Water Bill
Clive Lewis ExcerptsFriday 28th March 2025
(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Around 50 years ago, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution tore up the rulebook on political and economic management. She rewrote it with a single unwavering principle: that the pursuit of profit would serve the public good, even when it came to vital public services—even when it came to water. We often say that society stands on the shoulders of giants, but giants cast long shadows, and Thatcherism’s shadow looms dark over our water system today.
Whether we see ourselves standing on her shoulders or trapped in her shadow, one thing is undeniable: she proved that the world can be made differently. And if it can be made differently once, it can be made differently again. That, as the brilliant anthropologist David Graeber understood, is the hidden truth of the world. It is something we create and can choose to create anew. We can do it better.
Today, I want to show this House and this country that water is the lens through which we can imagine something better—a better way of running our economy, a better way of safeguarding our environment and a better way of empowering the public, for whom democracy supposedly exists. But that requires something very difficult: it requires us to break free from the constraints of our imagination and to let go of the idea that this economic model is all there is or all there ever could be.
It saddens me to say that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 perfectly exemplifies this failure of imagination. One of its leading proponents has a particular rhetorical flourish they love to use when dismissing calls for public ownership of water. They say, “I’m more interested in the purity of our water than the purity of our ideology.” I love that quote. I love it because it lays bare just how deeply the ideology of privatisation, and all that goes with it, has embedded itself. So entrenched is it within our collective consciousness that we no longer recognise it as an ideology. We no longer see it for what it is: a systemic exploitation of a common resource for private gain. Instead, it has simply become the natural order of things.
But how much longer can this go on? Since the crash of 2008, this ideology has been faltering under the weight of its own contradictions, yet its grip on British politics remains vice-like. Austerity, exploitation and corporate price gouging are still treated not as choices but as inevitabilities. Why? Because too many politicians on both sides of the House refuse to contemplate alternatives. For those on the other side of the House—on the Opposition Benches—I get it: this is their ideology. They are defending their class, and I would imagine they would go further still if they could. But on this side of the House, we have no excuse. We should be standing up for our class: working-class people—the public. Instead, we wrap their ideology in the language of fiscal responsibility, economic prudence and stewardship of the economy. But it is not fiscal responsibility when we balance the books on broken backs. It is not stewardship when the ship has been sold off and the crew left to drown. It is not prudence. It is power maintenance.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
I hope the engineers can check that the microphones and speakers are working while I ask a quick question. My hon. Friend mentions Members on this side of the House. There are far more of us on this side since July last year than there were in 2019, with a very different approach taken in our manifestos. Does he fear that the shift in tone he is suggesting is one of the reasons that we did so badly in 2019 but so well last year?
Clive Lewis
No, I do not. We have a distorted electoral system. Bring on proportional representation, because if we had PR, we would have had a different Government in 2019 and most definitely in 2017. Sometimes politicians have to do what they believe to be right and lead from the front. I think we should lead from the front.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)
I compliment the hon. Member on his Bill. To help his argument, there was overwhelming opinion poll support for public ownership of water in 2017 and 2019, and there still is today.
Clive Lewis
I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side.
Clive Lewis
On the issue of water, yes, I would say they are, because whether I like it or not, Reform has a policy for water to be owned 50% by pension companies and 50% by the public. As much as it grieves me to say it, that is a policy of public ownership. They are populist; they are listening to a popular voice.
Clive Lewis
I will make some progress and then give way, and I will also try to keep the volume down a little bit.
This is about the maintenance of a political and economic model that was never built to serve the public—a model designed to shield the wealth of asset holders, landlords, shareholders, corporations and, yes, privatised water companies. But here is the great irony: the very greed, recklessness and contempt of the water industry—its excesses—have cracked open the door, and through that crack, we glimpse an opportunity. It is an opportunity to shatter the myth of privatisation’s inevitability, to break free from the narrow, self-imposed rules that have caged our Government’s economic choices, to expose its failures, to challenge its dominance and, above all, to show this country that there is an alternative—an alternative that is democratic, sustainable and run in the interests of the many, not the few. We can do it better.
Mr Frith
My hon. Friend is making a typically impassioned speech. He says the general public are ahead of us. Where might that same public be when faced with the bill for bringing in the nationalisation he is clearly wedded to? Furthermore, in the event that we do not have to buy the water industry but seize it, the implications of that seizure will cause an economic collapse. At what point will he take responsibility for either of those scenarios when confronting a public who are, he says, ahead of us on this issue?
Clive Lewis
I will obviously come to many of those points later in my speech, but let me make this point now: I do not believe in nationalisation, and this Bill has nothing to do with nationalisation. This is about giving the public a say over their water. It is about governance, standards and democracy.
Clive Lewis
No, I am going to carry on and make some progress. You made your point. Let the public—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Mr Lewis, I do not believe I was making a point at all.
Clive Lewis
My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; I should have said that my hon. Friend made his point.
The clock is ticking. The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning. It is our lived reality. Rising droughts, creeping desertification, depleted aquifers, wildfires, systemic collapse—these are no longer projections; they are the forecast turned fact. Preparing for this future and adapting to what is now inevitable has never been more urgent.
The evidence is sobering. The UK’s water resources are under mounting pressure and not just from the climate emergency, but from rising demand and population growth. Experts now project that England could face significant water supply deficits as early as 2034 unless we act decisively. That is not a distant horizon; it is a little over a decade away.
But while the threat has grown, our resilience has shrunk, because while the climate crisis has intensified, our water infrastructure has stood still, or, worse, been sold off, hollowed out and left to rot. In the 35 years before privatisation almost 100 reservoirs were built; in the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. But it gets worse, because in that same period private water companies have sold off 25 reservoirs without replacing one. Instead of investing in resilience, they have extracted value: £72 billion paid out in dividends while pipes leak, rivers choke, and the public pays the price. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) asks how we can afford it; how can we not afford it? That is not mismanagement; it is a betrayal. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country—
Clive Lewis
One second.
If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country, we must treat it as such: an existential conflict. In that context, the actions of these companies—selling off reservoirs, failing to invest, polluting our water—are not just negligent; they are acts that actively undermine our national water security. In any other existential crisis, we might call that what it is: sabotage. And in a time of national peril, sabotage has another name: treason.
Let me explain why this matters to me personally. When I served on tour in Afghanistan back in 2009—not in a boy band—I experienced something utterly alien to me: the gnawing fear of thirst; not the mild irritation of forgetting a water bottle, but the deep physical worry that there may not be enough clean water to get through the day. In Britain, we have been blessed: water falls from the sky; it fills our rivers, it soaks our fields, and we joke about it—it is part of who we are. But in Afghanistan there was no humour; only heat, dust and desperation. There I saw children trekking miles through the desert, not for food, not for money, but to beg for clean bottled water. Once we have seen that, and once we have felt that fear, we can never take water for granted again. We never again believe it is something we can waste or pollute or privatise without consequence.
That is why I have brought forward this Bill: because anger is not enough; outrage, no matter how justified, will not fix the pipes, stop the sewage or fill the reservoirs. We need a plan. We need a strategy. We need a future. We can do it better.
My Water Bill delivers that. It sets out the high standards our country deserves and the democratic governance our water system desperately needs. First, it establishes clear, ambitious targets to stop the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches, to restore our water to high ecological and chemical standards, and to deliver universal, affordable access to water as a basic human right—a right we have never had before in this country. It demands a system designed not just to extract profit but to adapt, to build resilience in the face of climate change, and to harness nature-based solutions that work with the environment, not against it.
Secondly, it transforms governance. The Bill introduces representation for workers and local communities on the boards of water companies. It gives voting rights to employees and customers, so that those who use and maintain a system have a real say in how it is run. Water is not a commodity but a common good, and those who depend on it and pay for it should help govern it.
Thirdly, the Bill lays the foundations for a democratic future. It establishes a commission on water ownership to advise the Secretary of State on long-term strategy, looking at international best practice, especially in OECD countries, where public water ownership is the norm, not the exception. Crucially, it creates a citizens’ assembly on water ownership to bring the public into the process, to deliberate, debate and decide how we can govern this most precious of resources.
The public care, but how do I know that? I know because a small fraction of them are in the Public Gallery today, having travelled here from all over the country; I know because of the thousands of emails that have been sent to MPs across the House; and I know because those people will never stop campaigning until this injustice is resolved. They know that we can protect something not by selling it off, but by standing up for it, involving people in its care and ensuring that it serves the public, today, tomorrow and for generations to come.
My Bill offers a pathway out of crisis. It offers control, resilience and democracy. It is not just about cleaning up our rivers, but about cleaning up the system that allowed them to be polluted in the first place. Privatisation is not just a problem—it is the problem. We can do it better. I can hear some people on the Labour Benches thinking, “But we have just passed”—
Clive Lewis
I can now—for my next trick, I can hear thinking! I can hear them thinking, “But we have just passed the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Clive, so what are you talking about?” Yes, we have, but I am afraid to say it has been watered down—[Interruption.] Sorry, I had to get that one in—it was all going so well. The Act does not live up to what was promised, it does not deliver what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. Do not get me wrong: it is a start.
Grahame Morris
I congratulate my good and hon. Friend on making an excellent speech and on advocating for public ownership of water and the opportunity to make things better. Does he agree that the mismanagement of the water companies under privatisation is a huge indictment of the whole principle? In my area, bills are way above inflation and huge dividends are being paid by borrowing money. At the very least, should our Government not be looking at stopping the payment of bonuses and share dividends while sewage pollution continues, and we have appalling mismanagement of the industry?
Clive Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I agree with him wholeheartedly and I am just about to come to that point in relation to what the Water (Special Measures) Act does and does not do. It addresses some of those points, but as we have already discussed, privatisation is not just a problem, but the problem, and it is a big part of why so much has gone wrong.
Unfortunately, the Water (Special Measures) Act does not live up to what was promised or what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. However, it is a start, and I praise my colleagues on the Front Bench, including the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), who has done so much work in this area. Unfortunately, the Act is not a solution.
Remarkably, my Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act does not even define what clean water means. There are no standards or targets—just vague intentions handed over once again to a regulatory system that has already failed us and to the companies that caused the mess in the first place. It says nothing about better governance, and absolutely nothing about the big, fat, humongous elephant in the room: who owns our water? If we do not deal with ownership, we cannot deal with accountability. If we cannot deal with accountability, we can forget clean water. No—we must go further on clean water standards, corporate accountability and what happens when companies fail.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
Does my hon. and gallant Friend accept that there is increased accountability in the Water (Special Measures) Act through the fact that many companies in the industry are now rewriting their articles of association to ensure that they are accountable not just to shareholders, but to the customers and users of water?
Clive Lewis
After 35 years of abject failure, it is too little, too late. My Bill would put the final nail in the coffin of this sorry chapter of our country’s water and water system.
Neil Coyle
Sticking with the puns, I commend my hon. Friend on his gallons of passion; he is always making waves. He criticises the Government’s legislation, which is obviously not yet in effect, but does he think that the Cunliffe commission will go any way towards addressing some of the concerns he has outlined?
Clive Lewis
Unfortunately, I do not, because again the elephant in the room—who owns our water—has been ruled out of the Cunliffe commission’s operational process. It cannot actually look at that issue. I have no issue with Sir Jon Cunliffe, but let us not forget that he originates from the Treasury—he probably has Treasury brain. That economic orthodoxy is part of the reason why we are in the place that we are. I do not have so much confidence in the Cunliffe commission, but I do have far more confidence in the People’s Commission on the Water Sector, which is being run by academics and which will report at the same time. I will be very interested to hear what it says.
Clive Lewis
Those are the reasons why I have brought forward this Bill. The Government’s Act does none of those things, but my Bill does. Take just one example—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. I believe Mr Lewis probably cannot hear interventions, because he is so loud himself. Members should intervene loudly if they wish to intervene.
Clive Lewis
I did hear the intervention, but I wanted to make some progress.
Take this one example. Under this Bill, if a water company breaches the terms of its licence with a major sewage discharge, it can forget shareholder payout and piling on more debt. If it does it twice, it is in the last chance saloon. After three strikes, it is out—licence terminated and on its bike—and those price-gouging, asset-stripping, river-killing vulture capitalist outfits will be rolled into the sunset without a penny in compensation. What about those water infrastructure assets that they have been sweating for private gain? They go back into the public realm, thank you very much. If they start whining about debts, do not worry: we will do a full audit of what they invested, what they racked up in debt, what they paid out in dividends and what they stuffed into bloated executive pay packets. I will tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am yet to see a single privatised English water company walk away with anything other than a well-earned spanking and a sharp haircut for its creditors. Those assets will belong to the public once again, and we will not pay a penny more than they are worth.
I can hear people thinking, “Where will the money come from? How will you invest in publicly owned water without the private sector?” I will tell them where it has not come from in these past 35 years—I am mind-reading again.
Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Clive Lewis
I will just make some progress, and then I will give way. I am on a roll. Let me tell the House where the money has not come from for these past 35 years. It has not come from private shareholders or long-term thinking, and it certainly has not come from some mythical well of benevolent capitalism. The private companies have put in less than nothing; in fact, they have racked up more than £60 billion in debt. Thames Water has paid more than £7.2 billion in dividends since privatisation, and is now £15.2 billion in debt and counting—work that out. Now, it is trying to plug the hole with a £3 billion emergency loan that will cost 10% in annual interest. That is more than half a billion pounds a year, just for interest payments, courtesy of our bills. That money will not build a reservoir, fix a pipe or clean a river, but it will keep a rotten system afloat for a little longer.
Noah Law
My hon. and gallant Friend makes an impassioned case for public ownership—something that, in the right context, I am sure Members on all sides of the House can celebrate. On the point about the cost of financing to the public, though, does he agree that while there are some serious indiscretions in parts of the industry, such as in Thames Water’s case, this conversation about the appropriate financing model would be better entertained at a time when the cost of capital in the private water industry was not lower than the cost of public sector borrowing, on which, of course, we are in a very difficult situation?
Clive Lewis
The cheapest borrowing in the country, without a doubt, is public sector borrowing. The private water industry, which has had 35 years to sort this mess out, is not going to find investment. It is up to its eyeballs in debt. It is relying on a 50% increase in our bills by 2030, if we include inflation, and that is in the middle of a cost of living crisis. How can we justify that? The answer is that we cannot.
Mr Frith
The day after the seizure of public assets that my hon. Friend is describing, billions and billions of pounds of debt will come with it. What does he propose to do with that debt, other than refinancing, which is exactly where we are at now with the industry requirement to refinance the debt to try to keep bills down? Instead, he is advocating that the public purse take on that private debt.
Clive Lewis
At the beginning of my now seemingly rather long speech, I think I referred to a failure of imagination. Ask what Margaret Thatcher would have done when she was faced with similar problems. She would have fought her way through it. She changed the very fabric of our economy, our democracy and our politics, and she made it work. We can do the same, because the public are behind us. They want this to work.
Clive Lewis
I will make some progress. Let us recap, because I do not want to go on too long; I want to conclude, if I can. That money from Thames Water—that half a billion pounds in interest payments—will keep a rotten system afloat for just a little longer. The myth of privatisation is that the private sector will act in the long-term interests of the British public because it wants to turn a profit. That is preposterous, as is proven by the state of our water, and exhibit A is Thames Water.
We can now turn to the question of where the investment will come from. Under public ownership, it will come from the only place it ever should have—from us, the public—and every penny of it will go back into the system. It will go into the pipes, the rivers, the seas we swim in and the water we drink. There will be a direct relationship between what we pay and what we get, with no offshore dividends, no bloated bonuses and no debt-laden shell games—just clean, accountable, democratic water.
When I was in Afghanistan, every soldier had one critical duty: to stay hydrated. To dehydrate was considered a military offence, because it put the soldier and their team at risk. If someone ran out of water, we did not debate markets or metrics; we shared what we had. We had each other’s backs. As the desert-dwelling Fremen in James Herbert’s novel “Dune” believed:
“A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe”.
It is time our water returned to the tribe, to the people, to the public. We can do better; we must, and with this Bill, we will. I commend it to the House.
Several hon. Members rose—
Carla Denyer
Of course a current Government cannot bind a future Government on a decision like that indefinitely, and I was not suggesting that they could, but as I pointed out, as England is one of very few countries on the entire planet with a fully privatised water system, I suspect and hope that if we returned to a public system, it would be more likely to stay public, as both elected representatives and the public would see that the system performed better when the profit motive was removed.
Clive Lewis
People talk about whether something can be taken out of public control and put back into privatisation. Of course, Parliament is sovereign and that can always happen, but there is a point about giving control to the public. Let us take the NHS, which is a public service. Any Government in the post-war period could have taken the NHS back into privatisation. Why did they not do so? They would not have dared, because it would have been so publicly damaging and politically destructive. That is what would happen with our water. Does the hon. Member agree? [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. May I remind people in the Public Gallery to remain silent?
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on introducing the Bill. Whatever my position on its detail and on the history of what has happened with our water industry, we would all agree on how important it is to have a proper debate about water.
Unlike many of the Members present today, I have the privilege of having served in the previous Parliament, during which water and sewage discharge were constant topics of conversation. It is absolutely right that we talk about that and that we act. I am now proud to be in the party of a Government who have begun to act on the big challenges facing us when it comes to water.
I congratulate my hon. Friend, too, on the enormous passion that he brings to all the issues that he cares about. Nobody could say that he does not believe passionately in what he is talking about today. He is right to shine a light on the failures of the water industry—the profits that people are making while organisations such as Surfers Against Sewage have to deal with the very real issue of paddling through sewage. I am trying to be polite.
We have to go right back in time to see why the system was set up. The water companies were privatised to avoid taxpayer investment and to get the private sector to pay. That of course meant the need for dividends, and we have seen how that has worked. My hon. Friend talked about the last chance saloon—“Two strikes and you’re out”—for the water companies. His Bill suggests that on the second occasion, the state would take the company’s assets and run it, but the taxpayer would still pick up an enormous bill for that.
It is important to reflect on the context that we find ourselves in today, whether we are talking about investment in water, our railways, the 700,000 pupils in schools not fit for purpose, or in our crumbling hospitals—including the 40 built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which I visited during the last Parliament. Those will be unfit for purpose within the next five years and need money to be invested in them.
We need to invest money in our roads. It is great that the Government are putting money into potholes—that is a start. However, we know that we need more than that. I cycle, and potholes cause me enormous grief. I am constantly breaking a spoke. A spoke is only about £1.50, but getting a wheel trued—I am not expert enough to do that myself—costs a lot of money. These are issues that are actually hitting the pockets of our constituents. It is not about me; many people have these problems.
I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in Northamptonshire, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough and Rushden (Gen Kitchen), who has fought a tough campaign against potholes in her constituency, underlining how poorly the council has managed its roads. She has done excellent work to highlight the problems and to challenge and look at the council’s contracts, and that has led to the Government’s announcement in just the last week about investing in potholes—they have taken her blueprint from Wellingborough and are applying it to the country.
However, all this costs money. We have roads, railways, the water industry, schools and hospitals all in dire need. We need that money to go into the NHS to reduce waiting lists, which have reduced for five months in a row. We are seeing those waiting lists go down. Constituents of mine were in desperate straits—anyone who had a bit of money was paying privately to have their hip replaced. The constituents I visited who did not have that kind of money were on a long, slow waiting list while their health deteriorated, unable to work or go about their lives.
We have to see this issue in the context of all the money that needs to be spent. A year ago, I produced a list of what I call the big nasties. I have highlighted some of them. The list also includes the fact that we have not yet in this country decommissioned a single nuclear submarine, which is not just a monetary cost. It needs to be done, but we are finding it hard to bring submarines into port to repair them. It has been left for decades, and has now fallen to this Government to resolve. I gather that the first one is now being decommissioned—thanks, again, to a Labour Government being in power.
We have real problems at the animal health centre in Weybridge, where we do not have space to deal with two zoonotic diseases at the same time. To deal with these difficult diseases, the centre has special facilities so that no contaminants can escape. If we were hit by two zoonotic diseases in this country, we would be in a catastrophic situation. This situation was left by the previous Government, who did not deal with it for 14 years.
Then we have Porton Down. In 2017, it was going to be moved and rebuilt. Again, the facility deals with some of the most difficult scientific issues; there could be catastrophic effects if it was not there to deal with them. What has happened? There has been no movement at all. Again, it has fallen to this Government to spend something. Around £700 million had been spent, but nothing had been achieved. This Government have picked up the pieces.
Clive Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for making a powerful speech in this debate. There are a few things to say about the costs. First, we would control the assets. The assets would come off the balance sheet, which would be one mitigating factor. Secondly, throughout the post-war period, with British Leyland, Railtrack in 1945, coal, steel, gas, civil aviation and even the Bank of England, we paid less than the market value. As I explained at the beginning, this is about a mindset. We can do an audit of what the companies have taken out —what money they have extracted from our economy— and then we can pay them an appropriate rate and return. It may well be that they are paid nothing, but they may get something. Their creditors may take a haircut, but, frankly, that is better than our constituents taking a continuous haircut with their bills.
Dame Meg Hillier
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I hear his passion and his helpful iteration of those historic examples. However, I would also say that we need to be clear about who the shareholders are—very often, they are our pension funds. Pension fund trustees have a fiduciary duty to ensure they are maximising the income for those pensioners. If that does not happen, we know that, effectively, the taxpayer picks up the tab. A reality of privatisation was a drive to have a shareholder society. We can argue about whether that was the right or wrong thing to do, and I think we would probably agree in many respects on that. However, that is the reality of the situation now.
Earlier today, before the House was sitting, I was on a call about constituents who had lost money in an investment and are in a desperate situation. In that case, it was because of criminal activity by a fraudster. Their life savings have gone. The people who have invested and bought those shares, often very humble families who have worked hard all their lives, need some compensation. A student debating society might be tempted to say, “Let’s take it all back, and forget about the impact,” but we cannot forget about the impact, because it often falls on low-paid, hard-working people who are taxpayers too—they would end up paying a double whammy.
Dame Meg Hillier
I will not repeat all of the issues about people’s attendance at a citizens’ assembly—the difficulty of achieving it and of people coming to it. I am not sure whether Sir Jon Cunliffe is being paid to do the job—quite often people are not—but he has been given time to devote to it, and also has access to a lot of technical expertise and data. I have spent more than a decade looking at these sorts of reviews and how they collect information. They have powers to receive that information and the expertise to analyse it. I have had the privilege of working with the National Audit Office for a long period of time, and I know the level of expertise that goes into analysing that information, which is quite intense and immense, especially when we are dealing with money, infrastructure and water.
Clive Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I will be very brief. There is a crisis of democracy, and as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) has just mentioned, we are rejecting a citizens’ assembly. Such an assembly could have the technical support and technical capacity as well, but it would give a voice to the public. Instead, we have decided to give that voice to Sir Jon Cunliffe, a lifelong Treasury insider who works in the City of London and who will make a decision based on its interests. Can she not see the problem here, and the lack of confidence the public have in the democratic decisions that are being taken by people like that?
Jeremy Corbyn
Some people would not require any training or skills development at all; others might, and of course a short period would be needed for that. This is more a question for the promoter of the Bill. If the hon. Member for Norwich South wishes to intervene, I would be happy to give way on this point.
Clive Lewis
May I make a more general point? If the Bill went into Committee, we would look at this in far more detail, but a big part of the Bill is about a mission and our direction of travel. It is about tackling the crisis in democracy, and trusting our fellow citizens to give a point of view, with guidance from experts, so that we can make a decision. When the founders of the renaissance or capitalism sat down, did they know that the renaissance would happen, or that capitalism would end up like this? No. This is about heading in a certain direction and having some imagination—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Interventions should be short.
Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on his success in the private Member’s Bill ballot and on bringing forward this Bill, which deals with such an important topic. He deserves great credit for continuing the national debate on the quality of our waterways.
I know from the many emails I have received since my election in July that my constituents in Ashford, Hawkinge and the villages are angry about the state of our waterways, and they have every right to be angry: the latest figures for my constituency show that the waterways that were polluted by sewage 1,127 times in 2023. This was allowed to happen as a result of 14 years of mismanagement and weakened regulation of the water industry by the Conservatives.
The polluting of our local waterways has a real-world impact: it risks damaging our ecosystems and having an impact on people’s health. Not long after I was elected, I was contacted by a primary school in my constituency. At the end of the summer term, the school had a lovely tradition of taking some of its children to paddle in the Great Stour, which runs near the school. However, the school contacted me to say that when it took children to the river at the end of last year, 25% of those who had splashed and paddled were ill within 24 hours.
I will give another example. A constituent who regularly swims in the channel off the coast of the constituency of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) contacted me to express his deep concern about the amount of sewage that was allowed to be pumped into the sea from the combined sewer overflow. Those are just two examples of how pollution has been permitted in our waterways. This unacceptable and unforgivable destruction of our waterways should never have been allowed to happen, but that is exactly what the Conservatives did when they were in power.
Many of my constituents contacted me in advance of the Bill’s Second Reading to let me know how important water quality is to them. Water is a resource that we all rely on, and they rightly feel that the system is failing them, with polluted waterways, declining service standards and increasing bills. Water companies are failing to deliver for their customers and the environment, and the public have rightly had enough. I welcome how, since my hon. Friend the Minister and colleagues entered office, they have taken immediate measures to address the failures of the last 14 years, including ensuring that funding for vital infrastructure investment is ringfenced. I was pleased to see that compensation for households and businesses will be doubled when basic water services are affected.
I was proud to support the Water (Special Measures) Bill, and I was delighted to see it receive Royal Assent last month and pass into law. The strengthening of the enforcement regime is an important sign to the water industry that things have changed under this Labour Government and that Labour Members will not tolerate the poor standards of the last 14 years. I want to see a fundamental transformation of our water industry. I also want the waterways in Ashford, Hawkinge and the villages, as well as the rest of the country, to be cleaned up and restored to good health.
I will not, however, support my hon. Friend’s Bill, as the measures that he proposes go too far. I do not think it is the right time for them. This is an important issue, and we need to talk about it, but I am not convinced that bringing water services into public ownership would guarantee better services.
We have heard, seen and experienced that in our NHS. What happened there? We brought in NHS England to fix the problems and now, 14 years later, we are getting rid of NHS England. We have heard hon. Members talk about standards in our schools and the standard of our roads. Is it the right time for the measures in the Bill, or is it time to take responsibility and undertake the action that Labour came into government for? In eight months, we have moved fast and taken strong actions. Should we not give those new Acts time to come into effect and see if things get better?
Clive Lewis
For how long does my hon. Friend think we should polish the turd—we can probably find that floating in most of our rivers—of privatised English water?
Sojan Joseph
I would like to see things get better immediately. We cannot carry on as we have any longer, but what guarantee is there that by taking water into the public sector, the public’s water bills will come down and they will get the service they expect?
We see problems in our public sector. For example, the NHS does not have the workforce to do the job, and we have seen waiting lists go up. Can we wait for two days before getting the water supply back in our houses if we do not have enough people to do the job? Is this the right time for the changes in the Bill, or should we give time for the actions we have taken already to come into effect and see if things get better? That is why now is not the right time to do this, but we need to talk about it because it is an important subject. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South on introducing the Bill, but we should continue talking about and monitoring this, as it is the only way to move forward.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), and I commend him for the passion with which he introduced the debate. I believe that I serve the best community in the country, and I am aware that I have constituents in the Public Gallery, but I do not play to the gallery. My community is shaped by the River Thames, literally, because the constituency’s northern border is the river. My constituents are subject to only one water operator, Thames Water, and I come here to serve my constituents by seeking pragmatic solutions. They want safe, affordable water, and problems fixed when they arise. I very rarely find constituents who obsess over who provides it.
Let us not beat around the bush: there is no doubt that Thames Water has been run into the ground. Customers in Southwark have a right to be angry. They have faced higher bills, leaks and sewage—it has been a disgrace. The great promises of privatisation have failed to materialise over 35 years. Sadly, the promise of lower bills and a more efficient industry has turned to dust.
The figures speak for themselves. It was reported last year that, since 2020, there have been at least 72 billion litres of sewage discharges into the Thames—I say “at least” because not all outlets are monitored. We should thank River Action and others, including wild swimmers, for their work on the issue. Wild swimmers are welcome at Greenland dock in my constituency. I am yet to take the plunge—literally.
Prosecutions of Thames Water by the Environment Agency for pollution incidents led to fines of £35.7 million between 2017 and 2023. Earlier this year, Thames Water was fined £3.3 million after it killed more than 1,400 fish by discharging millions of litres of untreated sewage into rivers. The company admitted four charges in an Environment Agency prosecution. That is unacceptable. It is prosecutable under existing law, and the company needed to do more. Change is required; it was promised in our manifesto, and I believe that the Government intend to deliver it.
I want to give a few examples from my constituency of how Thames Water operates. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) spoke about standpipes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) said, we see people affected by outages, as companies like to call them, and in that case, bottled water is meant to be provided. Too often, that is pushed on to councils to provide, rather than it being dealt with by the company responsible for failing to deliver such a basic essential.
I have had to intervene to support constituents in some frankly bizarre cases. In Stevenson Crescent, a constituent came to me who had a leak from a pipe by her front door for 15 years, leading to higher water bills. There was a dispute between Thames Water and her landlord, Hexagon Housing Association, and neither would take responsibility. Both said that she owed money and should pay. It should not take a Member of Parliament’s intervention to get companies and landlords to sort out a problem that had been going on for so long that it was causing damp and mould in this woman’s home. It is a disgraceful state of affairs, and the Government should seek to change it through legislation on how these companies operate.
On Welsford Street, Thames Water stored equipment, blocking emergency vehicles and causing disruption for about 18 months, which was unbelievably callous and disrespectful. In Janeway Street, near my constituency office, builders damaged kerbing and paving without care for how people used it, and they fenced off pavements, which caused disruption for people with pushchairs and wheelchairs. When Thames Water attended a flat above my constituency office, opposite Bermondsey tube station, it removed the gate at the back of my office and did not bother to put it back. I do not know why it thought I would not be on to it. In Oakville House, there was a sewage leak into the boiler room, which meant that residents were left without heating or hot water in December, when temperatures were below zero. That was completely unacceptable, and it was not fixed fast enough.
At Bermondsey village hall—yes, there is a village hall in Bermondsey in central London—there was a leak in the car park. Thames Water refused to accept responsibility. The water meter in this community facility was going like a desk fan. The hall is run by Chris Parsons, a wonderful community stalwart who runs the policing and ward panel; the last time I was in the village hall was to run a community safety forum. She is also involved in St Olave, St Thomas and St John United Charity, a historic charity providing education support and funds to people in difficult circumstances in my constituency. It does tremendous work, although there are issues that need sorting out, and Chris is working with me before the Charity Commission has to formally be involved.
Chris runs the community hall. It is a genuine community facility reliant on the good will of volunteers and people like Chris. The owner of the building—Leathermarket JMB, a co-operative—and Chris came to me because Thames Water would not acknowledge that it was responsible. It took months to sort this very basic problem. It took bailiffs turning up for debts that they claimed were thousands of pounds, and the threat of legal action. It was incredibly heavy-handed, and it was symbolic of the company’s attitude and uncaring model. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Norwich South referred to the excesses of the sector. This is a good example of its lack of care for the customers it is meant to serve, and about the leak, which was pouring gallons of water underground, potentially damaging the foundations of other buildings.
Then there are the roadworks on Brunel Road. Two weeks ago today, Thames Water began work on Brunel Road. That has directly caused the loss of two bus services: the 381 and the C10. Brunel Road is in Rotherhithe. The constituency is shaped by the river. Rotherhithe is an Anglo-Saxon name that means “a landing place for cattle”. Rotherhithe is the docks. That means shipping—not just shipping of goods and trade, but shipping of people.
Other Members might claim credit for the Mayflower, but we know in Rotherhithe that the Mayflower set sail for the United States in 1620 from Rotherhithe. The master of the Mayflower, Christopher Jones, is buried in St Mary’s Church in Rotherhithe. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South talked about democracy. The reason the Mayflower set sail, crewed and was boarded by pilgrims in London was that they were seeking democratic and religious freedom. Americans claim the Mayflower as part of their democratic history. There is an amazing book on this written by a constituent in Bermondsey called Graham Taylor, “The Mayflower in Britain: How an icon was made in London”, which came out on the quatercentenary of the Mayflower journey—that is in 2020, for anyone struggling with the maths. It is about how the investors and the people boarded in London, rather than anywhere else.
I was talking about Brunel Road. Rotherhithe is a peninsula of 20,000-plus people. The 381 and C10 buses being cut off is hugely disruptive, forcing some people to walk more than a mile to get an alternative bus. Two weeks ago Thames Water used an emergency process to seek permission for its works, sending an email after council officers had left the building. There is a legitimate question about whether Southwark council should have had better access to emails over the weekend to see that emergency email pointing out works, but Thames Water used that emergency process and dug up the road. It could have done one side and then the other, but it chose to shut off the whole road—underhand and uncaring about the impact of the works. The works are supposed to finish today, and I hope they do, but if they do not, I hope Ministers will consider new powers for councils to block the misuse of emergency procedures, such as in that case.
Brunel Road is not named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Better than him, it is named after his father Marc—this is perhaps linked to the debate. Marc fled left-wing revolutionaries in France who were scrapping private ownership, not just without giving compensation but by taking off the heads of anyone who opposed it. More importantly, Marc Brunel designed and built the Thames tunnel, just a stone’s throw from the King’s Bench debtors prison, where he was locked up until the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister funded a grant to release him so that he could build that tunnel, which was a feat of engineering at the time.
Drilled from Rotherhithe to Wapping, it was the first subaqueous tunnel in the world, and for many years the largest soft-ground tunnel. Invented in order to achieve that engineering feat was the tunnelling shield, one of the basic tools of modern civil engineering. The tunnel was completed in 1843. Originally it was just for pedestrians, but it has developed over time. It was unforeseeable at that time how it would go on to be used, at one point becoming part of the London underground. I am digressing, but if Members want to know more about Brunel history, the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe is amazing and they should go. The museum actually sells Isambard Kingdom Brunel socks—though other Brunels are available.
Coming back to my point, the modern contrast with the Thames tunnel is the Tideway tunnel. Thames Water should have been in a secure place to deliver the modern tunnel that has gone under the Thames, but because it was mistrusted and because of the debt it had already accrued, it was not in a place to be able to deliver the new engineering feat that we have seen in my constituency. This engineering feat of the 21st century will improve the environment, take in storm overflow, prevent environmental damage and take some of the excess sewage away from London.
It is 7.2 metres wide, which is the equivalent of three London double-decker buses, for those who measure things by double-decker buses. The two connection tunnels are 5 metres and 2 metres in diameter respectively—5 metres being roughly the size of a London underground tunnel. One of the vertical shafts for the engineering tunnel is in Chambers Wharf, next to my constituency office, and came with a cofferdam—not without its detractors—that went right up close to people’s homes behind my office. That project was run well and gave compensation to the people directly affected, including those affected when the piling for the tunnel got stuck and there was drilling throughout the night until 5 o’clock in the morning. Members can imagine the complaints I got over that issue.
A cofferdam could have provided a new park for the community, with views back to Tower Bridge where people like to take selfies, but no one was willing to take on the maintenance and cost, and Thames Water was not in a position to be trusted. Instead of diverting to a new company to build this tunnel, Ministers under the last Government should have acted to address the problems that led Thames Water not to be trusted. As usual, the last Government left problems of that nature to be dealt with by a more responsible alternative, and here we are today talking about this Bill.
I make no bones about it; I am unconvinced that the state taking over is a solution, partly for the reasons I have stated. It is not a permanent solution on any grounds. I have serious doubts that making Thames Water a state-owned body would make the situation any better, given the faults it has.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I know you will be interested to know what my constituency party thinks. It debated this issue just last week, and out of more than 1,000 members, eight supported the nationalisation of Thames Water as an emergency motion. I thank those members for contributing, including Karen, Andy, Richard and others. It was useful to hear why they felt it was important. There were a lot of shared concerns about how the company is run, for the reasons I have outlined. I would like to thank Mike, Julie and other members who did not believe that simply nationalising it is a solution. They believe that state-owned does not necessarily equal better, cleaner or cheaper water, and there is no guarantee that things would be cheaper under a state-owned model.
We should look at evidence from other state-owned institutions. Nationalisation is not a magic bullet. Civil servants have many qualities, but running utility businesses is not necessarily in the Whitehall skillset, especially after 14 years of degradation. With Ministers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, it is no wonder people were working from home. We have criticised the degradation of the civil service, but some supporters of the Bill suggest that civil servants have the skills and expertise to run a utility business.
Clive Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for an excellent speech. I have learned so much history; it has been very interesting. He might be surprised to learn that I do not believe in state ownership of our water assets either. The Bill gives the public the final say on that, along with the Secretary of State and the commission. There are so many other models to consider: municipalised models, mutuals, handing the companies partly over to the strategic authorities and the Mayors that the Labour Government are setting up. There are myriad opportunities, options and routes to go down.
People say that the change would not be cheaper. I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to research by Visiting Professor David Hall and Conor Gray at the University of Greenwich. They said that the savings from within the system on a transition to some form of public ownership would amount to between £3.2 billion and £5.8 billion annually for England and Wales—enough to deliver price cuts of between 22% and 34%—because there would be lower rates for the financing of future expenditure.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. That was a very long intervention.
Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on introducing a Bill that directly addresses one of the most strongly felt public sentiments in my constituency and across the country. The work he has done on this Bill, with Unison and others, deserves great respect.
I support many of the measures that the Government have swiftly taken to address the failures in our water system since taking power. Blocking bonuses for bosses of polluting water companies to end the absurd financial rewards for the destruction of our natural heritage, and ringfencing billpayers’ money for long overdue improvements to infrastructure are positive steps in the right direction.
Clive Lewis
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 could have instructed Ofwat to take a far more rigorous approach to the payment of bonuses? At the moment, bosses do not get their bonus if they have a one-star rating. In the last 15 years, every single water company, except one, has had more than a one-star rating, hence they have been able to pay bonuses. Does my hon. Friend think that could have been tightened up?
Chris Hinchliff
The Minister is shaking her head, but I agree that it is difficult to see how any boss could qualify for a bonus in the current system.
I would be failing to adequately represent the constituents of North East Hertfordshire if I did not make it clear that they have no faith whatsoever that private water companies, after years of disgraceful neglect, can now be trusted to restore the health of our rivers. The residents who sent me to this place are rightly furious at being asked to pay more to make good the malpractice from which water companies have been profiting.
The public do not want to pay towards rescuing discredited corporations that have spent decades extracting wealth from our countryside and polluting our rivers to the detriment of wildlife, the pleasures of wild swimming, and any ordinary citizen who cares about the natural world. No doubt, some of the activities and profits of these companies have been included in the calculations of our nation’s GDP. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly that, so often, what passes for valuable economic activity in this country in reality inflicts enormous costs on the public, while threatening the very environment that underpins true prosperity and wellbeing for all.
Frankly, it is difficult to disagree with my constituents when they say that, given the damage done by water companies to our rivers through a combination of over-abstraction and pollution, Ofwat is wrong to allow them to charge so much as an extra penny on bills, never mind the staggering 31% increase granted to Thames Water. The residents contacting me about this issue have repeatedly called for water companies to pay for the damage they have done. They say that if the water companies cannot afford to do so without going bankrupt, then let them. And should nationalisation be required as a result, then let Parliament set the appropriate level of compensation for shareholders, netting off not just company debt, but all the dividends shelled out while our rivers and streams have choked with pollution.
I recognise that Parliament is not yet ready to accept the radicalism of the wider public on this issue, but this Bill offers a clear and pragmatic solution both to restoring democratic faith in the management of our water system, and to ensuring that it puts people and nature before profit. The whole saga we have witnessed in our water system means that we can now say, in all candour, that the capitalism of Adam Smith, in which the aggregate of self-interested economic decisions produces the collective good, in so far as it ever did exist, is now just a folk story told to justify the actions of the richest members of our society.
When it comes to our water system, the free market is a myth, and pretending it exists has only served to inject more pollution into our environment and inequality into our economy, as has happened on almost every occasion on which we have privatised one of our nation’s major assets. The Bill offers a solution to reassuring residents in Baldock that the Ivel will flow fully once again; to residents in Buntingford that planning consultations will no longer be waived through, where they will cause already overloaded infrastructure to flood people’s homes with sewage; and to residents in Barkway that effluent will no longer flow into our rivers for hundreds of hours every year.
Something which unites the rivers at each of the locations I have just referred to is that they are all chalk streams. We are proud custodians of 10 of these internationally significant waterways in North East Hertfordshire and I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to ask Ministers to publish the ready-to-go chalk stream recovery pack. It would be a move warmly welcomed by many local groups in my constituency and across the country. I would like to extend an invitation to Ministers to join me in visiting the River Ivel in my constituency to discuss a superb chalk stream restoration pilot project that could be implemented there.
To conclude, the Bill has my full support and I hope that Ministers will reflect its whole spirit in their responding remarks today.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
It has been an absolute delight to listen to the debate. There were times when I thought that having an official Opposition was unnecessary because of the amount of opposition from Government Members. I congratulate my Norfolk neighbour, the hon. and gallant Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis). I am delighted to have a return of these rather archaic honorifics, because next time he refers to me, he will have to call me honourable and learned, which I know will stick in his craw. I congratulate him on introducing a groundbreaking Bill to the House. It would have a huge impact on the water industry, for good or ill, as I will discuss in the coming minutes.
It is surprising to me, and perhaps to other hon. Members who were in this place before the last general election, to see the total absence of any Liberal Democrat Members in the Chamber. Not even their official spokesperson is here. I remember the amount of noise they made before the election about their views on water. It is telling that when it comes to a groundbreaking piece of legislation that could really make a change, according to the hon. Member for Norwich South, they could not even be bothered to attend. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I have unified the House. We all agree on one thing, and we know what that is.
The hon. Member for Norwich South made not just a critique of the water companies, but of private ownership in general. I want to address that very briefly, in a single sentence: capitalism has lifted more people in the world out of poverty and despair than any other economic system in history. However, I recognise that there are many forms of ownership in a capitalist system, including national and public ownership, mutualisation and private ownership.
Before throwing the metaphorical baby out with the almost uniquely clean bathwater that we enjoy in this country, let us take a moment to look back at private sector water company performance, in a way that would have been impossible for me to do prior to the general election, because the campaigning noise was so deafening that rational debate was too often brushed aside. I am taking a risk, but I hope that today, in this Chamber, we can have a more rational and careful debate, and look at the data. Let us look at the private performance, both good and ill. This is not a defence of the status quo, but it is a challenge to the assumption that public ownership is necessarily the solution. I will go back and look at elements of the performance of the private sector over the past 30 years. The first duty of a water company is to provide safe, clean drinking water for its customers. As we heard from the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), our water industry passes that test with flying colours. It is not just clean water but the cleanest water in the entire world, jointly with one other country—and I hope no one intervenes to ask me which country that is, because I simply do not know. Let us not forget, as we bash the water companies, that they have provided the cleanest drinking water in the world.
The next thing water companies have to do is to make sure that the supply is uninterrupted. We had an experiment with nationalisation of our water industry up until about 30 years ago. During that period, interruptions in the water supply were five times as likely as they are today. To put it another way, privatisation has reduced the interruption of the water supply fivefold. We can argue about why that is, but that is a fact. There are examples of disruption such as the one the hon. Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) referred to, and they are terrible, but in aggregate, the number of disruptions has reduced fivefold. We then turn to leakage. As my neighbour, the hon. Member for Norwich South, says, water is a scarce and valuable public resource, so leakage is very important. Since privatisation, the amount of leakage has reduced by a third.
How has all this been achieved? The answer is that £236 billion has been invested by the private sector in our water infrastructure since 1991. How has it been able to do that? The answer, in my submission, is that it has not been competing with the provision of new hospitals or new schools, and—perhaps Government Members will feel this more closely to their hearts—it has not been competing with personal independence payments for the disabled, the disability element of universal credit or carer’s allowance. Try asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer now for £236 billion to be spent from the public funds on water. We know from the debates we have had last week and this week that that is almost impossible.
I turn to performance. There are various ways of measuring performance, but the headline is serious sewage incidents. In the 1990s, the average number of serious sewage incidents was 500 a year. Now it is well below 100. The last year for which I could find data was 2021, and in that year the number was 62. There are other elements of performance. There are the chemicals being leached into our waterways through treated sewage. The most damaging for biodiversity is phosphorus. Since 1990, because of the investment, the amount of phosphorus entering our waterways through the water treatment system has not increased; it has reduced by 80%. This is at a time when our economy has grown and our population has increased significantly.
The next most damaging chemical is ammonia. Again, since 1990, the amount of ammonia going into the waterways because of treated water has not increased along with population growth or economic growth; it has in fact declined by 85%. The next most damaging chemicals are cadmium and mercury. Since 2008—a slightly different starting point, I accept—the amount of cadmium and mercury has reduced by 50%.
If we take away the emotion and start looking at some of the core data, we can see that there have been very real elements of progress—not universal progress, but real elements of progress because of a huge amount of private investment in our water industry.
Clive Lewis
If I could sum up the hon. and learned Member’s argument, he seems to be telling the public, “You’ve never had it so good.” I think many members of the public would disagree with that. I would also make the point that all the investment that has gone into our water since privatisation has come from our bills. Private companies have paid dividends and left themselves £60 billion in debt. That is money that otherwise would have been invested into the public water system.
Jerome Mayhew
I am absolutely not saying, “You’ve never had it so good,” but I am drawing attention to the actual data, so that we can make a balanced judgment. I will come to some of the disadvantages of the last 30 years later on in my speech, so I hope I will give a balanced judgment.
We have dealt with the rivers and serious sewage incidents—[Interruption.] Hon. Members should wait and not be hasty. Sewage discharges from storm overflows have been, without doubt, the greatest area of failure for decades, in both public and private ownership. Why? It is because the problem was hidden for decades. It was not reported, and it was not measured. Back in 2010, the Labour Government monitored only 7% of storm overflows. As a result, we had no idea how frequently storm overflows were being activated, or for how long. Worse, Labour changed the law in 2008—I think one Labour Member present was in Parliament at that time—to allow the water companies to self-monitor their environmental performance.
The Liberal Democrats do not come out of this very well, either. [Interruption.] We can all agree on that. During the coalition, there was a Liberal Democrat Water Minister from 2013 to 2015. What action did they take when they held the levers of power? Absolutely none.
It was the Conservatives who forced transparency on the water industry by requiring 100% of storm overflow data to be monitored and then published within 15 minutes. That exposed the problem, and we then took action through the £56 billion storm overflows discharge reduction plan to fix the problem over 25 years. We all want to go faster, but it is about the balance between costs, the industry’s ability to react, and the time a responsible Government have to take these decisions.
We also had a plan to improve the water quality of chalk streams, which is an issue close to your heart, Madam Deputy Speaker. I believe you have the Test in your constituency, and I can beat that with the Stiffkey, the Wensum, the Bure and a couple of others.
Despite the unacceptable storm overflows, the question we need to ask is whether river water quality has got better or worse under privatisation. The difficulty is the lack of comparative data, because as we have monitored more, we have more data points identifying more discharges that were previously unrecorded. One of the best datasets to look at is invertebrate biodiversity, on which there has been a comprehensive study by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, analysing 223,000 samples taken between 1989 and 2018. It looks for biodiversity gain or loss, especially in species that are particularly sensitive to clean water—the mayfly and the caddisfly. You will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that invertebrate biodiversity has tripled in our rivers over the last 30 years, during the period of privatisation.
I am not defending the water companies’ lack of inquisitiveness about the number of storm overflow discharges. This terrible problem has to be addressed, and it was being addressed by the last Conservative Government, but it prompts the question: has our water got better or worse, in aggregate, over the last 30 years? The data suggests that it has got considerably better.
I will talk about the pros and cons of privatisation in terms of funding. In my view, there are definite cons to the private ownership model we have had over the past 30 years. I concede that some water companies have exploited weak regulation to take advantage of their monopolistic position. True competition cannot exist because we have monopoly providers. The role of competition is meant to be provided by regulation and, too often, the regulation has been found wanting, particularly on the financial engineering of the leverage that water companies undertook in the noughties, peaking in about 2015.
Again, I accept that that is a problem that should have been prevented, but all the major parties are guilty and played their part. It started under Labour and continued under the coalition—I am afraid that both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have their fingerprints on this—before stopping in about 2015, when Ofwat belatedly tightened up its provision. Members will have noticed that the latest return on capital allowed by Ofwat is, from memory, 3.4%, which I submit is a reasonable return on capital and one that individuals might get from a high-interest account.
I hope that I have given a balanced assessment of the good and bad of privatisation over the past 30 years. We need to do that, because it is the basis on which we address the next question about the Bill: what is the right mechanism of ownership? In my view, privatisation has, on balance, been a success, because it has managed to lever in investment to improve our water quality overall, to reduce leakage and outages in the way that I have described, and to provide us with the safest water in the world.
Clive Lewis
I thank the hon. and learned Member for his contribution to the debate. Private water companies have invested less than nothing of their private equity in our water system since privatisation—in fact, we have £60 billion-worth of debt. I reiterate that taxpayers’ and bill payers’ money has gone into the investments in the water system. The private sector has paid less than nothing, so how we can say that a privatised water system—a natural monopoly, for which there is no perfect competition, or no competition at all—is generating innovation or investment? I fail to see that.
Jerome Mayhew
The profit motive does promote efficiency in innovation, because companies want to minimise their costs and therefore maximise their profits. It also provides access to capital in the manner that I have described, because there are rights issues as well as the recirculation of water bills. It is right that that is the foundation of the business, but it is not the only access to capital, whereas with public ownership, as we are very aware this week, there are limited funds. We cannot borrow forever. We have what I think are described as iron-clad fiscal rules, which we have heard a bit about recently. We know that this Government, and all Governments, are constrained in their ability to borrow and spend, and that they have other priorities, so we will never get a big budget for water if it is in public ownership.
The Bill has generated a huge amount of interest. I thoroughly agree with elements of it, particularly on nature-based solutions, which build on the “Plan for Water” published by the last Government in 2022. If the Bill proceeds, there are areas that I would like to discuss and develop in Committee, but I will not detain the House any further on them now. I look forward to the progress of the Bill.
Clive Lewis
With the leave of the House, I will not get back into a tit for tat over some of the comments that have been made at the Dispatch Box, because I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this fabulous debate on a critical issue. I think that most of us want to get to the same place: we want clean, drinkable, swimmable, and surfable water. I thank everyone who took part in this debate. I thank the Minister for all the work she is doing and will be doing. I thank the Opposition too. Even my wife Katy Lewis turned up today to come and listen, so I thank her for that. It is probably the longest say I have had in a debate in quite a while—I will not hear the end of that for a while, I am sure.
I will finish on this point.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if the NHS did not exist and we in this place had to come together to decide how we were going to provide healthcare for the people of this country. Having listened to today’s debate, I think this place would say that it was too difficult to create a national healthcare system and that we could not do something based on need, rather than on profitability and private sector investment. Yet we managed to do that after the second world war, which had absolutely obliterated our public finances, because we knew it was right, and we knew that some things are not to be judged by their profitability, because they are things that we need. Our health is one such thing, and I and millions of other people believe that water is one of them too. I hope that at some point, those on the Benches on my side of this House—my Government—will acknowledge that and do something about it.
Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Taiwo Owatemi.)
Debate to be resumed on Friday 4 July.
Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]
Clive Lewis ExcerptsTuesday 28th January 2025
(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 View all Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 28 January 2025 - large print - (28 Jan 2025)
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Back Benchers are on a four-minute limit.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
First, I thank EFRA Ministers for the work they have done on this Bill, and for everything they have been doing in working on the consultation. It is quite clear to most of the public that not only is England’s privatised model of water failing, but it is an extreme ideological outlier. It is one of the worst for costs and results. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) is chuntering away in his place. We need a long-term, patient approach, especially given the climate crisis, and that is fundamentally incompatible with privatisation.
Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)
While the chief executive officer of Thames Water was getting £195,000 in bonuses, we in Harpenden and Berkhamsted saw over 100 days of non-stop sewage in our river, which is a chalk stream. The same is now happening again, one year later, with 1,000 hours of non-stop sewage. Does the hon. Member agree that the system clearly does not work, and that such bonuses do not provide the right incentives?
Clive Lewis
I agree with the hon. Lady. I hope her party comes to its senses at some point—maybe in the same way that my party needs to come to its senses—and accept that some form of public ownership will probably be the best way to resolve that.
Clive Lewis
That is my personal view; I put that on the record.
These companies have legal obligations first and foremost to their shareholders, which means short-term profit maximisation. When water was privatised, to quote from Unison’s recent report on this matter, to
“ensure the commercial success of the companies, the government wrote off all the existing debts of the RWAs”—
regional water authorities—
“(£6.5 billion in total) and gave the private companies £7.7 billion of public subsidies in tax relief on profits.”
It has come to my attention that even some former chief executives of water companies fear for the future of the industry, because good investors have by and large exited it. It is now the Macquaries and vulture capitalists of this world that dominate shareholding.
This issue goes far beyond regulation. Indeed, our own regulator, Ofwat, has been found wanting, as its own growth duty prioritises business as usual. In other areas, the Government have quite rightly recognised and embraced the value of public ownership, such as in rail and with Great British Energy. Unfortunately, when it comes to water companies there seems to be an inconsistency in Government policy. Many of us on this side of the House ran on a manifesto commitment to reduce the cost of living, and that commitment is one that I think every Labour MP believes in. However, the cost of corruption and of extraction by a private water company should under no circumstances, as is currently configured in the Bill, land on the heads of our constituents should any of these companies go bust or be taken into special administration.
Water is a monopoly industry, which means that bill payers and taxpayers are the same. What message would it send to our constituents if they are asked to pay, via their bills or via tax, to make a payout for the mistakes and excesses of privatised water?
Graham Stuart
Doubtless the behaviour of the privatised firms should be looked at closely, but one of the fundamentals of having a state-run system for such long-term assets was that they were chronically under-invested. They could never win out in the political battle between schools, hospitals and long-term water infrastructure, and only privatisation allowed the record investment that has gone in since. The hon. Gentleman ought to recognise that in trying to get the balance right.
Clive Lewis
I do recognise that, and not for one second am I calling for nationalisation, which is the model the right hon. Member was talking about. There is a plethora of possibilities for public ownership, from mutualisation through to giving regional authorities more scope, and even working with the private sector. We must ensure that the public have a critical say over the future of water, and there are multiple forms that public ownership can take. I am not necessarily in favour of 1970s-style nationalisation, which is pretty much what they have in Scotland at the moment.
I will, however, ask those on the Front Bench to consider new clause 8 and ensure that our constituents—the people we came into politics for—do not foot a single penny more for the failures of privatised water. Investors, shareholders and creditors should be the ones who take the haircut. They should be the ones who foot the bill because of what they have done to our water. This should not be landing on the heads of our constituents. This is a political choice, and I urge my Government to make it clear that we will always back the public, not the private companies that have got us into this mess.
Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]
Clive Lewis ExcerptsMonday 16th December 2024
(3 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 View all Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 45-I(a) Amendment for Report (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (19 Nov 2024)
Victoria Atkins
I imagine the hon. Gentleman presents himself as a fair-minded individual to his constituents. When the Thames tideway super-sewer is open and functioning, presumably he will say to his constituents that they will see a vast improvement in the terrible situation that he has just described, thanks to the previous Government securing investment in order to make it possible.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
Listening to the right hon. Lady and the excuses that the previous Government have made for what they did, it seems that what you were doing was equivalent to polishing one of the many turds that you will find in the Thames. Perhaps you would like to listen to your main electoral competitor, Reform UK, which actually has a policy for public ownership—I was quite surprised to find that out myself. Perhaps you think that that could solve many of the problems in UK waters.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. One solution would be not using the word “you”. As an experienced Member, he should know much better than that.
Draft Direct Payments to Farmers (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2023
Draft Agriculture (Financial Assistance) (Amendment) Regulations 2023
Clive Lewis Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mark Spencer
I genuinely welcome the Committee’s scrutiny. To be fair to the hon. Member for Cambridge, I also welcome the scrutiny he brings to the role of ELMS and his desire to hold us to account, particularly over the £2.4 billion. That is a manifesto commitment, and he is right to continue to ask whether we are committed to delivering it. I am more than happy to reassure him again that we will deliver that cash. I also welcome his comments about how he wants to see ELMS succeed, bringing environmental and biodiversity benefits, as well as keeping our country well fed.
On the SIs, the hon. Gentleman asked why we have done things the way we have previously and whether this is the final time. The honest truth is that I am the Minister now and I do not think we should keep coming back and talking about the same question. I challenged the team, and we decided to make this the final time. To be fair to previous Ministers, the process has allowed for scrutiny and for the debate to take place annually. Originally, we set out a seven-year plan, and allowing some flexibility in the system and an opportunity to revisit decisions is always sound political practice.
I do not think we have seen a negative impact on land values; if anything, I think the opposite might be true. Land values continue to go up exponentially, and it is probably now beyond the means of most traditional farmers to make a return on land, given the value it seems to attract today. So we have not seen that impact on land values, but what is more interesting is the impact that that might have on rental values going forward, and we will have to monitor that to see what impact some of these changes will have on the rented sector especially.
We are keen to roll the scheme for new entrants out soon, and it will not be long before the hon. Gentleman sees the details of that. If ever there was a moment when we wanted to see the brightest and best young people coming into our sector, this is it. Encouraging new entrants into agriculture, farming and food production is the right thing to do. It has always been difficult, but somehow people have managed to defy economic gravity and enter UK agriculture. In the ’30s and ’40s that was traditionally through dairy farming. We then saw a change to outdoor pigs and poultry. Now we are seeing a lot of people getting into food production through flying flocks. Given some of the changes that ELMS are bringing—with overwintered stubbles and cover crops—we are seeing real opportunities for people to set up flying sheep flocks to graze off those cover crops in the spring. That is another great opportunity for people moving forward.
As we move into these new schemes, we will transfer all that cash from one pot into the other. That is the right thing to do. We must take people on this journey at time and a speed that they can cope with, and I think we are pitching that just about right. That goes to some of the comments from my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. We are moving in that direction and giving people the chance to readjust.
My right hon. Friend mentioned hedgerows. They are a really good example of where we can have a very positive impact. There are quite generous capital grants available to people through countryside stewardship to put in new hedgerows. The SFI standards also allow people to monitor and log the quality of their own hedgerows, so that they can improve them and change the way they manage them.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
I want to pick up on the point the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire made about an army of people in high-vis holding clipboards. One issue that has been raised with the Environmental Audit Committee in our food security inquiry is that enforcement may be an issue, and we were wondering what extra support and resource would go into the enforcement side. If the payments go to farmers, people could be paid but not actually do the work on hedgerows and sustainability. I would be grateful for more information on that.
Mark Spencer
I was just coming to that, because it is a really important point to land, so I am grateful for the two interventions that have given me opportunity to do that. We want to move in a direction that is much less about enforcement and catching people out and more about supporting and encouraging people to do the right thing. Instead of inspectors, we will have assistants and people going on to farms to advise and support. People will not be turning up with a tape measure and saying, “Aha! You’re 50 cm short on that margin.” Rather, they will be saying, “This is what you need to do, and this is how it needs to work.” We want to help and support people to move in the right direction.
There is another side to that. With modern technology it is possible to monitor things via satellite. We can see cropping and improvements to hedgerows via satellites. If individuals take the mickey, do not do the right thing and try to commit fraud, we will of course go after them and prosecute them for defrauding the taxpayer. We aim to support the people who want to do the right thing, while penalising the very small number of people who want to take the mickey.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire made a point about pest management and the use of pesticides on a crop. The purpose of pest management buffer strips is to encourage the production and growth of natural insecticides—in other words ladybirds, lacewings and predators that will go and eat aphids, which are the pests we want to get rid of. We are encouraging people not to use insecticides. They can still use herbicides and fungicides, but they cannot use insecticides, which are the chemicals that will kill those ladybirds and lacewings. I accept that there may be a time where a farmer, having committed to not using insecticide, has to backtrack on that agreement because of a huge aphid infestation. They would have to make a commercial decision as to whether they wanted to stick to receiving taxpayers’ money for not using insecticides or wanted to backtrack on that, use insecticide and not receive payment for that crop.
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (Third sitting)
Clive Lewis ExcerptsThursday 30th June 2022
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 View all Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 June 2022 - (30 Jun 2022)
Deidre Brock
Q
Professor Whitelaw: Craig might be able to answer this more clearly, but depending on the species, that might be breed books or production systems, which would be embedded within the companies or with different nations.
Dr Lewis: We should be very aware here that there is a species component to that. When we start thinking of cattle, for historical reasons, there is a very strong traceability element through the cattle chain. However, if we look at the pig industry in the UK, it is more done on a—shall we say—lot basis. For example, normal practice in the UK pig industry is to use pulled semen at a commercial level for a terminal sire, so even within a litter, you might have three or sires represented. That is today, so an individual animal traceability in the UK pig industry today does not really exist. When we answer the question on traceability and what exists today, that is very species-specific, rather than “This is the livestock sector.”
Professor Whitelaw: This is the basis of all of my thinking. We are using these tools to create precision changes to the genome—changes that can happen naturally. There is no difference between those two. There is a difference in how they arise; one is because we choose to target a specific DNA sequence and change it, and the other is just a random lottery that evolution throws up. However, from the animal’s perspective, and I would argue from our perspective, in how we look at these animals, it is just a genetic variation that exists. There is no difference. Going to the traceability question, why and what are you tracing?
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
Q
We have been dealing with crops so far, and we have now moved on to animals. I must admit that I am now beginning to struggle with this slightly. We are not talking about plants but about sentient animals, and about genetic modifications to them.
The thing I have been reading about PRDC—porcine respiratory disease complex—is that part of it comes down to environmental and conditioning factors. There are obviously some pig farmers, for example, who keep their animals in better conditions than others, but many do not. Even when you keep your animals in optimal condition, there are certain conditions that they are kept in that will encourage that disease.
My question is on behalf of the millions of people who are increasingly becoming vegan or vegetarian. We are now introducing genetic editing to enable us to keep those animals in sometimes quite horrific conditions. It is for this disease at the moment, but what is to say that exploitation of these animals is not going to only deepen? Now we can keep these animals knee deep in their own crap—sorry, Ms McVey—and we can edit their genes so they can survive in those conditions. That is how some people will see this and that is how much of the public will see it. Can you give me some reassurance that that is not going to happen? When profit is the bottom line, I see these animals becoming more robust and able to live in ever-more extreme and difficult conditions.
Dr Rice: Perhaps I can jump in. If you have read about PRRS virus, you will probably know that it is actually not dependent on conditions. Animals in the wild, as well as animals in production, all get sick. What actually happens on farms today is that farmers have to install multimillion filtration systems—because viruses are airborne—to filtrate outside air through very complicated filtration systems so that viruses cannot get into the farm. So it actually has nothing to do with the conditions.
The Chair
Allow the witness to finish.
Dr Rice: It is a reality today and you are welcome to visit those farm centres. I visited one two weeks ago, and I just want to tell you that when we are talking about conditions, I was at the farm and the animals looked beautiful. At the same farm, the owner was telling me that two months ago, he was walking into a room full of dead piglets. Why did that happen? It was because the mother got PRRS virus and it killed all her not-yet-born piglets and they were born dead. So when you walk into this room and see all the crates covered with dead bodies, it is actually very impactful on people’s minds and everything. People suffer mentally seeing those pictures. We have an ability to prevent that. It seems a little strange that we would say no, that they would have to continue to suffer like that, even though we have a tool to give them to completely avoid those types of situations for those poor animals. No, they are not maintained in very bad conditions; they are properly farmed. There are rights on those farms, I would say, but again, all the pigs are getting that and the main biosecurity precaution today is to prevent air from outside from bringing the virus to the farm.
Dr Lewis: I appreciate your questions and concerns, Mr Lewis. Let us just step back. First and foremost, I have the privilege of travelling the world and working with pig farmers all over the world. First and foremost, the UK should be very proud of its tradition of animal welfare and the UK farming sector’s animal welfare standards. If I look at the most extensive and intensive systems here in the UK, both equally get PRRS virus. I struggle with that in many conversations with vets all over the UK. Really, the system does not dictate whether—
Clive Lewis
Q
Dr Lewis: I was just coming to that point. This is a conversation that I have actively had. I have had the privilege of being in a couple of public dialogues with Peter Nuffield. There is a great debate about where animal welfare, farming systems and the food system are in the UK today, but I do not think it is directly relevant to this Bill. If we say that animal welfare needs to change, we already have robust legislation and codes of practice for the UK on what animal welfare should look like and what the standards are. The debate about whether they should move or not is about the animal welfare legislation, and I believe it should be part of a public consultation.
Considering that that legislation is already in place, whether we have genome edited animals or not does not change how many animals we put in the pen; that is dictated by a separate piece of legislation. Just saying that we are going to have gene editing so that we can put more animals in the pen—
The Chair
Mr Lewis, we are straying from the topic. I have to stop you because I have three other Members who want to remain on topic—Kerry, Andrew Bowie and Katherine Fletcher. We will move on because we have strayed off the topic. I have been very patient and I did let it go on for a little while.
Clive Lewis
Q
Dr Mills, on gene edited exports, one presumes that once this biotechnology is achieved, it does not make a difference what welfare rights we have in this country for animals. A big part of the Bill is giving British biotechnology the ability to get out in front on this, and we could then sell that technology to other countries that have much lower animal welfare standards. Is that a concern?
Peter Stevenson: I do not know enough about plants to give a proper opinion. When it comes to the animal side, as I said earlier, there are a few cases in which I think gene editing could be beneficial, but ideally I would like to see animals removed from the Bill and much more thought given to how gene editing is going to be used and what protections should be there before legislation is introduced.
For example, the arguments that gene editing can be beneficial in terms of disease resistance have been overstated. Yes of course, if you are looking at diseases that have nothing to do with the way animals are being kept, gene editing for disease resistance can be helpful, but the science is absolutely clear that many diseases stem from keeping animals in intensive conditions. Very specifically, the crowded, stressful conditions in intensive livestock production can lead to the emergence, the spread and the amplification of pathogens. Gene editing should not be used to tackle such diseases. These diseases should be addressed by keeping animals in better conditions. There is a very real danger that if you gene edit for resistance to diseases that primarily result from keeping animals in poor conditions, that could lead to animals being kept in even more crowded, stressful conditions, because they may be resistant to the diseases that are inherent in such conditions.
Having said all that, I suspect Government isn’t about to drop animals from the Bill. I have talked about how the Bill should be strengthened in terms of giving a stronger central role to the welfare advisory body, but it also needs to be strengthened in setting out what that body should be looking at. The Bill is very unusual. Usually primary legislation provides more definition.
For example, the welfare advisory body should be looking for things like a piece of gene editing aimed at animals growing faster or providing higher yields, and asking, “Has this caused a problem for animals that have been selectively bred for such purposes?” If it has, it should be very careful and look at whether that is likely to happen with gene edited animals. It should also be asked to look at whether the desired objective of the gene editing could have been achieved in less intrusive ways. An awful lot more thought needs to be given to the use of gene editing in animals.
I will add one point. It is more than 50 years since Ruth Harrison’s book “Animal Machines” first alerted us to the dangers of intensive livestock farming, yet gene editing is doing exactly that: treating animals as machines that can be fine-tuned to make them a bit more convenient for us. The Bill sits at considerable odds with the recent Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 that regards animals as sentient beings. The two do not mesh.
Dr Mills: To pick up on what Mr Stevenson said and to clarify, the Nuffield Council certainly sees many benefits in genome editing as applied to animals. Unlike perhaps a number of other commentators on the issue, we does not see genome editing as necessarily being the last resort. We recognise that, in some cases, there are social conditions that are every bit as intractable as the biology of animals; indeed, given the technologies that are becoming available to us, the biology of animals is perhaps more tractable. Our way of approaching this is to treat those things symmetrically and to consider in what way different interventions might promote a just, healthy and sustainable food and farming system, taking into account the interests of the people and animals that are dependent on that system.
You asked about the technology being sold to countries that have lower animal welfare standards than the UK. I am very happy to live in the UK, a country that does respect animal welfare. Of course, the science and the technology are very easily translated across national and jurisdictional boundaries, but that really is an argument for the governance of breeding according to purposes. It should be consistent with the purpose of securing safe, just and sustainable food and farming systems. A technology can be applied in any number of contexts, and one cannot necessarily control them all. However, if you set out in the right direction, you have a much better chance of arriving at a desirable destination.
Dr Campbell: Chair, may I comment on that?
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (First sitting)
Clive Lewis ExcerptsTuesday 28th June 2022
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 View all Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 28 June 2022 - (28 Jun 2022)
David Duguid
Q
Dr Ferrier: Yes, they are. We are having to ensure that at the moment, as I said, the certification requirements are obeyed and can be delivered on. It is the same as for other things that the organic sector cannot use that the conventional sector can, or for certain specifications, so I definitely believe that the current segregation arrangements would also apply here, enabling that certification rule to be followed.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
Q
Dr Ferrier: We are definitely not opposed to transparency, and we are very much in favour of the notification arrangements that are set out in the Bill. That is something that we worked with Government on over a period of time—to be able to have a system within the supply chain, from breeder all the way along, as far as it needs to go, so that the supply chain is aware of the particular breeding technology used. That enables the transparency and the traceability to be there.
We are also not opposed to labelling, as such, because a lot of voluntary, market-led labelling exists already, outside of the statutory system, enabling a retailer, manufacturer or producer to alert the public to something that it particularly wants them to see to try to persuade them to buy that product. Market-led labelling is definitely something that could be achieved, if the market demanded it at the point where products were being used, because we have the notification transparency system within the Bill.
We are opposed to statutory labelling—I guess that position is in line with DEFRA and the Food Standards Agency—because there is no scientific basis for statutory labelling for products that could have been produced through conventional breeding or natural mutations. We therefore believe that, actually, it would be misleading for consumers to have products that were labelled as different when they are not different from their conventionally bred counterparts. We are pleased to see that in the Bill—that any marketing of these products must not mislead the consumer. Of course, the food information to consumers regulations mean that producers of food cannot mislead consumers anyway. So, there is not a scientific basis for statutory labelling, and it would not benefit the consumer. It is really about the safety of the food, so it would not apply to this particular technology because all of those authorisation processes would be in place.
On consumer surveys, which are often quoted, if you ask, “Would you like this particular thing to be labelled?” consumers will generally want that. However, with lots of other breeding techniques, such as radiation-induced mutagenesis, polyploidy induction—don’t ask me to explain what that means—or somatic hybridisation, if you asked consumers “Would you like to see that on a label if it is being used?” they would say yes. We need to be led by the science of whether these products are actually different if you are going to put a statutory labelling requirement in place. If the market wants to label when the time comes, that will certainly be possible with the transparency arrangements in place.
Clive Lewis
Q
Dr Ferrier: I just do not think labelling is a way to deliver policy. It is very blunt.
The Chair
Thank you, Dr Ferrier and David Exwood, for your time and valuable contribution. We now move on to our next witness.
Examination of Witness
Professor Gideon Henderson gave evidence.
Clive Lewis
Q
Professor Dunwell: We could debate the precautionary principle for a long time.
Clive Lewis
But you are obviously happy that it has been resolved.
Professor Dunwell: Yes, but the discussions and the recommendations we have had are proportionate to the scientific debates that ACRE takes part in. Under the traditional remit, our major remit is to advise on potential risks of GM to human health and the environment. That is the core of our debate. At the same time, we have to do that in this area of moving scientific expertise. We continually adjust that, but those are the core features in what we are tasked to do. Clearly, more tasks might come out of the Bill. In that area, we have for years had flexibility about elements of those core principles. Yes, we are satisfied that the precautionary principle is not an issue.
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (Second sitting)
Clive Lewis ExcerptsTuesday 28th June 2022
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 View all Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 28 June 2022 - (28 Jun 2022)
Clive Lewis
Q
Professor Napier: In my opinion, it is regulatory approval that is the barrier.
Clive Lewis
Why? What does that do?
Professor Napier: It is mainly the cost and the uncertainty. If you think about the way GM crops are regulated, for example, in the US it will cost you something like $10 million and take several years to get regulatory approval. In Europe, you could spend that money two or three times over, and because the approval process also has a political component, it will never be approved, so you have this uncertainty. From an entrepreneurial point of view and a commercialisation point of view, what you want is certainty. Even if you think, “Okay, the horizon is five years and I know I need to spend $10 million,” at least you know what it is. If there is uncertainty, I am not going to go on “Dragons’ Den” and say, “Here is my pitch. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Can I have some money, please?” I suspect they will tell me to—
Clive Lewis
Q
I am interested in your views, as individuals who operate in the private-public sphere. When it comes to food security and the climate crisis, I would have thought that profit maximisation will probably not be the route map to solving those problems. What is going to be needed is a private-public partnership where we get the best of both, but some things may cost more. It is going to cost us to tackle the climate crisis; it is going to cost us to ensure that we can feed the world with a climate crisis in the 21st century, so it is even more important that we get the regulatory framework right and that it is robust. Freedom from regulations for businesses means freedoms against consumers, the public and those who do not have access to those sciences to be able to utilise them.
Professor Halford: Look at what has happened to GM technology in Europe. The last GM crop approved for cultivation in Europe was approved in 2010, I think. Only one GM crop is grown to any extent in Europe, and that got approval before it became difficult in the mid-’90s. So nothing is happening—for climate resilience or anything else.
Clive Lewis
That is the extreme version, isn’t it?
Professor Halford: Everyone pats themselves on the back and says, “We’ve got a great regulatory framework,” but nothing is happening. Burkina Faso has more experience—
Clive Lewis
Q
Professor Halford: The simple answer is that it has to be proportionate to the risk. You can also compare gene editing to what we have already. We already have chemical and radiation mutants; that technology has been going around since the 1950s. They are already on the market, with exactly the same kinds of genetic changes that gene editing introduces, but completely random.
Clive Lewis
Q
Professor Halford: You could make exactly the same comment about anything in plant breeding. The argument is, “Why should you look at gene editing as being different?” Is it more risky? Is it more likely to be misused? I would say no.
Clive Lewis
Q
Professor Napier: I know what you are trying to say. I tried to write an article about this a couple of years ago, taking the example of Golden rice, which was developed to deliver a public good and took decades to get to market. Why? Because it had been demonetarised. Effectively, all the economic drivers had been taken out of it, so the impetus for it to be delivered to market was not there. You could not monetarise it, which on one level is exactly as it should be: why should you be monetarising what is effectively misery—childhood blindness and things like that? But it also basically depowers the way the world works—the way that modern economies work. That is just the way of the world, isn’t it? We all know that.
I understand what you are saying. For us, we really want to see stuff applied and translated. People get far too hung up about intellectual property. I am not an IP lawyer, but I know a lot about IP. People feel it is a hindrance in plant biotechnology, but compared with the costs of getting regulatory approval, IP is not the barrier. The reason why we have all these big corporations dominating the field of plant biotechnology is that they are the only people who can afford regulatory approval.
When we ran GM field trials in 2012 at Rothamsted, there were big demonstrations about it. Most of the people had come from the Occupy London demonstration, so they were anti-globalisation protesters. They were protesting about the globalisation and corporatisation of the world; they were not actually that concerned about GM. That is not to dismiss their concerns, but that is what they were really worried about. You can end up conflating a whole load of things and saying, “These are all the things that people should worry about,” but I am not sure that is what you need to worry about. It sounds like I am telling you what to do, but I am absolutely not. There are other things to think about in the Bill.
Professor Halford: If you are going to say that you should regulate how people use the technology—can you do that?
Clive Lewis
Q
I am sorry, Mr Angus, that I have not brought you into this conversation very well, but that is not my job. If you would like to come back on anything—
The Chair
William Angus, would you like to say a few words on this subject?
William Angus: Yes, and I assure you that I will be brief. First of all, I have some comments about various things. This is not a short-term solution. It has been bandied about by many that this is like, “Oh, well, in three years we can do this and that.” We can develop genetic resources in three years already; we do not need that. I am actually a really big supporter of gene editing. I think it allows us to short-circuit when we have major key traits that will be of significant global benefit. Gene editing comes into that very well.
We already have a very strong regulatory system for national listing of varieties. The Committee may or may not know that currently, before we can put varieties into the marketplace, they have to go through a pretty robust national listing system. They have to be distinct, uniform and stable, and they also have to have a value for cultivation and use, so those mechanisms are already in place. I would feel confident that, by beefing them up a bit, we could cover the regulatory issues without huge quantities of over-regulation in terms of entry to the market.
I want to make the point that this is not the shortcut that people perceive it to be, because once you have your trait of interest, you then have to transfer it into a variety or something that is genetically good; then you have your in-house testing process, which is usually three to four years; then you have two years of statutory tests; then your wheat, for instance, gets a recommended listing, and then you have two or three years of seed modification. The idea that we can somehow wave a magic wand with gene editing and create something within three years is complete nonsense; it would take 10 or 11 years. This is the thing about plant breeding: it is a long-term venture.
I am weird—I admit that I am slightly strange. You are quite right that all the big companies are profit-driven. I have absolutely no interest in money, but as a plant breeder you can make a huge difference, not only globally but domestically. I suspect that if you have had a bit of bread today, you will have had part of a variety that I was involved with. That gives me a huge amount of satisfaction, and I hope you enjoyed the bread. That is what plant breeders do: it is about impact. Now that I work on a more global scale, it is helping so many people whom I have met who live on $2 a day. That is really the important part. I do not necessarily represent the interests of large multinationals, I am afraid.
Deidre Brock
Although it is certainly bound up in the arguments about gene editing and genetic modification.
Dr Harrison: In many ways, among the small and medium-sized enterprises such as Bill’s, in a landscape such as the UK, where there is a lot of innovation happening, there are start-ups starting now that want to do breeding and gene editing, so you may well see the opposite happening: a democratisation of the process and more people entering the market as the barrier to entry is much lower because of the regulation change.
Professor Oldroyd: The food production sector is no different from any other sector in this free market economy. I hear a lot of concerns about a few companies owning most of the seeds, but I do not hear the same about a few companies owning most of the drugs, cars, phones, clothes or any other product. That is a reality of our free market economy. The food production system is just like any other sector; there are major players who have a sizeable part of the market share.
Richard made a very important point. The phenomenal restrictions that are being put on traditional genetic modification have actually meant that only the big players that have deep pockets can use that technology. I feel as though we have ended up in the situation that most people feared, where a few companies have total control of a technology, and that is principally because of the cost of releasing those traits. If we follow the Bill and treat them as equivalent to conventional breeding, we absolutely liberate the technology for SMEs to get in the game. At the moment, they could not afford to do that with GM.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
Q
I do not think that is a model that I would want to apply to food. Some of us would like to see something more robust that did not make the mistakes that we have made on pharmaceuticals, for example. Food supply is critical, especially as we move through the 21st century with the climate crisis and a growing population. When I was asking you questions as a BBC journalist a long time ago, I was always struck by your passion for the science and for communicating the science. As currently constructed, does the Bill provide the protections we need? Outside your laboratories, away from the pure science, there are free-market corporations for which the bottom line is the end game and the main driver. Do you feel that this science is beyond abuse and beyond being used in the same way that perhaps big pharma have cornered those markets?
Lastly, I understand the notion that reducing barriers opens up the market to small and medium-sized companies, but the history of any industry shows us that big players begin to hoover up small players over decades, and you end up back in an oligopoly or monopoly situation. That does not necessarily have to happen, but that is what usually happens with new tech. There is a free-for-all when everyone piles in, but ultimately people sell up and move on, and the big companies hoover up. When you get past the science and it reaches the real world, do you feel that there is the opportunity for abuse? Does the Bill protect us from that?
Professor Oldroyd: With the caveat of clause 3, legislating gene editing as equivalent to conventional breeding is the best way to allow small to medium-sized enterprises to become involved in the technology. If you really want to see a break in major corporate ownership, lowering the barriers to how you get a product from that technology is almost certainly going to facilitate that. As I said earlier, the big problem currently with GM is that it is so costly to release a GM variety that only “the big four” can afford to do that. I think that taking this approach will help that ownership of lines.
Certainly from me, as a researcher, the Bill as it currently stands greatly facilitates me to work directly with plant breeders and move products through the conventional plant breeding mechanism into the market and on to the consumer. Some of that plant breeding is in the big four, but quite a bit of it is not. Those are more the medium-sized enterprises, not necessarily BASF or Bayer, although they do have a role in some of that. I think the current Bill will certainly facilitate that broadening of ownership of the technology and a speeding up of the impact to the consumer.
Dr Harrison: If I could add one small point, our public research institutes in the UK have a pivotal role to play here. We do research funded by the Government in this area and we publish that. We can protect it before or we can just publish it so it is free and able to be used by many.
You could really think strategically about how those research organisations are used to direct change in the way that one would want to see, so that varieties come on to the market either nearly complete, so breeders can take them up, which is often what happens, or even release complete varieties, as happens in many other countries, from public funded research organisations. Again, that allows freedom of choice, so varieties come on to the market that have traits that are desirable and do not suffer from the problem you point out, which is that some small companies may become subsumed into larger companies.
Thinking about it more broadly—this is outside the scope of the Bill—there is an absolute opportunity for the UK to lead on bringing those traits to the point at which they can be taken to market, in a variety of different ways that are not just dependent on the big four.
Kerry McCarthy
Q
Professor Oldroyd: I am probably the best person to answer that, because my research is entirely focused on trying to remove the need for the addition of phosphate and nitrate as inorganic fertilisers for food production. I am absolutely driven by a desire to have sustainable productivity for both rich and poor world farmers. Historically, I got most, if not all, of my money from the British or European Governments, but now, as I said, I get money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and also from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. In that regard, it is absolutely policy driven for sustainable productivity for smallholder farmers.
Dr Harrison: I echo that. For the UKRI-funded research that NIAB delivers there are two key components. One is scientific discovery. When you are working in crops, that is about strategic discoveries of things that are important to the strategic objectives of the research councils. Of course, BBSRC is the primary funder of agricultural research in the UK. It is absolutely in that zone of looking at how crop science and net zero intersect and how we can generate more sustainable farming systems. Much of the research, even if it is discovery and frontier bioscience, always has a strategic element to it.
COP26: Limiting Global Temperature Rises
Clive Lewis Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
It is good to speak after the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson), because in many ways she embodies the best of those on the Conservative Benches on this issue.
I will congratulate the Government on some of the work they have done, and continue to do, on moving towards rectifying our climate crisis. However, the analogy I would use it this: imagine we are all sat in a car heading off a cliff edge. What we actually need is a big, hard handbrake turn to avert that cliff edge. What we have at the moment are a Government who are gently taking their foot off the accelerator. Quite simply, that is not good enough. We need a big shove on the brakes: a big handbrake turn and a big skid to turn away from there. That is not happening. I am happy that they are taking their foot off the accelerator, but frankly, for where we are at the moment, that is simply not good enough. The depressing fact is that we are still having these debates. We are still talking about keeping the temperature down to 1.5° C, even though we know this is an existential threat. We are fiddling not just while Rome burns, but while the planet burns. For those of us who have known about this for 30 years or more, that is frankly ridiculous and future generations will never forgive us.
The 2021 IPCC report was a code red for humanity, but alas a green light for business as usual for this Government. As I said earlier this week, there are two problems with the Government’s net zero strategy: net and zero. Zero, because we know, as those who were quick enough to get on the internet and see what documents the Government had put up will have seen, that aviation emissions will be increasing well beyond 2035. We will be pumping out millions of tonnes into the atmosphere well beyond 2035 and beyond 2050. And net, because the negative emission technology we are relying on to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere does not exist at scale yet and shows no signs of doing so.
Let us be honest: I believe the net zero strategy is classic greenwash, big on soundbites, small on detail and absolutely limited on systemic change—the kind of systemic change that we need if we are to avert a climate crisis.
The Climate Emergency
Clive Lewis Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) who I believe is one of the few Conservative Members who gets the scale of the challenge before us. Most Members of the House agree that something needs to be done, but the difference between many Conservative Members and Labour Members comes down to the speed, scale and ambition of that change. For example, in 2017 the Government’s manifesto stated that they would plant 11 million trees over five years in their efforts to challenge and tackle the climate crisis. Compare that with Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, which has just planted 350 million trees in 12 hours. That tells us everything we need to know about the scale of the Government’s ambition when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.
Jeremy Lefroy
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and Ethiopia has pledged to plant 4 billion trees in the next year.
Clive Lewis
You took the words out of my mouth.
Labour Members are committed to nothing less than the total transformation of our economy—not just how it works, but for whom it works. So many of us who came into politics as Labour Members understand that the fight against the climate crisis is the fight against inequality. Why? Because we know that the poorest 50% of people in this country, and between countries, consume just 10% of the resources and emit just 10% of the carbon. The wealthiest 10% consume 50% of the resources and emit 50% of the carbon. It is therefore clear that the fight against climate change is also the fight against global and domestic inequality. The poor cannot give up what they do not have; they cannot give up carbon that they are not emitting. The people who can are those at the top—the top 10%; the top 1%. Those are the people who must give up their carbon and their use of resources.
My hon. Friend—I will call her that—the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has said that the Queen’s Speech contained just six words about the environment, and there was not a single mention of the climate and ecological crisis facing our planet. That is hardly surprising, given this Government’s track record on the climate emergency. We have had a green light for fracking, and fossil fuel subsidies have been boosted by billions. Onshore wind has been scrapped and solar support axed. The green homes scheme has been eviscerated, and zero-carbon homes abandoned. The Green Bank has been sold, Swansea tidal lagoon stuffed, and Heathrow expansion approved. After 10 years of that, the Government tell us to trust them to tackle the climate crisis, but many Labour Members, and many members of the public, are extremely sceptical about their claims.
Even though we face a climate and ecological crisis, that is not a collapse. This is a turning point—that is what a crisis is—and things may go one way or another. This is a crossroads. That is why Extinction Rebellion, youth climate strikers and all those who understand the scale and urgency of the issue are fighting so hard for the future. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion and I have introduced the green new deal, and why Labour Members are pushing forward the green industrial revolution. If that is to be the future for our economy, we need a transformation in our transport system, housing, heat and energy, and a complete modal shift in the way we live, work and consume. Let us take, for example, electric cars. We know that we cannot build 31 million electric cars. That is how many petrol and diesel cars there are on our roads. There is not enough cobalt on the planet for us to be able to build all those cars, so we will require a complete transformation of how we travel.
I will finish with a quote from someone who has already been mentioned today, Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring”. She was one of the first people to alert us to this environmental catastrophe. She said:
“Humankind is challenged as it has never been challenged before, to prove its mastery—not of nature, but of itself.”
That is the challenge. Can the Government prove mastery not just of themselves but of their ability to tackle the climate crisis? It is time to get a grip.
Environment and Climate Change
Clive Lewis Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
So often as politicians we talk about what is politically possible, but with the climate crisis we need to move from the art of the politically possible to the science of what is necessary. When you are drowning, you do not ask yourself, “Ooh, what is politically possible?”; you do whatever it takes to survive. When the banks crashed in 2008, the political consensus in this place was to save them by any means necessary. According to the National Audit Office, the cost was £1.2 trillion, which meant 10 years of austerity, public service cuts and vast human suffering. But now, instead of a banking collapse, we face a climate and ecological collapse. We face catastrophes of biblical proportions: droughts, pestilence, famine, floods, wildfires, mass migration, political instability, war and terrorism. Global civilisation as we know it will be gone by the end of the century unless we act.
What has been the response from the Conservatives? I will try not to be too partisan. We have seen the green light for fracking, fossil fuel subsidies boosted by billions, onshore wind scrapped, solar support axed, the green homes scheme eviscerated, zero-carbon homes abandoned, the green bank sold off, the Swansea tidal lagoon stuffed, and Heathrow approved. If Tory environmental policy in 2010 could be summed-up as “hug a husky”, the 2019 policy looks more like “Shoot it, skin it, and boil it down to its bones.”
It was against that background—with the science of the climate crisis over here and Government policy over there—that Greta Thunberg, the youth strikers and Extinction Rebellion appeared. They arrived at the climate crisis debate like gatecrashers at a premature funeral, smashing through the window in a shower of glass to announce to a hushed congregation that the patient was still alive. Their message to this place is simple: “The time for incrementalism has passed. Act now, change now, or be swept away by those who will.”
This motion offers us a chance to fundamentally restructure our economy to deliver good, secure, well-paid jobs as we mobilise to decarbonise our economy on a grand scale. It offers us a chance to reinvigorate and strengthen our democracy, to massively reduce social and economic inequalities, and to protect and restore vital threatened habitats and carbon sinks. We must onshore the global financial system, bringing it back under democratic control.
That brings me to my final point. Navigating global society through the perils of the 21st century will require two key things: global co-operation, and human ingenuity and passion on a scale hitherto unseen in our entire history. President Kennedy summed it up in his moon-shot speech of 1962. He did not ask what it would cost; he asked instead what it would take to succeed. He said:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”.