Sewage

Ellie Chowns Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

I thank the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) for bringing this important debate to the House. As the Secretary of State said, we are all in furious agreement that the condition of our rivers, lakes and seas is an absolute scandal. It would be remiss of me not to point out that the problem is not just due to sewage, as the Minister knows. As colleagues have mentioned, agricultural pollution is a key factor in the condition of our rivers, lakes and seas, and we cannot fix the problem without addressing both sewage and agricultural pollution together. However, today’s subject is sewage, so I will focus on that.

Turning to the motion before us, I am not against introducing a blue flag system for rivers and streams, but that is just tinkering around the edges of a broken system. A shortage of flags and targets is not the problem. Last year, the Environment Agency gave the water companies a collective target of a 40% reduction in sewage incidents, but what did we have? A 30% increase. Monitoring and targets are not enough if there is no meaningful action or sanction. I understand that the water companies have well over 1,000 criminal convictions between them—some companies have over 100 convictions—but they are still getting away with it.

At the same time, bills are going through the roof by an average of over 20% in a single year, and by even more for rural constituents, including mine. It is the bill payers, not the shareholders, who are paying the price. Customer bills provide an average of 35% of company revenue to pay the financial costs—the dividends to shareholders and the interest on loans—of the privatised water and sewerage companies in England and Wales. In the case of Scottish Water, a publicly owned company that may have other problems, those costs amounted to just 8% of revenue from consumer bills.

[Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)]

In my constituency, raw sewage discharge increased by 75% in 2023, yet there are plans to raise bills by 32% in the next five years. It is clear that the British public are being ripped off. Does the hon. Member agree that while better regulation and investment rules may fix some of the issues, the only way to solve the whole problem is to bring the water supply back into public ownership?

[Ellie Chowns]

I completely agree. That is precisely the thrust of my argument.

Over the last three decades, shareholders have extracted £83 billion in dividends. They have invested effectively less than nothing, because the share capital and retained earnings in those companies are now lower than they were at the time of privatisation. The capital investment has been taken out of customer bills, yet customers are still paying through the nose. A professor at the University of Greenwich—I have his report here—has shown that the cost of the investment needed in the water industry would be much lower under public ownership than under private ownership. It is clear that, ultimately, public ownership is the only way to gain the control needed to ensure that this essential public utility works for the public benefit, yet the Labour party is unfortunately not willing to consider it.

The Government have the power to bring failing companies into special administration via the High Court, but during the passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act, the Minister said:

“Special administration must be a last resort, as it has significant consequences for a company’s investors.”––[Official Report, Water (Special Measures) Public Bill Committee, 14 January 2025; c. 96.]

That speaks volumes about who the Government think our water industry is for. It is not for those so-called investors—actually extractors—who have taken out so many dividends paid for by debt while neglecting our infrastructure and killing our waterways with sewage. There should be significant consequences for them. The people of this country—the British people—do not want their water to be investable: they want it to be clean, reliable, affordable and in public hands. Public ownership is the key element of the solution to the sewage scandal.