NPS in five years time”

—perhaps the Minister will confirm that that is the case—

“or before that time should there be a significant need to do so.”

Obviously, my question is what would constitute a significant need. The Government’s response continues:

“This will take account of any changes to appropriate policy since the development of the original Waste Water NPS.”

I am not disagreeing with the Minister, but we need more information this evening.

The Government’s response also refers to schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, a large part of which has still to come into effect. They say

“We intend to implement Schedule 3 as soon as possible and dates are being explored”

—this is exciting stuff, Mr Deputy Speaker—

“in the consultation on implementation of Schedule 3 which we launched on 20 December. The Act also requires local authorities to adopt those sustainable drainage systems which serve more than one property. In the short term”

—it must be quite a short term, Mr Deputy Speaker—

“Defra will fund the maintenance of adopted sustainable drainage systems whilst we explore long-term funding options.”

Will the Minister tell us what the procedure and timetable will be for the adoption—finally—of sustainable drainage systems? The last Government could have done that before the general election, but they chose not to. We are now approaching the anniversary of that election, and I think that the House is growing impatient. I certainly am. When will we have the SUDs? They are important. The House wants to be able to establish whether the Government have explored all the alternatives.

I hope the Minister will respond—in his usual, inimitable, charming way—to the points raised. In respect of the national policy statement, if we are truly signed up to sustainable development, the environment and the needs of local communities must not be sacrificed. The Committee commends the national policy statement and is glad that the Government welcome some of its proposals. However, we are disappointed that they disagree with certain measures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I am one of 144 Members of Parliament in the Thames Water area directly affected by the issue of the Thames tunnel, and I hope that both the Minister and the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) will forgive me if I restrict my comments to the area that is close to my heart.

It is good to have consensus at times in politics and to be able to discuss issues in a measured way. One of the difficulties with the Thames tunnel is that there will be one hell of an outcry from many Thames Water customers in the years to come when they recognise the sheer cost implied by what is being put into place through this national policy statement for waste water, as it affects not only the London area, but the Thames Water area. Those living in the centre of London will see the tunnel being constructed, as I am sure it will be in the years to come, and will recognise that that does not come entirely cost free. I suspect that Thames Water customers in the Oxfordshires and Gloucestershires of this world will put a lot more pressure on. It is, therefore, all the more important that I use this opportunity to put certain concerns about this policy statement on the record, although I do not wish to break away too far from elements of the happy consensus that we have seen tonight.

I think we all acknowledge that if the Thames tunnel goes ahead, as I confidently predict it will, it will be a nationally significant infrastructure project. It is therefore sensible to make it one in the formal sense, both in relation to the Planning Act and, as the framework suggests is needed with such projects, with the sort of national policy statement we are debating tonight. I agree with other Members that although this debate has been relatively short, this opportunity to debate such a crucial issue is welcome. The Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs certainly thought so when it examined this draft national policy statement last year, as we gathered from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) earlier.

The Committee also signalled some concerns about the way that the document appeared to pre-empt elements of the planning process. The waste water NPS is the key document against which the planning application for the Thames tunnel will be judged. For that reason, the Committee said that it should be “a purely generic document” to prevent the justification for the Thames tunnel project from being removed from scrutiny. It also warned that although reference to specific schemes could be put in an annex to the national policy statement,

“it should be made clear that it does not constitute information to which decision makers must have regard when considering project applications.”

I fear that the Government have rejected that element of the advice. Instead, the NPS makes it clear, on page 21, that the tunnel is the “only option” and that what would be left to the Planning Inspectorate would merely be the “specific design and route”. In its response to the Select Committee report, DEFRA said the Government want to provide a “degree of certainty” to Thames Water. I do not think there is any doubt that they have been able to achieve that result.

Let us be quite clear about what the national policy statement means in practice. It means there will be no independent analysis of the very case for a tunnel. The document we are debating removes the case for the tunnel from the planning process. I think the Minister will argue that that is reasonable because the arguments have already been heard in detail—perhaps privately in his office and the offices of his predecessors—that the evidence is overwhelming and that the final NPS makes an unarguable case. If that were true, he would have a point, but the NPS is far from entirely convincing, not least because there are a number of things that one would never learn just from reading the document. In my brief contribution tonight I shall list the ones that seem the most significant, and I join the Select Committee in asking whether there really is no need for an independent assessment.

First, the tunnel will not collect 39 million tonnes of sewage. Like Thames Water, the NPS mentions 39 million cubic metres of discharge into the Thames each year. It then states that the Thames tunnel is the preferred way to address this issue. The casual reader of the document will assume that the tunnel collects 39 million tonnes of discharge, but that figure will be more than halved without the tunnel being built. The construction of the Lee tunnel and the upgrades to the sewage treatment works will prevent 21 million tonnes from entering the tidal Thames, and improvements to Mogden sewage treatment works will tackle several million more upstream.

Rather than celebrating the huge strides already being made to clean up the Thames—I am not entirely complacent about that; there should be huge strides and we should always be looking to improve the quality of water in the Thames—the NPS makes only oblique references and never entirely quantifies them in the way that I have tried to do tonight. It is worth repeating that the amount of sewage entering the Thames will fall dramatically without the Thames tunnel project. Only 18 million tonnes of discharge will be addressed by the tunnel, by no means all of which would be stopped as there would still be three large discharge events in an average year.

Unlike the publicity we have seen from Thames Water the NPS does at least describe the discharges as a mixture of “untreated sewage and rain water”, but it does not explain that the rain water accounts for more than 95% of the total. That somewhat disingenuous use of statistics has understandably misled countless members of the public and even Members of this House. In last week’s debate on the Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr Offord) talked about tackling the

“39 million tonnes of effluent”—[Official Report, 14 March 2012; Vol. 542, c. 306.]

but the reality is that there are just 18 million tonnes of discharge, of which not even 1 million tonnes are effluent. Any discharge of sewage is regrettable but we should deal in facts.

[Miss McIntosh]

When the Committee put questions on the national policy statement to the Department, we asked particularly about the potential impact of SUDS and other rainfall harvesting. If, as my hon. Friend says, we are talking about mostly rainfall, that impact would be quite substantial.

[Mark Field]

I accept that there would be an impact, but the use of the word “effluent” in relation to the 39 million cubic metres gives the public and many Members of this House a somewhat misleading impression of the sheer urgency of the need to undertake the project at this time.

It has been asserted that the river has been getting better and will continue to do so, and there is no doubt about that, but a feature of debates on the Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill last week and less recently was the number of hon. Members who suggested that the Thames had been getting worse, and will continue to get worse without the tunnel. The hon. Members for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) and for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) made that statement in part. That claim is not supported by the facts, as regards the immediate future; it is also probably not entirely true as regards the past and present.

I note that the Environment Agency’s website no longer hosts a press release that it issued only 17 months ago, but at that time, it went so far as to describe the Thames as

“the beauty queen of the planet’s waterways.”

That perhaps goes a little too far, even for those who have no desire whatever for a Thames tunnel-type project, but what prompted the comment was real enough: the sustained and continuing improvement of the Thames, which saw it win the international Theiss river prize for outstanding achievement in river management and restoration.