Water Management

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

After a summer of drought in England, including in my constituency, we are bracing ourselves for flooding and storm overflows, and then more drought and more flooding, and then more storm overflows, and then more drought, more flooding and more storm overflows. On the levels around Stathe, Helland, Burrowbridge, Stoke St Mary and North Curry, my constituents must get used to the risk of their land being underwater almost every year, sewage being surcharged into the River Tone, and hosepipe bans and drought, if not at the same time, then in very quick succession.

We are looking at a future of water scarcity—too little water—and too much water. The proposed solutions sound familiar: more reservoirs, more underground stormwater tanks, thicker concrete, bigger pipes, more pumping, more energy and more chemicals. Yes, we are going to need some of that, but that alone would amount to one of the most carbon-intensive infrastructure investment programmes this country has ever seen. In treating the symptoms, not the causes, those measures risk failure. Instead, it is time to tackle the problem where it begins: in the way that our homes, streets and buildings have been designed for decades and in the way that they will be designed in the future.

The truth is that England does not lack water. I will be able to point to an awful lot of it this autumn across my constituency. Rather, it lacks the ability or perhaps the political will to manage it sustainably where it lands.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman on introducing the debate. Is it not time to ensure that developers with a number of projects—many of them building hundreds of houses—start paying towards the upgrading of waste and water management? They often have big profit margins on their houses and such a policy would take the onus off Government and off the Minister.

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right that developers should pay their way. There is much to do, as I will come to.

On average, each house roof in England receives enough free rainwater to meet all its household’s non-potable—non-drinking—water needs, including flushing toilets, washing clothes and watering gardens. Instead of that, we send it, often at high speed, into the sewerage network where it discharges into our rivers. At the same time, we spend millions of pounds making pure drinking water, pumping it into our homes and flushing that down the toilet.

Around a quarter to a third of drinking water in our homes gets nowhere near being drunk. In fact, it is all flushed down the drain without a single drop quenching anybody’s thirst. It is an appalling and pointless waste of drinking water and energy. It means that we respond by investing tens of billions of pounds in reservoirs to hold a bit more rain, so we can treat more of it, pump more of it into our homes and—yes—flush more of it down the toilet unnecessarily. That is not environmental progress; that is a high-carbon and highly expensive way of papering over the cracks in our water system.

The water from our homes and highways—vast volumes of rainwater—continue to go straight down the drain as well, mixing with sewage, pointlessly being pumped and treated and pumped and treated, and far too often creating a backwash that sends sewage tumbling into the River Tone in my constituency and into rivers and beaches across the country.

Our waste water treatment plants can cope with the sewage that is produced. What they cannot cope with is the millions of litres of rainwater we add to the sewage before we send it to the waste water treatment plants. Too often we respond by investing huge amounts into storage tanks to hold stormwater, so we can pump and treat more of it. that is a high-carbon and highly expensive way of papering over the cracks in our water system.

The climate is making the problems worse and, ironically, our addition of rainwater into the mix is making the climate worse—a classic doom loop. As the atmosphere warms, England’s winters become wetter and our summers drier with more intensive thunderstorms. Meanwhile, housing delivery continues at scale, covering land with more impermeable surfaces while we continue to legally entitle developers to collect new rainwater and add that to the sewerage systems as well, which cannot cope. We are building the problem into existence before our eyes.

Contrast this with how we look and deal with energy. We no longer assume that all power has to be generated centrally. Instead, we actively encourage decentralised generation, such as solar panels on roofs which, thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson), will now be required on every roof of every new home. We have batteries in homes and heat pumps replacing distant combustion, and we offer grants to make it happen. On water, we remain stubbornly stuck in—well, I was going to say the 20th century, but it feels like the 19th century.

Other countries have progressed. In parts of Belgium, new homes must capture rainwater for beneficial use. No wonder it has achieved the lowest per capita water consumption in Europe, and no doubt the lowest water bills with it. Australia, Germany and Singapore have embedded rainwater harvesting and source-controlled drainage into mainstream development. In England, by contrast, we continue to ignore rainwater’s massive asset value. Even the amendment I proposed to the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 that new homes should capture rainwater to use it and lower residents’ bills was rejected, I am sorry to say, by the Government.

This issue will not go away, and the alternative approach is really not that radical. It is all remarkably simple. The simple principle is what is called source control: capture rain where it falls, use it wisely and return the excess rain to the ground where it fell. Why use it to top up our sewage? Do we love sewage so much that we actually want to make more of it by adding more water and creating an even greater volume? For all those homes built in earlier centuries where rainwater is directed into the sewer already, why not offer grants to retro-split two drains from the one drain they have at the moment? It would mean lower costs for the consumer, lower water bills, less sewerage for water companies, less sewage going into our rivers and lower costs for the Government, the public and the agencies to cope with.

It could cut water bills by roughly a third, meaning £225 off the average household bill. A household in Taunton and Wellington that catches its own rainwater and takes it out of the sewer would cut its water bill by a quarter to a third. That is around £225 a year off a £695 bill. Nationally, that is 28% to 35% of the total bill. If we gross that up, that is £6.5 billion off bills across 29 million households. Imagine what that could do if it was freed up to be spent in the economy in other ways.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I confess that I am a little confused. There are plenty of places in the country, including in my region, where we already have a separate system for sewage and rainwater runoff that should keep them separate. Yet, over many years, we have seen that that has not had the desired effect, and I am sorry to say that we are still seeing far too much sewage going into our rivers. While I recognise the point he is trying to make, I do not think that it is the silver bullet he suggests. Does he not accept that if we are to capture more rainwater, the way to do that is to build the reservoirs we need?

[Gideon Amos]

As I said at the beginning, we certainly need some reservoirs; I completely accept that. However, as I have explained, we do not assume that the only solution with energy is massive, centralised power stations. In the same way, collecting water on our roofs and in our homes can make a massive contribution. That contribution —some £6.5 billion back into people’s pockets—is not to be sneezed at.

Done at scale, the approach simultaneously tackles water scarcity, water excesses and carbon emissions. Toilets flushed with rainwater reduce demand for new reservoirs and enable more new development. Soakaways, green roofs and property-level sustainable drainage systems help to slow run-off and reduce flood risk and storm overflows. Less pumping and treatment means lower operational carbon. Less concrete and excavation means lower embodied carbon. Crucially, decentralised rainwater management delivers the benefits exactly where people experience them.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is showing his usual erudition on these topics. He mentions SUDS—sustainable drainage systems—which can be an important part of the solutions he outlines. However, many homeowners in my constituency find that those sustainable drainage systems do not work as intended because they are not properly designed and maintained. We have unenacted legislation that means developers are not being held to account. Does he agree that we need to do more to make sustainable drainage systems work effectively?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend is characteristically right, and I will come on to schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which he and I tried on several occasions to have enacted during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

Crucially, decentralised water management delivers the benefits I have listed: homes that are more resilient, bills that are lower, streets that flood less and rivers that have less sewage being discharged into them. Before I was elected as an MP, my campaign was to get the River Tone designated as a bathing water at French Weir. Working with the friends’ group, we succeeded, but unless we take action to reduce sewage volumes in the Tone catchment and around the country, we will not be able to meaningfully reduce sewage discharges into those rivers and beaches.

Crucially, none of this requires an AI data centre to make it happen; what is required is a shift in mindset: managing rain before it becomes a problem rather than using it to make a problem and then trying to manage that problem we have created. We can personally do our bit. My son thinks that the enormous water butt I am trying to make in my back garden is a Heath Robinson creation—well, he would if he knew what Heath Robinson was, but he is far too young. Following all the regulations is challenging, but I am working on it. However, what is really needed is the Government to take action on regulation.

Three key changes are needed from the Government. First, we need to stop designing homes that treat rain as an inconvenience to be sent elsewhere. Rather, it should be sent into people’s homes and harnessed as the asset and essential natural resource that it is and require rainwater harvesting in all new homes. Secondly, the Government needs to bring schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act into law, as pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), so that we start to drain more of our rainwater into the ground where it falls and have a properly regulated system for doing so. Thirdly, the Government need to grant the retro-splitting of household drains so that people can save on their bills and at the same time save our rivers—like our precious Tone—which can be spared the sewage these drains create, add to and augment.

England is about to spend unprecedented sums on water sewerage and infrastructure. We cannot solely rely on carbon-heavy centralised systems. We should finally change our relationship with the rain that falls right on the top of us all. If we want cleaner rivers, secure water supplies, lower emissions and homes fit for a changing climate, the answer is learning to value rain and use it to save us all money where it lands.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Hardy]

This is like geeks united—we love our SUDS! They are brilliant.

The hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington is right: the point about the maintenance of SUDS has been raised a few times. It is okay to build them—I actually think most are built and designed in a very effective way—but there is also the question of how we ensure they are maintained and who is responsible for that.

[Gideon Amos]

I just want to make an observation. When I trained as an architect, I had to follow a whole series of regulations on drains about what the diameters are, what the gradients are—everything has to be followed. For SUDS, there are no such regulations. One is regulated; the other is all down to policy. As many Members have said, we need proper regulation for SUDS, because things will go wrong if we do not get schedule 3 or similar legislation on to the statute book.