Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The schemes that he describes, which are collectively known as SUDS—

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

Sustainable urban drainage systems.

[Mr Slaughter]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that prompt. Local authorities have woken up to the possibility of SUDS, albeit perhaps somewhat late in the day. Many are now insisting in planning applications that there should be no more paving over, while many are rightly taking enforcement action where those conditions are disobeyed. However, it is quite wrong to think that SUDS on their own will be a solution to the problem; rather, they offer additional assistance. The idea that we can suddenly convert road surfaces and pavements into permeable surfaces across London is highly impractical—look at the problems we had with simply replacing the water mains—and it would also cost four or five times more than the highest estimated cost for the tunnel. However, we must use SUDS, and indeed other measures

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for his intervention, because he brings me back to the point that I was making. I was pleased to receive an invitation from the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark to attend a meeting on 6 March in this place. This perhaps draws attention to the point that the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) raised, because although probably 140 to 150 MPs would have been invited if the right hon. Gentleman had asked all those with an interest in Thames Water, I think only three turned up—me, the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr Offord), who is in his place, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford), who was here a moment ago. That perhaps shows a certain lack of interest among some of our colleagues. I am sure that the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster would have been there, had he not had a more pressing engagement—I am sure that it was not the Campaign for Real Ale reception that was on at the same time, but there we go.

The invitation asked us to come and listen to Chris Binnie, the engineer who served as the independent chair of the Thames tideway strategic study steering group, which recommended the full tunnel solution. He was going to be present to explain

“why he now believes the costs have exceeded the benefits, and why there are quicker and cheaper solutions that should be considered urgently.”

I am familiar, as many Members are, with Mr Binnie’s proposal, which is what he has called the “Binnie Bubbler”, It is designed to aerate the Thames in a way that prevents the death of the fish and other livestock—if that is right phrase—in the Thames. I have read the arguments for and against the “Binnie Bubbler”, and I have always been rather sceptical about it, because I am not sure that it is suitable for the tidal Thames—it has apparently worked in Cardiff bay in a lagoon area—and also because I do not think it acceptable to allow raw sewage into the Thames at current levels and then simply to try to aerate it and possibly skim off the worst of it.

I therefore went along to the meeting—although I am sorry that I could not stay for the entire time—to see whether Mr Binnie had something more to say on that issue. It would be fair to say that he had something quite surprising to say. I appreciate that I am about to read from a note about the meeting that was written up by a supporter of the tunnel—I had left by this stage—but it says:

“Chris Binnie announced that he had changed his mind again and now supported Thames Water’s view that we should implement the single Thames Tunnel option. Wow! You could hear the gasps around the room and Simon Hughes’ chin nearly hit the floor.”

That might be slightly unfair: the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark is unfazed even by things greater than engineers changing their minds, for the second time. However, this issue draws attention to an important point in the argument about the Bill, and brings us back to the financing. I think everybody—certainly everybody present in the Chamber today and most other Members of the House, albeit with certain exceptions, my neighbouring Member of Parliament being one of them—supports the idea that something must be done to relieve sewer flooding of the Thames in a substantive way that will last us, we hope, as long as the Bazalgette solution did.