Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Eleanor Laing Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State will know, having grown up in Liverpool, how beautiful the coastal constituency of Wirral West is. The Rivers Trust found that a sewer storm overflow in Caldy spilled 75 times in 2022, for a total of more than 1,700 hours, discharging directly into the Dee estuary. It is a very beautiful part of the world, where people go to enjoy the beach, let their children play, enjoy water sports and so forth. It is also very important environmentally—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady is meant to be making an intervention, not a speech. It has to be brief.

[Dr Coffey]

I share with the hon. Lady a love for that part of the north-west. I grew up there, and I used to cycle down to the River Mersey regularly on the Otterspool prom. I was not quite so much a visitor to the other side, apart from when I was visiting family elsewhere.

It is thanks to the openness of this Government in getting the monitoring done and publishing it that the scale of the scourge of sewage has been unveiled. The hon. Lady should welcome that. She should also welcome the active plans that we have been undertaking, with investment, so that even more action will be under way to reduce that sewage, if not eliminate it.

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[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

This is not just the responsibility of the water companies, because it is not just water assets that discharge into our rivers. Within a short section of the River Tame in Greater Manchester there are three water assets, but there are also Johnson brook and Wilson brook. Johnson brook regularly discharges raw sewage into the Tame because of a misconnected sewer somewhere along the reaches of that brook, and Wilson brook regularly discharges chemicals into the Tame because of industrial processes. The Environment Agency’s actions are appalling. What more is the Secretary of State doing—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We cannot have these long interventions, because too many Members want to speak. It is simply not fair.

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Gentleman has raised a very specific constituency matter. I am sure that if he were to write to me or to the Water Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), we could follow it up.

I am conscious that a great many Members have applied to speak today, but I want to make a few more points clear. I have been advised by my officials that issuing automatic penalties could actually limit subsequent liability for more serious enforcement action and higher penalties when an investigation found that an incident was more severe than was initially thought. When a pollution incident occurs, the severity of the incident and the degree of culpability need to be properly investigated. It is through such proper investigation that the Environment Agency can determine the most appropriate response, including criminal prosecution for the most serious incidents.

I am sure that the policy is well intentioned, but it strongly risks making enforcement weaker and potentially letting the most serious polluters off the hook. Water companies must be liable for any illegal activity: polluters must pay. That is why, since 2015, the Environment Agency has carried out more than 50 prosecutions, securing court fines of over £140 million, including the record-breaking fine of £90 million handed to Southern Water. Again, we are going further to ensure that water companies face substantial penalties, which are easier to deploy than going through the courts. We are consulting on reforms to the civil penalties that the Environment Agency can issue to make the process quicker and easier. As I have said, the Government’s preferred option is to remove the cap on penalties entirely, which would pave the way for unlimited penalties for water companies that break the rules.

There is a great deal more that I could have said, but we listened to the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton for more than half an hour, and it is important for other Members to be able to contribute to the debate.

It is the role of Ofwat to scrutinise proposals from the water companies to make sure that customers get good value for money. We will try to carry out other activities such as trying to reduce the cost of these new projects overall, but I also want to flag up that we will continue to ensure that we deliver our integrated plan for water. It is a blueprint for a truly national effort to meet the stretching targets that we set through the Environment Act 2021, and it includes actions to tackle every source of pollution, including sewage discharge and pollution from agriculture, plastics, road run-off, chemicals and pesticides. The plan is underpinned by significant investment. Its scale and deliverability, plus the detail of it, mean that it will go further and faster than anything we have ever done before, and it is certainly going further and faster than most developed nations have ever gone before.

In summary: Labour wants monitoring; we have already delivered it. Labour wants fines; we have delivered record fines. Labour wants larger penalties; we are making them unlimited. Labour says that it wants stronger sanctions, but it would in effect weaken them. Labour wants a plan; we have already published one. Ours is fully costed and credible. Labour says that its plans will not impact household bills, but it cannot say how much they will cost. It was a Labour Government who were taken to court by the European Union for allowing the discharge of sewage, and 13 years later in Wales, where Labour is actually in government, they are discharging sewage almost twice as often as in England. That is not a plan; it is an uncosted political game and a recipe for tripling the average water bill. I encourage the House to support our amendment today, to stop the false attacks and to focus on delivering cleaner water. That is something that all our constituents want.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

It is obvious that an awful lot of people want to speak this afternoon, so we will start with a time limit of four minutes—I am sorry, not five minutes—which will quickly go down to three minutes, so I advise most people sitting in the Chamber to look at their notes and cut them in half.

[Sally-Ann Hart]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would like to apologise to the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon). I understand he emailed my office on 7 September last year and received a response.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for setting the record straight with that point of order, and I see that the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton has acknowledged her apology.

[Jim McMahon]

indicated assent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Let us continue with the debate.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

After the next speaker, the time limit will go down to three minutes.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

This is an important issue, and I agree with the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) that all parties in this place should work to improve what is a very difficult situation for our constituents and the country.

My constituency has eight chalk streams, and I have been campaigning for many years to improve their quality, often with support from Labour Members such as Martin Salter—he is a keen angler—and cross-party members of the all-party parliamentary group on chalk streams, which I helped to set up.

I was shocked when two of my substantial chalk streams, the Beane and the Mimram, ran dry in 2007. I took the Labour Minister to see them, and he was shocked by their condition. The World Wide Fund for Nature joined me and others in starting a campaign, “Rivers on the Edge”, to reduce the huge amount of water being abstracted from these streams. We were successful in that campaign, although by then the Government had changed. It then became clear that not only were these poor streams being abstracted, but they faced pollution, problems with agricultural practice next to them, with nitrates going into them, and all sorts of other problems, including sewage overflow.

I pay tribute to Charles Rangeley-Wilson, who has been involved in all the campaigns, including those against pollution and soil erosion, and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), whose Bill I supported; we both rebelled slightly against the Government on one occasion over that issue. Charles chaired Catchment Based Approach in producing a restoration strategy for chalk streams, which is a good document that the Government support. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) came to its launch by the River Mimram in my constituency, and it sets out a national chalk streams strategy. Although many of its recommendations are not about the problem of sewage overflows, it does cover that.

The Government have taken powers in the Environment Act 2021 and the Agriculture Act 2020 that would enable a catchment-based approach to tackling the range of issues involved in river quality. The water plan, which has been released recently, shows where the investment would be, with fines imposed and money reinvested in improving water quality. One of the main recommendations was to have some sort of protection and priority status for chalk streams. I know that the Secretary of State is concentrating on water generally, but Lord Trenchard has tabled an amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and I wonder whether she would be prepared to consider it.

We know that the state of our rivers and streams is not what it should be, but between 2000 and 2010 we really did not know that, because the monitoring did not take place. It came as a shock that our rivers were in the state they were in. I welcome the fact that the Government are now being transparent, are committing to targets and are really taking this on.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

The time limit has now reduced to three minutes.

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[Samantha Dixon (City of Chester) (Lab)]

We all dream of crystal-clear rivers winding their way through the beautiful British countryside, into our towns and cities, and out into a clean and glistening sea. Sadly, that is not the image that constituents up and down the country are familiar with. Instead, they are faced with the reality of endless hours of raw sewage being dumped into our rivers.

The Government have been weak on water companies and soft on sewage. As a result, our rivers and seas are plagued by sewage, agricultural run-off and diffuse pollution. Shockingly, analysis shows that sewage dumping is taking place every two and a half minutes. We all know that the environmental consequences are catastrophic, but it is not just the environment and the wildlife that are affected. The Tory sewage scandal has serious consequences for public health and for businesses that rely on the beauty and nature of Britain to attract visitors and thrive.

That is certainly the case in my constituency. The River Dee, which flows through it, is one of Chester’s greatest assets, playing a vital part in our history and day-to-day life. The Groves, on the riverbank, is home to numerous businesses, which rely on the beauty and of course the cleanliness of the river. It is a popular destination for Cestrians and visitors alike to enjoy leisure activities. That is why, when I was elected at the end of last year, one of my first acts was to bring together Welsh Water, local river groups, businesses and residents for a summit on the Dee to set out a vision for a clean river, free from the frequent sewage discharges that we see today.

Businesses and sports clubs that rely on the river have told me of the serious consequences that they are facing: people are less keen to take part in river-based activities, and customers are even turned away from hospitality businesses on days when the smell is too bad. Chester businesses are losing trade as a direct result of the Government’s sewage scandal. Indeed, on previous occasions, the world-famous Chester regatta—the oldest regatta in the world, which is celebrating its 290th anniversary this year—has had to be abandoned because of sewage discharges. I sincerely hope that, by the time of its 300th anniversary, sewage discharges will be a thing of the past.

According to data published by the Rivers Trust, a total of 919 hours’ worth of untreated sewage and storm water was discharged into the river in 2020. Despite nearly half a billion pounds being cut from the budget by central Government in the past 13 years, innovative projects such as Cheshire West and Chester Council’s new 1 km rainwater drainage tunnel are helping to alleviate the pressure on our sewage system and reduce the amount of foul waste that ends up in the Dee. Only half the funding towards the drain costs was provided by Government. That is just a drop in the ocean—or rather a drop in Dee—of what is actually needed to tackle the scale of the problem. The scale of change needed to eradicate—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I thank the hon. Lady.