Waste Incinerators

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I welcome this crucial debate, the way it was introduced by the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) and the excellent intervention by the hon. Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson).

We have had debates in the past in Westminster Hall in which, unusually, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and I joined forces—[Laughter.] Yes, it is true. We joined forces to oppose the expansion of the Edmonton incinerator for a number of reasons: first, that it would create high levels of pollution; secondly, that it is in quite a poor area of north London; and thirdly, that the exhaust gases would descend over Essex and land there, causing all kinds of problems. We opposed it because it was over capacity. The modelling even predicted that it would import waste from Europe to keep the incinerator going, because the design was far too big. I can see hon. Members nodding in agreement, because exactly the same kind of nonsense has been talked elsewhere.

When the Government are represented at the UN plastics treaty convention in Geneva this August, they might, if they have a moment, have a chat with the mayor of Geneva. I spent an interesting evening with him some years ago, and I asked him what problems he had. I complimented him on the levels of recycling in the city, which are very high—it is well run. He said, “Fantastic. The problem is that we are stuck with a private finance initiative-type incinerator that needs a vast amount of rubbish to keep it going.” Geneva has to truck burnable waste from Milan through the Alps to keep the incinerator going. This is the economics of the madhouse.

I recognise that we cannot immediately end all incineration, but the fact is that the Edmonton incinerator, which produces 700,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, is being expanded. The recycling rates of north London boroughs are better than they were, but none of them is very good. The Minister will probably remember the occasion when she and I were both in Islington—she was a councillor—and we discovered that some Islington waste had turned up in Indonesia, which is obviously a handy place to take waste from Finsbury Park. It is utterly absurd. We need a different and better approach to waste in this country.

Incineration is a sort of faux recycling. People say, “It’s okay—it’s burned; it’s gone.” It is not gone. It is burned, and pollution comes from it. Yes, we generate electricity from it and get some road-building materials from the ash, but surely we should look at recycling rates instead. The Government’s own estimate is that 55% of all waste is readily recyclable, quite a bit more is partially recyclable and only 8% to 10% is absolutely impossible to recycle. Our society needs a different approach and a different attitude.

I hope that the Minister will tell us that there will be no new licences for new incinerators in this country. I hope that she will look at the existing licences and see where we can reduce incineration to a much lower level, although I recognise that it is difficult to get rid of it straightaway. Finally, I hope that there will be a big Government initiative on recycling rates. That will mean looking at household as well as industrial collections. Too little is recycled, and too much food waste goes into landfill or to incineration when it could and should be composted. But if we have 45 different systems to collect household waste, we are bound to get confusion. Let us have a simpler system, much better composting and recycling, and an attitude that is about working with our environment, not destroying it.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)]

What a pleasure it is to speak under your chairship, Ms Lewell, I think for the second time in a fortnight; we are truly blessed to see each other so frequently. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for raising this important issue and congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House who have taken part in the debate. We have heard some disturbing stories; I was horrified to hear about the fire in Carlisle and the consequent impacts that had, particularly on local children.

As we have heard, the process for extracting energy from waste through incineration is an important issue up and down the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Derby South has drawn attention to the Sinfin waste treatment facility in Derby. He will understand that it is not for me to comment on individual decisions that are for waste authorities to make; however, I am able to say that the operator will need to apply to the EA for a variation to review the permit before it can be recommissioned, which would include a comprehensive assessment of measures to prevent odours and pests. If the recommissioning does happen, the EA would ensure that a robust commissioning plan is in place to prevent any adverse environmental impacts, including from nuisance. He asked whether my officials would meet him to discuss his many concerns; I am happy to offer him that undertaking.

I am sure council tax payers in Derby and across Derbyshire are disappointed that a facility that promised so much and cost so much has yet to treat waste, but I am pleased to set out the progress this Government have made in delivering the long-awaited recycling reforms, our circular economy ambitions and our position in relation to energy from waste. I do not think anyone can accuse us of being slack in those areas. I am sure that through the magic of Hansard and the Government processes, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) will shortly receive a response to the letters that he has written to Government colleagues in the MHCLG.

Let me take you right back, Ms Lewell, to 15 years ago, when the Conservative party was governing in coalition. Basically, over the last 15 years recycling rates have stalled, and in some places gone backwards. Too much waste is still dealt with through incineration or landfill. More than half of waste collected by local authorities in 2023-24 was incinerated, and just 41% was recycled. Incidents such as those that the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) raised—he and I go back a long way—have really damaged people’s confidence in our recycling system. That incident of litter turning up in Indonesia shows us that there is no such place as away. We only have materials.

In an uncertain and turbulent world, we need to take steps to address this, and we have done so at pace. We have introduced reforms that will create 21,000 green jobs and stimulate £10 billion of investment in our recycling capability. That is what underpins our ambition to recycle 65% of municipal waste by 2035. We will get from 41% last year to 65% in 10 years’ time. That is a bold ambition. These are the biggest changes to waste recycling since the last Labour Government introduced the landfill tax back in 2001-02. This is a step change.

I would gently point out that not everybody in this room voted for the deposit return scheme, which is one of the three big pillars of reform that the right hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Steve Barclay) developed when he was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) was absent for the vote in the House on the deposit return scheme. I am glad that somehow, despite his absence, he may have supported the reforms that he worked on as a Minister.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

On recycling, does the Minister agree that one of the problems is that there are too many collection systems that operate differently in different boroughs and different places? Secondly, people living in flats often find it very difficult to store waste for weekly collection, and the levels of compostable waste recycling are very low in those places. Does the Department agree, and is the Minister prepared to take any action to improve those rates of recycling?

[Mary Creagh]

I have set out the actions that we are taking to drive up recycling rates, one of which is to put paid to the proposal we inherited for up to seven bins through the simpler recycling reforms. We have been really clear that we will have black bin waste and mandatory food collections in every local authority, because that does not happen. It obviously happens in Islington, but it does not happen with uniformity across the country. Mandatory food waste recycling came in for businesses on 1 April this year, and it will come in for local authorities on 1 April 2026. That standardisation of recycling and collections should help us all to do better and play our part.

I take on board the right hon. Gentleman’s point about collecting from flats. There are really serious problems. One issue is that recyclable waste is often put into black bins, so they get full very quickly, when actually a lot of stuff could be taken out. The deposit return scheme, the simpler recycling reforms and the extended producer responsibility scheme are really big changes developed under the previous Government and carried on by us at speed, because we have no time to waste. We have to move away from our linear, unsustainable “take, make, throw” model, where we just extract things, make things and throw them away. We want to end the throwaway society, and for things that are made in Britain to be built to last, as they were in olden times.

Water Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis]

No, I do not. We have a distorted electoral system. Bring on proportional representation, because if we had PR, we would have had a different Government in 2019 and most definitely in 2017. Sometimes politicians have to do what they believe to be right and lead from the front. I think we should lead from the front.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I compliment the hon. Member on his Bill. To help his argument, there was overwhelming opinion poll support for public ownership of water in 2017 and 2019, and there still is today.

[Clive Lewis]

I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side.

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[Dame Meg Hillier]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not want to try your patience, so I will move on from the Green party, because the subject of the debate is the Water Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South has put forward.

I want to talk about the challenges that we are seeing in water. Nobody would argue that there is not a problem we are having to deal with. I take the example of my wonderful constituency of Hackney South and Shoreditch and the amazing resource that is the River Lea. It runs through my constituency, starting further up beyond London. We do not have the figures for 2024 yet, but in 2023 there were 1,060 instances of sewage discharge into the River Lea. That amounted to 11,502 hours of sewage discharge from storm overflows. If that is not bad enough, it is almost double the figure from 2022, when sewage was discharged into the River Lea for 5,891 hours. It has been getting worse. We have been raising this issue in the House, and in the last Parliament not enough happened to tackle it. Now, thank goodness, we have a Labour Government who are beginning to act and make sure that water companies are taken into account.

The water quality of the Lea has had a damning assessment: an overall classification of bad, failing on chemical standards and bad ecological health. It is a tragedy that we worked so hard to get our waterways cleaned up during the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, which was a major boost to east London, but we now have bad ecological health.

On a hot, sunny day on Hackney Marshes—sadly no longer in my constituency after the boundary changes —people can be seen swimming in the river, and that is not a place they should be swimming. It is one of the most polluted rivers in the country, but it should be a blue lung for east Londoners. We need to get this problem tackled.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Member is making an important point about river pollution, and she is absolutely right. Would she agree that there is also a planning issue? There are too many paved spaces, and not enough run-off is available to go into the ground water. We need a holistic approach that includes much more assertive planning policies on drainage. Otherwise, we end up with sewage in our rivers during periods of heavy rainfall.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that—I say “Friend” because the right hon. Gentleman and I served very effectively together in Islington when he was the MP and I was a junior councillor for eight years in his patch, so I know his passion in this area.

On run-offs, it is interesting that some councils are still behind on planning issues, so in some areas people are still allowed to pave over their front gardens, and in others they are expected to put in blocks for the tyres of vehicles, with drain-aways or soakaways around them. We need much more of that. I have been involved in that debate for 30 years, and the right hon. Gentleman has been involved for even longer—I bow to his experience—yet we still see challenges in the planning system not allowing for that. We await the full detail of the planning changes, but I really welcome the Government’s move to look at planning differently, ensuring that we are building this sort of resilience into our areas.

We have small areas of flood risk in my constituency, around the Lea valley, so we need to ensure, if it is appropriate to build homes there, that we manage that risk through some of these mitigations. That is very important, because what also happens is that rubbish is washed down from the streets to the canal side—we have just talked about the River Lea—and many of my canal dwellers are concerned, as I am sure are the right hon. Gentleman’s, about the rubbish that has to be collected.

Research by Thames21 and University College London shows that the amount of faecal E. coli bacteria in the River Lea regularly exceeds international standards. It pains me to have to say this, because I love my constituency and think that part of my job is to big it up and tell everyone the great things about it, but sometimes we just have to call out the problems, unfortunately, and this is a real concern.

My constituency is served by Thames Water, of course. Thames Water discharged sewage into the Thames for more than 300,000 hours in 2024, but what is really shocking is that only four years earlier sewage was discharged for just under 19,000 hours—18,443 hours. We thought that was bad and it has exponentially increased, and there is 50% more sewage than in 2023 when sewage was discharged into the Thames for 196,000 hours. London is an international city; it is unbelievable that our river is so dirty and we need to get this resolved.

Nationally, none of our rivers is considered to be in good chemical health according to the Rivers Trust. That means every river in England contains chemicals that are known to cause harm, and figures published just yesterday by the Environment Agency revealed that untreated sewage, including human waste, wet wipes and condoms, was released into waterways for more than 3.62 million hours in 2024. In 2016—just eight years before that data—the comparable figure was 100,533 hours. We are seeing a really big deterioration, and that is why we need to act. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Minister about some of the actions the Government are taking to tackle this.

If sewage on its own is not a reason to look at how we tackle water, the problem of security of supply is a very big concern. I had the privilege of chairing the Public Accounts Committee for nine years, having also served on the Committee for longer, and in 2020 we found that there is a serious risk that the country will run out of water in the next 20 years. We were not a Committee that tended to use hyperbole; we were looking at the facts. We would build our reports on work by the National Audit Office, and we would question witnesses about it. The timescale for that risk was 20 years, so we are already five years into that programme. My hon. Friend the Minister and the Government face a great challenge to try and resolve this in such a short time, because 15 years is not as long as it seems when we are dealing with such big issues.

Security of supply is threatened by increasing demand and diminishing supply. Relevant factors of course include population growth in parts of the country, and urbanisation and development. The point of how we deal with this in planning has been raised and it is absolutely vital that water supply is built into new developments and the new towns the Government are proposing and all the housing developments that we hope to see.

Climate change has obviously been a factor as well, as is unsustainable abstraction when water is removed from the natural environment. I will not try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the issue of chalk streams in this country is a scandal, and once damaged they are gone forever. We have been raping our environment for water company profit and that has to stop. We have also seen growth in water-intensive industries such as data centres, which are causing issues for electricity but also for water, and we need a proper planning process for that. So a lot of this does come back to the Government’s stance in taking a genuinely proactive approach, making sure that planning is not a blocker but actually helps deliver the solutions we need.

In 2022, the Government updated Ofwat’s strategic policy statement to include an objective for the regulator to “increase resilience” in the long term. In 2024, the national infrastructure commission recommended that the Government and Ofwat ensure that water companies’ plans were sufficient to increase water supplies to meet demand for an additional 4,800 megalitres per day by 2050. The numbers are all very well, but we know there is a big challenge now.

The Government will be publishing an updated national framework for water in the summer—I do not think my hon. Friend the Minister ever gets a holiday, with the amount of work that she has to do. Basically, we have water, but not in the places that we need it. We have not built a reservoir for decades. As a child of the 1976 drought—unbelievable, but true—I remember the impact that had on behaviour. In my case, we did not have standpipes in the street, but many families in this country had to go with a bottle to a standpipe in the street to get their water. Water is always a precious commodity, but we really learned that then. We were told not to leave the tap running when washing up or cleaning our teeth. I do not want to lecture people, but we should all keep to those habits. I learned those habits about water preservation at the age of seven—I will admit it—and they have never left me. That was a serious crisis in 1976, but here we are in 2025, facing many of the same challenges. I do not envy my hon. Friend the Minister for the challenges she is seeking to address.

The Government are acting. The Water (Special Measures) Act has been introduced and includes, quite properly, criminal liability for water executives. They cannot hide behind the corporate body and say it was someone else’s fault; we have to have people stepping up. In over a decade on the Public Accounts Committee, I learned that failure is always an orphan. We used to call it “public accounts tennis”. We would say, “Who was in charge? Who was responsible?” and people would all look at each other, waiting to see who would jump forward. Introducing criminal liability sounds draconian, and it is, but it is vital that those who are heading up operations of this importance, and being paid the pay that they are to deliver them, take real responsibility and ensure they have systems in place in their organisations. If the buck stops with them, they will take it very seriously. The criminal liability includes imprisonment for water executives when companies fail to co-operate or obstruct investigations.

The Act also introduces a bonus ban for chief executives and senior leaders unless high standards are met on protecting the environment, consumers and financial resilience. We can talk more about Thames Water in relation to that in a moment. It also introduces automatic penalties for environmental pollution. It ensures that pollution is being measured in real time, because during the last Parliament it was discovered that, for all the talk about measuring sewage, it was not being measured in real time. A lot of the indicators were not there, so it was easy to dodge the real numbers that we are now seeing with the exponential increase in sewage discharge.

The Act introduces an independent water commission as a regulator, which I welcome. The commission was launched in October last year and is chaired by the former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Sir Jon Cunliffe. It is intended to deliver a reset to the sector and is expected to be the biggest review of the water industry since privatisation. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South, who introduced the Bill today, that the commission will be the platform for discussions about the future. Tempting as it may be for him to want to get his Bill passed today, it would not deliver in the timeframe that he would want it to, as that would take a while. Let us take a measured stand and look closely at the independent commission—as I have warned my hon. Friend the Minister, I will be watching it very closely and asking questions about it—because we need to see that overview from every angle. Sir Jon Cunliffe is an independent individual who will be very tough with the Government on this issue.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I compliment my good friend the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on his passion, commitment, knowledge and determination. If I may say so, I am also grateful that he mentioned the late, great David Graeber in his introduction. He was a good friend to both of us, an amazing young man and an amazing philosopher sadly taken from us too soon. I think his family will be really chuffed that the hon. Member has included him in his speech on something so fundamental as the right to fresh, clean water for us all. This Bill seeks to protect that right; it recognises that water is an essential and basic need, and therefore something so universal and so essential surely ought to be completely in public hands. Most countries around the world do not even countenance the idea of privatising water; they say, “It is our public responsibility to ensure that we can provide clean and safe water for everybody.”

When the Government of Margaret Thatcher and others privatised water in the 1980s, many of us strongly opposed it—I think I am the only Member in the Chamber who had the privilege of voting against privatisation at the time. We predicted that it would lead to a rip-off of the public sector, and to asset stripping of the land and other resources that the water boards had built up. We also pointed out that the water infrastructure we enjoy—the reservoirs in Wales, in Scotland and all over England, the piping, the sewage works, and all the other hugely complex elements of infrastructure—was, for the most part, built by public enterprise and public investment. We all laud the work of Bialetti in producing a sewage system for London. That was not done by the private sector; it was done through Victorian investment in a public structure to bring about proper treatment of sewage and provide clean water for the people of London. We should be proud of the public investment that brought about the water system that we have, and should recognise that since 1989, when water was privatised, £72 billion has been taken out in dividends by the water companies. That amounts to £2 billion a year not invested in water—not invested in new pipes and in protecting the system we have. Those profits are extraordinary.

The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) rightly talked about the amount of pollution flowing into our rivers. I cannot get my head around the fact that 300,000 hours-worth of sewage was pumped into the Thames in the last year alone. When we add that to the amount being pumped into the Severn, the Trent, the Humber, the Mersey and all the great rivers across this country, we realise the scale of the problem we are dealing with. We then realise what happens to that—the sewage goes into the sea, and it comes back in fish. It pollutes water, which does not stop at the river’s mouth; it goes into the oceans, creating further global water pollution.

Surely we can do much better. I therefore welcome the Bill, and I invite Members to look seriously at clauses 1 and 2. Clause 1 sets out the measures that will be required in the Secretary of State’s strategy, including measures on prioritising investment, collaborating with local authorities and using natural flood management techniques, and a requirement for local authorities to take into account the need for conservation—all incredibly sensible measures that can only be delivered by public authorities. Privatised water companies do not have as their top line the conservation of the natural world and the environment. They have as their top line, their middle line and their bottom line the profits they can take out of it. And please, nobody tell me that the £72 billion paid out in dividends has been reinvested in the British economy. It is in tax havens all over the world. We are subsidising tax havens all over the world on the back of our polluted and privatised water industry.

Clause 2 relates to the commission on water, which is a fascinating proposal. The commission would include representatives of water companies—which are privatised at the moment but would hopefully be publicly owned—union representatives in the water industry, environmental or conservation groups, water users, which would be local businesses, and local authorities. I strongly support public ownership of water, but I do not envisage a situation in which the Prime Minister, as a gift to his friends, puts them all on a British water board. I would like to retain the existing system of managing river basin areas—Thames, Severn Trent and so on. That makes sense, because that is where the primary water supply comes from. That would be managed through a commission that includes the workforce, trade unions, all the local authorities in the area, local businesses, because they use water and supply services locally, and others who can be appointed from elsewhere. We would have public buy-in to the structure, which would give us a much better and more democratic system.

I urge Members to look with some imagination at what the hon. Member for Norwich South has put forward. Some say, “We can’t possibly bring this into public ownership because it might cost money.” The 1945 Labour Government started by nationalising the Bank of England in 1946 and went on to bring many other industries into public ownership. Even the Ted Heath Government in 1971 brought Rolls-Royce into public ownership and created Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd because the company was failing. The agreed share price was set by Parliament—it was not set by the market in all those cases. We can do the same in this case.

[Mr Frith]

The right hon. Gentleman and I stood for election in 2019 on a manifesto of public ownership of the utilities and water companies. It cost me my job, and the public decided to give Labour the worst electoral thumping in our history. Will he take some responsibility for that? Does he reflect on the point that what he is advocating has already been rejected by this country?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Member for that incredibly friendly and helpful intervention. I am most grateful to him for the collegiate way in which he put that; I could not put it better myself. That manifesto included public ownership of water and other services because those industries needed to come into public ownership; they were failing. The policies in that manifesto were all well in the plus category—more than 70% supported public ownership of water. This might be uncomfortable for him, but the Labour party actually received more votes publicly and nationally in 2019 than it did in the recent general election. We have an electoral system that is unbelievably unfair, and which brought about an enormous majority on a very low total vote. We can all play with the numbers.

I do not resile from what was in that manifesto, because it was put there by people who worked in the industry. The GMB and other unions took part in the consultation that brought about that policy on water. I urge the hon. Member to consider the Bill put forward by my friend the hon. Member for Norwich South, and to recognise that it is an opportunity to do something different.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about having a commission, or a citizens’ assembly. Why is everybody so scared of a citizens’ assembly? What is the big problem with it? Is it something in Members’ heads? What is going on? Why would anyone be so worried about it? Citizens get together and put forward a proposal. We do not have to agree it or accept it, and it does not take away the powers of Parliament. It gives an opportunity for randomly selected ordinary citizens to put forward a point of view. That was done a lot in Scotland when we were talking about devolution. It has been done in other places; in Chile, it was done to develop a new constitution, some of which was ultimately rejected in a referendum. Do these assemblies take away from or diminish the principles discussed? No. I believe they do the very opposite.

[Mark Ferguson]

I have not yet heard a response from anyone in this House to my legitimate concern about regional variation if there is no ability to compel. The right hon. Gentleman is a Member for Islington in London, where a lot of meetings like this one are held. I am a Member for Gateshead, 250 miles away. Attending an assembly would require a lot of travel. How does he suggest we deal with the lack of compulsion, and the regional variation in involvement in citizens’ assemblies?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Since the hon. Member used to live in Islington, he is well aware of how great the connectivity to the area is. Obviously, we live in a country where the capital, London, is in the south-east. That is maybe not an ideal geographical location, but I do not think it is going to change any time soon. If we have a national commission, it has to meet somewhere—it does not have to be in London. Do we have to pay the cost of getting people to the meetings? Yes, of course, obviously we do. I envisage a more localised form of consultation in regional water areas, such as Severn Trent, Humber and so on. I think that would meet the concerns that the hon. Gentleman legitimately raises about the overly centric nature of our political structures in this country.

[Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)]

Is there not an inherent contradiction here? I am not against the principle of citizens’ assemblies; my concern is the idea that they need to be formed by Parliament. Secondly, does the right hon. Gentleman not see an inconsistency between a party that has a mandate for delivering nationalisation, and handing these matters over to a citizens’ assembly for deliberation? Does he not see that there is an inherent contradiction between the two?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I do not think there is a contradiction at all. I think it is mature, grown-up politics to say, “We have the objective of public ownership. We want you to consider what the best form and structure of it would be.” It could be that people do not agree with it at all; we would then have to discuss and debate the matter with them. Obviously, ultimately Parliament has to make the decision. I know everyone in the House is brilliant; the intellect is superb, and the knowledge amazing, and they are infallible in all their judgments, but is it just possible that there are some people who are not Members of Parliament who also have enormous knowledge, experience and ability? Perhaps we should listen to them, too.

[Neil Coyle]

rose—

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I will give way for the last time.

[Neil Coyle]

How long, roughly, does the right hon. Gentleman think it would take to ensure that the citizens were skilled up enough to contribute effectively to the full consultation that he is talking about? As he was so precious about the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith), I will do him a favour by pointing out that the Bill requires the commission to report within four months.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Some people would not require any training or skills development at all; others might, and of course a short period would be needed for that. This is more a question for the promoter of the Bill. If the hon. Member for Norwich South wishes to intervene, I would be happy to give way on this point.

[Clive Lewis]

May I make a more general point? If the Bill went into Committee, we would look at this in far more detail, but a big part of the Bill is about a mission and our direction of travel. It is about tackling the crisis in democracy, and trusting our fellow citizens to give a point of view, with guidance from experts, so that we can make a decision. When the founders of the renaissance or capitalism sat down, did they know that the renaissance would happen, or that capitalism would end up like this? No. This is about heading in a certain direction and having some imagination—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Interventions should be short.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Member for Norwich South for that helpful reply to the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle). I am just doing my best to facilitate debate here, and I hope that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will appreciate the congenial atmosphere that I am trying to create. I do not know whether it is working; please let me know later.

[Mark Garnier]

It is working for us.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Well, there you go. Thank you very much indeed.

I will finish with a couple of points. This country now suffers serious flooding almost every year. We have all experienced the pain that our constituents and others face as a result. Part, but not all, of that is brought about by unusual weather patterns and excessive rainfall. We also need to think seriously about natural river management and natural flood prevention; that is specified in the Bill, and is important. The city of York, for example, is at a confluence of rivers. It has always been in danger of flooding, because it has these rivers flowing into it. There could be a combination of solutions. One is, yes, flood defence walls, concrete barriers and so on to protect central York from flooding. However, there is also the management of what happens upstream.

If we deforest further upstream, build on floodplains and prevent the river following its natural course, we end up with flooding. There are lots of small-scale natural defences one can have against flooding, such as not building on floodplains, having rivers meandering rather than flowing in straight lines, and letting beavers build their dams on streams and so on. There are a whole lot of solutions, all of which add up to something valuable and good. That will not be thought about by water companies; it is done with imagination. Farmers in Shropshire are promoting exactly that kind of solution. Likewise, what happened with the River Parrett, which had excessive flooding, has partly been resolved—but not completely—by the Environment Agency recreating peat bogs up in the hills. There are a lot of things that we can do, but they require imagination. A water company, whose sole interest is in making money out of the water industry, will not be interested in that. That is why the public must have a voice in this process, and that is what the Bill ensures.

The levels of pollution are truly shocking—the sewage that flows in and the danger to all of us. The water we drink is not pure and it is not clean, because there is a limit to how much scrubbing of water can be done to make it clean. We end up drinking all kinds of foul things in our water, not to mention the microplastics that exist because of the excessive use of plastic water bottles as people do not trust the water supply. It breaks my heart. Every day I walk up Seven Sisters Road and outside every shop is a great stack of plastic bottles of water, because people do not trust the water. Would it not be nice if we totally trusted our water and did not feel the need endlessly to buy plastic bottles of water to keep us going through the day?

Last Saturday, I took part in a local people’s forum in my constituency. We invited people to come to discuss water and the water supply. The hall was completely full and the forum was also followed online by a number of other people. We had two excellent speakers: Johnbosco Nwogbo from We Own It, and Laura Reineke from Friends of the Thames. They both spoke with passion, knowledge and interest. We then threw open the discussion for questions and asked each table to come up with their ideas. The commonality was: clean water; ownership and control; the cost of water; and anger and irritation at Thames Water’s lack of investment in the pipe network, including the lack of re-sleeving of the Victorian mains in so many places.

We have had major floods on Isledon Road, Stroud Green Road, Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road in the recent past, not to mention one in the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington—not the constituency of the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), who has been speaking today—which flooded into our area. The Sobell leisure centre, near where I live, was flooded out. It is now two and a half years later and the restitution works for the damage done are just being completed. That is the irresponsibility of Thames Water not investing in the network, wasting money in the short term by digging up short sections of road, replacing the pipe, filling it in again and coming back the next month to dig up another bit of road 100 metres away to do exactly the same thing. We need a much more coherent and comprehensive approach.

The Bill put forward by the hon. Member for Norwich South gives us the chance to do something better and do something different: to make our water a public asset and a public resource; and to take it away from those who have done so much damage to it. Instead, let us do something better and say that we are going to provide all the people of this country with good quality clean water. We will stop polluting our rivers and seas, and we will have river basin management to ensure that flooding, if not ended—we are not going to end it completely—will at least be under control through natural as well as other means. Let us end the waste and start investing in a sustainable future for all of us. That is what the Bill does.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Frith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—that is an important observation. The town is doing its utmost to make Burrs, the country park I have been referring to, into a jewel, a place to visit and a destination to come to, but we have very little say in the quality of the water that runs through it.

I will engage with the proposals made by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South and the aim to clean our rivers, strengthen environmental protections and ensure better oversight, but I believe that the Government are well under way with that focus. I remain focused on communities such as mine and what they need now—urgent, decisive action. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on what comes next and what we have already achieved. That has included the banning of bosses’ bonuses and of mega-payouts after decades of under-investment.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I agree with what the hon. Member is saying about levels of pollution. Does he really think that United Utilities is a fit and proper organisation to carry on supplying water? Does he not think that somebody else should be doing it—like us?

[Mr Frith]

I would not suggest that either the right hon. Gentleman or I should be in charge of the water in my constituency.

We need severe and automatic fines for illegal sewage discharges. There has been real-time monitoring by campaigners, as well as formal observations—I have referred to yesterday’s updates. We need criminal charges for water company executives who have overseen law breaking, and stricter environmental and consumer standards.

None of this should divide us, but our focus should be the ends, not the means. To bring failing companies to heel requires a degree of imagination, and we need to put public service first. To simply say that we should have public ownership of everything, without asking who pays and who takes the debt thereafter, does not require imagination. It is a failure to answer the challenge and the question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ellie Chowns]

I refer the hon. Lady to my previous comments on the merits of citizens’ assemblies in considering the details over many dozens of hours. I also refer to my party’s manifesto.

Secondly, climate change is a systemic challenge. I am glad that some hon. Members have mentioned this and that it is included in the text of the Bill because, as the hon. Member for Norwich South said, it is a huge problem when there is too little water. Too much water is also a huge problem, and that problem is increasing.

I have already spoken several times in this House about flooding in my constituency. Climate change is making these challenges more frequent and more severe, so any Water Bill needs to address not only the water industry, water supply and sewage, but also climate change and its interactions with water. I am pleased that is mentioned in the Bill.

Another topic mentioned by the Bill, somewhat briefly, is perhaps even closer to my heart—and certainly close to my constituency. Indeed, as I put my hand to my heart, I feel the jewellery I am wearing, which represents the River Wye. Pollution is the elephant in the room in how this issue is currently being tackled. Pollution comes not only from sewage but from agricultural run-off. Nearly three quarters of the pollution in my constituency is from agricultural run-off. There has been a planning moratorium across almost all of my constituency for more than five years, with devastating economic effects. Tackling the water industry will not address this. Indeed, the majority of my constituency is served by the only non-profit water company in the UK.

The problem we face is around pollution. I find it disappointing, even distressing, that although the conversation about water in this House has rightly focused on sewage, it has not focused sufficiently on tackling water pollution. As DEFRA figures and the Environmental Audit Committee’s report both show, half of the problem is from agricultural water pollution. Slightly more of our waterways are in bad condition because of agricultural pollution rather than sewage pollution. This is an issue that we need to tackle together, working in concert with farmers.

We need to support farmers, which is why I am so devastated by the direction in recent months, which has arguably been wrong. I am particularly upset that just a couple of weeks ago, the sustainable farming incentive was taken away from farmers without anything to replace it. We need a Government who work with farmers and support them to transition to nature-friendly farming, so that we can reduce the agricultural run-off that has such a devastating effect on our waterways.

The Government have this vital role to play in leadership. It is essential to tackle the failures of the privatised water industry, essential to tackle the outrageous volume of sewage overflows into our rivers and essential to tackle agricultural water pollution.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Could I take the hon. Member back to the question of farming pollution? Does she feel that the problem is too many pesticides being used in farming, too large fields, or an inability to restore the natural drainage systems, such as ditches, which lead to water going into groundwater, rather than rushing down and filling and polluting our rivers?

[Ellie Chowns]

I hope the right hon. Member would agree that it is a multifaceted problem, and that there are different issues in different places. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. In my constituency, the issue is particularly about phosphate pollution, but in other places it is about nitrates, and in other places it is about water volume. I absolutely agree with his earlier comments on the importance of upland water management and natural flood management approaches, which are ways to ensure that we manage water, keep water on the land and address questions of drainage. Indeed, I mentioned this in a debate on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill just the other day, because it is vital that the Bill addresses the question of water management.

We need to treat these things in an integrated and site-specific way. I have called for many years now for a water protection zone in my constituency to ensure that the sources of pollution are correctly attributed and tackled, and have called for more funding and teeth for the Environment Agency to enforce the existing rules, which will help to reduce the problem of pollution.

To conclude, I warmly welcome the Bill brought to the House today by the hon. Member for Norwich South, which presents a thoughtful, constructive and detailed way of bringing people together to address what we all recognise is a crucial problem. However, I say to him—and to the Minister—that we must tackle agricultural water pollution with the same sense of urgency and commitment with which we are addressing sewage. Sir Jon Cunliffe’s Independent Water Commission explicitly excluded this issue from its terms of reference, except in so far as it relates to the water industry. I have read the water commission’s terms of reference very carefully, and have spoken to the commission about it: it is not set up to address the problem of agricultural run-off into our rivers. We need the same level of focus on this issue as we do on sewage, because if we want to clean up our rivers, lakes and seas, we need an integrated approach.

Climate and Nature Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is an honour to speak on the Bill, given the twin challenges of tackling climate change and ensuring that our natural world not only survives but becomes a far greater part of our lives. Those priorities are shared by the vast majority of my constituents in Cannock Chase, many of whom have written to me over the last few weeks.

As others have done, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage), who deserves great credit for using her private Member’s Bill to push for strong ambitions and action on both climate and biodiversity. That decision has enabled a huge amount of discussion to take place on those issues not just today, but over the last few months and, no doubt, in the months and years to come. In particular, she has worked incredibly hard to ensure that those discussions radiate out of this place by engaging with passionate campaigners from up and down the country. I have no doubt that that will make the public debate both wider and deeper, which I am confident all hon. Members in the Chamber welcome.

As I noted in my maiden speech, my constituency is best known for its forest. While there is far more to Cannock Chase and the fantastic people who call it home than that, I am happy to have the welcome excuse of this debate to focus on the natural beauty and serenity that it has to offer. The truth is that Cannock Chase has a far more complex and diverse range of habitats than simply a 2,700-hectare forest. About a third of the wider Cannock Chase national landscape is agricultural land, which I will come to later, and a large proportion is heathland, which is a vital but endangered habitat.

In many ways, the decline and continuing plight of Britain’s heathland is symbolic of the decline of our natural world, which we are discussing today and which the Bill rightly seeks to address and reverse. It is often said that Britain is one of the most nature deprived countries in the world, but for us in Cannock Chase that can be hard to believe because of all the natural beauty right on our doorstep. Indeed, no one living in my constituency is more than a 15-minute drive from our stunning forest and heathland. Having said that, inequality and poor bus services mean that the most deprived parts of my constituency are also the most nature deprived. I hope we will bear that intersection in mind as we continue the debate.

When I knock on doors on new build estates in Cannock Chase such as those in Hednesford, which is often described as the gateway to the Chase, people who have recently moved to the area often tell me that having nature a stone’s throw away is what drew them to our communities, particularly those who grew up in urban areas. The Chase attracts a huge number of visitors—about 2.5 million a year—which, if hon. Members can believe it, means that the density of visitors we receive is four to five times greater than that of the Lake District national park. That intensity of tourism shows how passionate we are about nature and our instinctive need to get lost in it, but also that we can sometimes pose the greatest risk to the natural world. In my area, it is sometimes said that we are at risk of loving the Chase to death, so the agenda of this Bill and this Government to prevent outcomes like that is very important.

As I mentioned, no habitat in my constituency illustrates this better than lowland heathland. Rarer than tropical rainforests, lowland heath is found on Brindley heath and Moors Gorse, just north of Hednesford, and at the iron age hill fort of Castle Ring in Cannock Wood. As well as being a scheduled ancient monument, Castle Ring is home to a variety of rare habitats such as sphagnum bog and acidic grassland.

The UK is fortunate to have a fifth of all the heathland in Europe, yet sadly we have lost 80% of it over the last two centuries. It is particularly concerning that much of that loss has occurred over the last 70 years, echoing the picture of ever increasing species and habitat loss that Members have drawn attention to today, including my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Alice Macdonald). I know, from taking my daughter to see the stunning carpets of purple heather over the Chase every August, that the cutbacks to conservation work due to austerity are allowing scrub and ferns to creep in more and more year after year.

That is why I was delighted that just before Christmas, to mark the 75th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, the Environment Secretary announced that national landscapes such as Cannock Chase will be granted new powers to boost nature’s recovery and improve sustainable access to these beautiful landscapes. Refining the role and authority of national parks and national landscapes will benefit our rural economy and mean that more people can enjoy spending time reconnecting with nature. It is also fantastic to see stronger regulations to ensure that public bodies, including water companies, do more to respect and support these precious landscapes.

I am confident that that ambition will be extended to the protection of sites of special scientific interest, of which we have many in Cannock Chase. Often SSSIs are under greater ecological threat than national parks or landscapes because they are more dispersed or designated for a particular species. For example, the Cannock extension canal in my home village of Norton Canes plays host to one of the country’s largest populations of floating water plantain, which I have to admit is not particularly special to look at but is none the less an ecologically important endangered plant that thrives in gently undulating waters such as canals.

As I mentioned, farming is absolutely present in the Cannock Chase national landscape, and in my view, there is nowhere better than national parks and national landscapes to see that farmers are stewards of the land and keen to work in harmony with nature. Support must be in place to enable farmers to realise this ambition, which is why I very much welcome the Government’s announcement of £5 billion over the next two years through the new deal for farmers, which will help to ensure that natural recovery is taking place on every English farm, alongside sustainable food production.

To the credit of the previous Government, they introduced the farming in protected landscapes programme. Four Oaks farm, near Slitting Mill in my constituency, was one of the recipients of the funding, but it was a very time-limited programme, so I hope it will be renewed beyond the next financial year.

Alongside many Members of the House, particularly my fellow members of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, I look forward to continuing the work of finding a way forward to a financially and environmentally sustainable future for British farming. For protected landscapes like Cannock Chase, funding streams such as the higher tier of the countryside stewardship scheme will be vital. These bespoke, delicately balanced projects need the expertise of Government agencies such as Natural England, and while significant progress has been made in recent months on expanding capacity and speeding up decisions, we still have a long way to go to ensure that all farmers can access environmental land management schemes and improve sustainability and biodiversity in the best way for their farm.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way and compliment him on his speech. Does he agree that biodiverse farming and biodiverse areas near high-production farms are not the enemy of good-quality food production, but in fact enhance that production and reduce the need for the use of chemicals and herbicides on our land?

[Josh Newbury]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. I completely agree that we need to ensure that our farms are properly supported and that we highlight best practice, so that it is spread across the country. Sustainable food production and national self-sufficiency need to go hand in hand with that work. We must encourage and enable farmers to be stewards of the land, which we know they absolutely are.

Water Companies: Regulation and Financial Stability

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Pritchard.

Water is fundamentally a human right; everyone needs to use water at some point. The water companies, all now in private ownership, are responsible not just for the supply of water but, jointly with the Environment Agency, for river basin management, flooding and many other things. The private ownership of water since 1989 has resulted in £78 billion paid in dividends, mostly to foreign-owned companies, many of which do not pay tax in this country. It has resulted in a £60 billion debt collectively and £9.1 million has been paid to chief executives in utterly excessive salaries.

The argument for privatisation was that there would be more investment, and the water would be cheaper and the service more efficient. Well, that has worked out well, hasn’t it? We have massive levels of sewage discharged into rivers and the sea, lower-quality water all over, and less and less investment in many areas.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Ind)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the 285,000 people who signed the petition about renationalisation that I helped to present to Downing Street a couple of years ago, particularly those in the beautiful coastal town of Whitstable, have been badly let down by Southern Water on a daily basis?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. She put forward an excellent initiative at that time, calling for public ownership of the water industry. I will conclude my short remarks in a couple of minutes by addressing the question of public ownership.

I now want to refer to Thames Water, which covers my constituency and much of London and the south-east. It is one of the biggest water companies, the most indebted and the most inefficient, and it would be interesting to know how it survives. Two years ago, when even the Financial Times called for public ownership of the water industry and said that it was the norm around the world, I am sure it was Thames Water it had in mind.

Thames Water on its own has racked up £14 billion of debt. In 1989, on privatisation, its debt was zero. It has paid out £2.7 billion in dividends and £37 million in what it euphemistically calls internal dividends to its parent companies. The company could require as much as £10 billion to get its infrastructure up to regulatory standards. That would be compounded by the interest payments on its massive debt pile. My constituents suffer flooding and endless traffic disruption because of the lack of maintenance over many years. There have to be endless replacements of short sections of pipework, because there has been no proper planned investment programme.

My call is simply this. I am sure that the Government’s proposed regulatory regime would be better than what we have at present, and it is good that the Secretary of State acknowledges the issues facing the water companies and all of us as consumers around the country. However, I simply say that once more we are into a debate between a regulator and the water companies, who this morning claimed they could not invest because of the regulatory framework.

I think we should go back to the issue of public ownership. I have no idea where the figures given by the Secretary of State today came from; perhaps he can explain that. The reality is that under public ownership Parliament would decide the share value and the amount of compensation paid, which would have to take into account the inefficiency and waste of the companies, and people would be compensated with Government bonds at a fixed rate of interest. That would give us public ownership and control. I do not want an old-style nationalisation; I want community nationalisation.

I will finish by saying that were local authorities, the workers in the industry, local communities and the Environment Agency jointly involved in how the water companies are run, their performance would be a lot better than it is with distant shareholders raking in massive profits from our water supply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

We have talked about how disgusting, and what a public health issue it is to have sewage and other pollution pouring into our rivers, but I want to touch on the ecological damage. In Winchester, a chalk stream, the River Itchen, goes right through the heart of the city. Chalk streams are very rare, with fewer than 210 of them in the entire world, and 85% of them are in southern England. Many of them are designated sites of special scientific interest because their ecosystems and biodiversity are unique. I found out recently that the type of Atlantic salmon found in southern chalk streams are genetically distinct from Atlantic salmon in the rest of the world. Chalk streams have taken millions of years to form, and they can be destroyed in just a few decades by companies that are either breaking the law or working within the law but, because there is such a lack of regulation, causing great environmental damage. That is bad for public health, consumers, prices and the environment.

In my constituency, it is frustratingly clear that Southern Water, which is 82% owned by an Australian investment firm, has been prioritising profit over pollution prevention. It is that simple.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the problem is exacerbated by over-abstraction upstream, particularly in chalk streams, which to survive environmentally need water flowing through them throughout the year? Many chalk streams are completely dry for some summer months, and that destroys all fish and all ecological sustainability.

[Dr Chambers]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point: it is not simply pollution, but the over-extraction of those environments that is horrendously damaging to chalk streams.

The Liberal Democrats have long been calling for reform to water companies so that they have environmental experts on their boards to ensure they meet their minimum environmental standards before they are allowed to make profits. Putting social and environmental good at the heart of what they do is absolutely necessary to ensure that we are not still talking about how we are struggling with pollution, leaks and a lack of investment in 30 years’ time.

Thank you for calling me to speak in this debate, Mr Pritchard. Protecting our natural environment is one of the top priorities for probably all our constituents.