Water (Special Measures) Bill [ Lords ] (Fifth sitting)

Catherine Fookes Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 16th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Tim Farron]

I will say a brief word on the new clause. This is important, and I would like to add to the detail that my hon. Friend the Member for Witney has set out. Essentially, we have two problems here, one of which is that water companies are not statutory consultees, and they should be. I take the point that it could be more clearly stated, but the new clause does say “When participating” more than once, not “If participating”.

Without pointing fingers—well, maybe a bit at water companies in certain parts of the country, including mine—the key thing is that there is an incentive for a water company, when giving its advice to a planning committee, whether it be in the national parks, the dales, the lakes or a local council, basically to say that everything is fine, and why would it not? If a water company says, “We have no capacity issues. You can build those 200 houses on the edge of Kendal and it won’t cause any problems for our sewer capacity,” two things happen, do they not? First, the water company is not conceding the need to spend any money on upgrading the sewerage network. Secondly, it is guaranteeing itself 200 households that pay water bills, in addition to the ones it already has, so it has a built-in incentive—maybe not to be dishonest, but to not really give the fullest and broadest assessment of the situation.

[Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)]

I would like to give the hon. Member a practical example of where the absolute opposite has happened in Wales. In my constituency of Monmouthshire, Welsh Water was very clear that, because of the phosphate levels in the River Wye, there could be no development whatsoever in my area of the constituency—Monmouth—for several years. It absolutely stopped all development and seemed to be very honest in doing so. Now the problems have cleared up somewhat, and Monmouthshire county council has put forward a proposal in the local development plan to build houses. We also have a sustainable drainage systems regime, which means that absolutely nothing will be built without those systems. By the way, 50% of the homes will be affordable and they will be 100% net zero, so I commend Monmouthshire county council for putting that forward. I just wanted to say that there are examples where the opposite has happened to what the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale is saying.

[Tim Farron]

I thank the hon. Member for the intervention; I am sure that is the case, and the two are not mutually exclusive. I want to see houses built. The great frustration in our communities in the lakes and dales and just outside is that we desperately need homes that are affordable, and we want homes to be zero carbon. We want to be in a situation where the local community is able to hold developers to account. The danger is that developers who are going to build stuff on the cheap that is not affordable to potential buyers or renters are able to get themselves off the hook because the water companies will not really test the resilience of the existing infrastructure.

It is true that both things can happen. We feel that this is about giving planning authorities the power to say, “The developer is seeking to do this, but the community as a whole does not have the resilience or the capacity to cope with 200 extra bathrooms; so what resources will the developer or the water company put in to ensure that the facilities are upgraded to make that possible?” This is about ensuring that planning does its job.