Water Industry

Charles Walker Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke]

Then they went back up again, as my hon. Friend remarks. Under the previous Government the water industry was allowed to become 100% mortgaged to make the tax avoidance work. There have been excessive pay rises in the boardroom at a time when hard-working families have not seen substantial pay rises. That has been very hard to justify and people look askance at that.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

My hon. Friend wisely talks about infrastructure. One of my concerns regarding the east and south-east of England is that water companies have been extracting water to the detriment of our rivers and not building reservoirs. Indeed, the last major reservoir in the south-east—the Queen Mother—was built 40 years ago. In the meantime, millions more houses have been built, placing more pressure on a valuable resource that tends to come out of the aquifers in the ground.

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend makes exactly the right point. In my constituency, in Dover and Deal in east Kent, we depend on the aquifers. There is water abstraction and water stress, and compulsory metering has been in place for some time. We need to look more closely at the national planning and national infrastructure planning aspect, which I am sure hon. Members will raise.

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[Charlie Elphicke]

That is true. In some parts of the country we have too much water and in some parts too little. I am sure that at some point someone will raise the need to move water from one place where there is too much of it to another place where there may be too little of it.

[Mr Walker]

We do not need to move water around from one place to another; we need to build more reservoirs such as the Abingdon reservoir, which was spade-ready and then the plug was pulled, if my hon. Friend will forgive the pun. We need to build more reservoirs, not waste money transporting water around the country.

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend is a passionate advocate for more reservoirs. Reservoirs are not only important for water storage; they are important places for the angling community. Many hon. Members here are passionate anglers who enjoy fishing, and reservoirs provide an opportunity for that pursuit.

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[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Members who secured this welcome debate.

Until recently, there had been a general consensus that the privatised water industry was a success. That was a consensus to which I never subscribed, whether in government or in opposition. It is far from being a success.

We must not allow the water industry to get away with all sorts of technical explanations of why it cannot do its job properly and reasonably cheaply, because it has a simple task. It gets its raw material free: it is called rain. It collects the rainwater and pumps it along pipes to its customers. It then charges them for using the water.

[Mr Charles Walker]

That is exactly the problem. Our water companies are lousy at collecting water. When it is at its most abundant, they wave it down the rivers into the sea. That is why they need to be building more reservoirs. I am sorry to labour the point, but they are not collecting the water.

[Frank Dobson]

The next word in my notes is “reservoirs”. Every substantial reservoir that the water companies use was built when the industry was in the public sector. The private sector has not increased reservoir capacity in this country since privatisation in 1989-90.

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[Mr Buckland]

I hope that this debate will continue in a spirit of looking to the long-term future of the industry, rather than descending into anything approaching point scoring. I do not think that is worthy of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) and I am sure that we will not see such a descent in his contribution, because this issue predates this Government.

As I was explaining, price rises started to increase significantly in the middle of the past decade. The average Thames Water household bill was £254 in 2005-06 and it has now risen to £354. One of my constituents sent me his own list of increases, where he recorded that in 2005-06 his bill increased by a whopping 21% and that since that time his bills have increased by 84%. So we can see why consumers and residents are asking, “Why us? Why do we have to bear the burden?”

I am pleased that Ofwat has issued a preliminary decision to disallow Thames Water’s request to raise prices by £29 for customers’ bills with effect from 2014-15. Thames Water said that it wished to spread that increase over several years but, as Ofwat has said, Thames Water has produced insufficient evidence to justify such a rise. It is unique this year in terms of the other water companies and the issue is compounded by the prospect of indefinite rises of up to £80 for my residents in order to pay for the £4.1 billion Thames tideway tunnel. I am in no way an opponent of bold and imaginative infrastructure schemes. They represent the best spirit of what inspired the Victorians to create the infrastructure on which, in many ways, we rely today. Buildings such as this place were the result of such boldness. It is right, however, that we should ask the legitimate question about whether dealing with the problems experienced through the discharge of sewage into the River Thames is worth that £4.1 billion.

I have no doubt that there are serious issues with pollution, but air pollution in London affects more people than the issue that the tunnel seeks to address. Other proposals, such as those for sustainable drainage, would be a more incremental way of dealing with the problem than inflicting this large hit on consumers.

[Mr Charles Walker]

What does my hon. Friend suggest that London does with its faeces if we do not put them into the Thames or build a tunnel to take them away from the Thames? Where will it all go?

[Mr Buckland]

I am not saying that there is not a problem, but that there are alternative ways of dealing with it through sustainable drainage. Earlier, my hon. Friend made an intervention about the need to build more infrastructure. I heard what he said, but to my way of thinking the Abingdon reservoir was the wrong response to the problems that still besets Thames Water—that is, the massive leakages. Thames Water is still losing 646 million litres of water a day.