Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind Members that they are expected to wear face coverings when they are not speaking in the debate, in line with the current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I also remind Members that they are asked by the House to have a covid lateral flow test twice a week if coming on to the parliamentary estate. This can be done either at the testing centre in the House or at home. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the room.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 582336, relating to the discharge of sewage by water companies.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Paisley, and it is an honour to be leading the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. The petition calls for an outright ban on water companies discharging raw sewage into watercourses. Personally, I think a lot of our constituents will be shocked to hear that it is currently legal for water companies to do this. How can it be okay for multimillion-pound businesses to absolve themselves of the responsibility for ensuring that our rivers and streams, and ultimately our seas, are free of harmful sewage?

I pay tribute to Ferry Harmer, who started the petition after seeing Feargal Sharkey raise some of the issues around the state of our rivers on the TV programme “Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing” last year. I also thank the 111,434 people from around the UK who have taken the time to sign the petition, especially the 186 people from Gower who have signed it. I have had nearly 150 constituents get in touch with me about this issue in one way or another. That demonstrates the strength of feeling about this issue, which has featured recently in the news. When I spoke to Ferry, it was clear he is a man of real passion and determination. He spoke about the petition and told me that 41% of fish species are in decline in British waters. A third of species are in serious decline, including iconic fish such as salmon and trout.

Through my research, I have discovered astounding facts about the state of our rivers and waterways. Some 39 million tonnes of sewage were discharged into the River Thames alone in 2019—that is one river in one year. Last year, raw sewage was discharged into our waters more than 400,000 times, which is quite an incredible figure. This has now become an emergency for our waterways. Not a single river in England is in a healthy condition, not a single river meets a good chemical standard, and over 85% do not meet good ecological standards. Frankly, it is not good enough.

I am fortunate to represent arguably the best coastal community in the UK. The coast around Gower is popular all year round with families and tourists, and a growing number of local wild swimming groups took off during lockdown. It is the only contact that people have with the outside world, and it has been a saviour for so many people. The well-known Mermaids and other groups know that Gower has some of the best surfing in the UK. I will do anything I can to protect our vital ecosystem, seafood production economy and thriving tourist economy. I know that this is a devolved matter, but as I noted in a recent Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Question Time, this a UK-wide issue. What work is the Minister doing alongside the devolved Administrations, and what commitment can she give to do so, because these waterways, whether in England, Wales or Scotland, are all intertwined and all end up somewhere?

If sewage goes into our rivers and waterways, it will ultimately make its way to the sea, and even into our food chain through seafood and fish. I know we are all supposed to encourage recycling, but even I think that is going a little too far. The Government are failing in their duty of care here. The state of our waterways has not improved since 2016, despite ministerial claims that they are cleaning up their act. What is even worse, the unlawful discharge of sewage could be up to 10 times higher than the rate of prosecutions by the Environment Agency. The Environment Agency is responsible for monitoring and enforcement of water quality breaches, but it has fallen foul of the Government’s cuts; its funding has been slashed by 63% since 2010. Simple measures such as the number of points at which samples are collected have been cut by more than 40%. How can we continue to monitor the health of our rivers if less data is collected?

The Government’s response to the petition mentions that

“water companies have agreed to make available real-time data on sewage discharges from storm overflows at designated bathing waters all year round from this year. This data will be made available to help surfers, swimmers and other recreational water users to check the latest information and make informed choices on where to swim.”

Who does not want to check the amount of human waste, used sanitary products and anything else people have flushed into the water before they go for a swim? That is not a delightful thought. Let us not forget the words of the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who back in 2018 told the Environmental Audit Committee that divergence from tough EU rules would be an opportunity for the UK Government to implement unquestionably tougher restrictions. He said that

“being different can sometimes mean being better”,

and that leavers did not automatically advocate for divergence out of a desire to lower standards. However, owing to Brexit, we have seen a shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers and an increase in red tape, which has led to chemicals not being available to fully treat wastewater before it is discharged. What is more, the Government have granted permissions for the discharges to take place.

I am not here only to outline the increasing problems that the Government are exacerbating, because I have received suggestions of things that the Government could put into place to reverse some of the damage. To clean up our waterways, we need a fully funded and resourced action plan. We need targets for water companies and serious consequences when they break the rules. One way of doing that is to increase the environmental reporting requirement for water companies. I call on the Government to improve their plan to introduce annual reports, such as by making them quarterly reports. With more regular reporting and a system that allows for this, we can see where there are problem areas and react much more efficiently.

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[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Paisley, and to have the opportunity to debate this important issue. I must start by saying that the Government’s new Environment Act 2021 goes further than ever to help to reduce water pollution in our rivers and seas, now and in the future. In many ways, it directly addresses a number of points that the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) has raised in today’s debate.

However, an orchestrated campaign on social media left many thousands of our constituents—people who really care about the quality of our water and river pollution—being bombarded with misinformation. The hon. Member has been very constructive in her contribution to this debate, as I am sure other Members will be, but I hope that the debate will ensure that the true facts are on the record—facts, not fiction.

The fact is that there is nothing new in this Environment Act that creates a right for water companies to dump raw sewage in our water courses. For the first time, the Act creates a statutory duty at the most accountable level of all—the top of Government—to better monitor water quality upstream and downstream of our sewage works, to reduce discharges from storm overflows, and to have clear plans on how to eliminate storm overflows completely in England, and those plans must be in place not at some distant date but in a year’s time. Those are real improvements.

The Act also establishes a new duty for the Environment Agency to publish storm overflow data annually, and water companies will have a duty to publish real-time storm overflow information too. That is quite different from what we saw in the social media disinformation campaign, which created such heightened concern and probably led to today’s debate.

Those are real improvements that matter in my constituency, because we are home to a rare north-flowing salmonid chalk stream, of which there are only 200 in the world. The Loddon springs out of the ground in Buckskin, in the centre of Basingstoke, in my own village of Mapledurwell, and in the surrounding fields. By the time it reaches the sewage works in Chineham, where discharges occur, only two or three miles away, it is still little more than a stream.

In 2006, a water cycle study was undertaken by the local authority to model the impact of large-scale house building, of which Basingstoke has undertaken a great deal in the last two decades, on the River Loddon. Since for more than a decade, I have been working with the Environment Agency and Thames Water to ensure that there are improvements and protections for the quality of our river and that the right measures are in place at our sewage works in Chineham. Indeed, it has one of the toughest consent levels in the country for phosphates. In 2015, some successful lobbying meant that new technology was trialled at the Basingstoke plant rather than it happening somewhere else.

We have been doing a great deal, but we welcome the extra measures in the Act to go further. Some aspects of the river have improved, but others have not. The Minister can help with some of those things, but others she simply cannot. For example, there has been a significant increase in the local crayfish population in the Loddon, which has tipped the river into poor status not because there has been an increase in pollution, but because the crayfish eat the eggs of the course fish. That kind of detail is often lost in social media campaigns, which can misrepresent the information that the Environment Agency gathers. I am interested to know what work the Minister will do to educate local councillors and schools on such information.

The new Act also provides the opportunity to tackle storm water discharges, which is incredibly welcome. Let us be clear: if those discharges did not happen, the storm water would simply flood homes and businesses, which would be completely unacceptable. The measures in the new Act mean that plans must be developed to reduce storm water and, eventually, eliminate it.

That is important for me locally, because in April 2020 an almost unprecedented amount of rainfall led the Loddon to experience 40 overflow events. There was insufficient space to store the quantity of storm water, so it had to be released into the river. The situation is unpredictable—there have been only two such events this year—but we need to ensure that future problems with increased rainfall can be dealt with.

A significant contributory cause of the problem is that house builders have an automatic right to connect rainwater drainage to the sewage system. I will focus on that for the Minister. The Government need to bring into force schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which removes developers’ automatic right to connect rainwater drainage to combined sewers, which can put additional storm water pressure on our sewage works’ capacity. What plans do the Government have to tackle that piece of legislation, which is still unenacted?

Overflows in Basingstoke are also caused by high levels of groundwater infiltrating the Thames Water network. Thames Water will work on that through a scheme to reline sewers from 2025 to 2030, plus two upgrades at the Basingstoke sewage works to increase capacity. I am concerned, however, that because Thames Water has done a significant amount of work on the issue already, it does not see Basingstoke as a priority for future investment.

The Act requires a plan to be in place to make improvements at every stage. I stress to the Minister that it cannot be right that a river such as the Loddon, which is little more than a stream as it runs past the Basingstoke sewage works, as I have pointed out, is subject to the same national storm water overflow rules as much larger bodies of water. Will she set out how plans to reduce and eliminate storm water overflow events can take into account the different size of water courses involved? The Loddon may have one of the lowest number of overflow events in the Thames valley, which makes it less of a priority for Thames Water, but it is a small tributary to the Thames when it receives overflow water in Basingstoke.

I pay tribute to the Minister’s work on the issue of water quality, on which she has made so much progress, and it is fitting that she should be responding to today’s debate.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

I am not imposing a formal time limit, but hon. Members should keep it in mind that if they take about five minutes each, we will comfortably get in everybody who wishes to speak. I now call Tim Farron, and I see you, Mr Morris.

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[Tim Farron]

I am very grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention and for his work in this area highlighting this issue. We have much to be grateful to him for. The point that he makes is absolutely right. We can have policies, but what good are they if they are not enforced or the water companies can factor into their spending plans that a fine of perhaps less than £50,000 is a small price to pay when they are able to dish out to their shareholders £2 billion in dividends each year?

I am absolutely proud of the English lakes and of our waterways. We have glorious lakes, rivers and streams in our community, and I want to keep them clean, but at the moment the water companies have permission to take advantage of the fact that they are allowed to have these emissions, and they are not being held to account via the legal process.

I would like the Minister to reflect on the issues raised today and to tell me what plan she has to help us in the Lake district to ensure that the best visitor attraction in the country, and the biggest outside of London, is kept clean and pristine, and something that we can all remain proud of.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

To get the remaining 12 Back-Bench speeches in, I will have to cut the time limit for speeches to four minutes.

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[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I am very grateful to you, Mr Paisley, for allowing me to contribute briefly to this important debate.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Well, you did write to me.

[Philip Dunne]

I was intending to intervene, but if I have a couple of minutes, I will take advantage of them.

The petition that the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) spoke to—I apologise to her for not being here for her speech—was stimulated by some of the campaign groups with whom I worked when I introduced my private Member’s Bill in 2020. It reflects, as Members have said, the widespread growing awareness of, and horror at, the state of our rivers as a consequence of the uncontrolled dumping of sewage in river systems by water treatment works and the water sewage system, which has been overwhelmed for a variety of reasons. I want to touch on two areas where it is really important that we take things forward, now that the Environment Act has become law.

I completely disagree with the description that the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), for whom I normally have a lot of time, gave of the amendment that was finally made to the Bill. He is simply wrong. The Act will lead to a progressive reduction in sewer discharges, and that will be enforceable in the way described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and as I described in the closing stages of consideration of Lords amendments.

I want to touch on two points, one of them raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke. We will have a planning Bill before us before long. It has to include measures for the proper separation of surface and foul water systems for new developments. Water running off hard standing in all new developments across the country can, through the right to connect, be connected to foul water drainage systems. That is what leads to an overwhelming quantity of water causing problems in the treatment works, which have not been expanded to cope with development over the last 60 or so years. It is a problem that successive Governments have contributed to by not investing enough in the infrastructure of our drainage systems.

The right to connect needs to be dealt with by our having the subsystem to require separation by developers. They should be required to contribute to the capital costs of infrastructure works under the ground; at present, they are not. They have to contribute to the connection charge, but not to the capital for works that would allow full separation for new developments, which is essential.

Finally, I encourage the Minister—I pay tribute to the work that she did to improve the Environment Bill, particularly as it went through the Lords—to adjust Ofwat’s priorities. She has the opportunity to encourage Ofwat, through its forthcoming strategic policy statement, to focus not just on leakage and keeping bills down, but on keeping sewage out of our rivers by investing more in the treatment network for which our water companies are responsible.

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[Kerry McCarthy]

I would rather not, because I have only a few minutes, and the right hon. Lady has already spoken.

I will talk about the local situation, but first, I want to express concern about reports that raw sewage spills in Honiton are threatening the first wild beaver colony to live on an English river for 400 years, which is part of a trial approved by the Minister’s Department. I hope she will agree that it is wonderful that beavers are being reintroduced into our natural environment, and I am very concerned about the threat to them.

In Bristol, particular issues have arisen recently. Conham river park is a popular wild swimming spot for local residents, and the—

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Order. We have a Division in the House and will come back in 15 minutes.

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[Gareth Thomas]

The right hon. Gentleman will have to forgive me. I was concentrating on other things in the 10 years before privatisation—I am not quite that old. If he shares the Opposition’s concerns about the quality of performance of the privatised water companies, I welcome that.

I recognise that the Minister is not likely to give a commitment today to bring the water companies back into public ownership of one sort or another. I will therefore suggest a third way. We could maintain pressure on water companies to bring down the amount of sewage dumped in our streams long after the news cycle has moved on to other issues by giving the consumers of water companies more power, perhaps in the form of a requirement that any increase in bills—or if the Minister were willing to be radical, any increase in the salary of the chief executive and board—has to be approved by the consumers of that company. There should be a water users consumer committee for each water company, with real power to hold to account the board of that company. At the moment, only two committees, without any substantive powers, cover the whole operation of the English water companies. They are clearly not having much impact. I urge the Minister to take away the need to give consumers more direct power over and say in the operation of the water companies on which we all rely.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

I call Mr Grahame Morris. If it is more comfortable for you to remain seated for your speech, I am more than happy to facilitate that.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

That is very kind of you, Mr Paisley. I apologise to you and other Members. I have either a trapped nerve or a pulled muscle. I just cannot bob up and down. It is very painful.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

It is very in vogue to have a bad back at the moment.

[Grahame Morris]

So long as I am either up or down, I am okay; it is getting up and down that is the problem. Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Paisley. I express my appreciation of my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for opening this important debate. Water companies are polluting our bathing waters, rivers and beaches. I am pleased to have this opportunity to raise concerns expressed to me by my constituents.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) spoke of storm overflow events. We are told that combined sewage overflows are used in extreme weather conditions. However, in 2020, water companies discharged raw sewage into rivers in England more than 40,000 times. Illegal dumping stems from water companies being allowed to self-report such spills since 2010. We simply cannot permit privately owned water company monopolies to police themselves. Professor Peter Hammond, visiting scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, told Ministers:

“The evidence suggests that in the last decade, ‘early’ dumping of untreated sewage to rivers has been at least 10 times more frequent than EA monitoring and prosecutions suggest”.

I represent a coastal community in County Durham’s only section of coastline. In Durham’s current 2025 county of culture bid, the east Durham heritage coast should be a jewel. Unfortunately, despite the stream of press releases from Durham County Council’s Conservative coalition leadership declaring various environmental and ecological emergencies, repeated concerns about sewage discharges on the east Durham coast seem to have been ignored; we have seen excuses, inaction and a failure to protect public health. The lack of interest in protecting and promoting clean water on the east Durham coast by the council is a scandal. Residents using the safer seas and rivers app, pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) and promoted by the shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), will realise that there have been 113 pollution alerts for the County Durham coastline so far in 2021.

Durham County Council deflects any inquiries to the Environment Agency. However, anyone watching recent interviews by Environment Agency spokespeople would be forgiven for thinking they were water company representatives rather than a public regulator.

Combined sewer overflows should be a safety valve used sparingly and only in extreme weather conditions. Instead, legal and illegal dumping of sewage seems to be standard practice and, indeed, the Government are complicit in this situation arising. I have called consistently for this essential public asset to be brought under public control. Ministers need to explain to the public why they value the private monopoly interests of water companies over the health, welfare and wellbeing of the public.