Environmental Targets (Water) (England) Regulations 2022

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Benyon]

That the Regulations laid before the House on 19 December 2022 be approved.

Relevant document: 25th Report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Special attention drawn to the instrument.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move that the draft environmental targets for water in England be approved. Water is one of our most precious natural resources. It is essential for human well-being, farming, food production and biodiversity.

I will briefly set out how the Government have massively increased action on water quality. We are tackling agricultural pollution at the source by doubling investment in catchment-sensitive farming and rolling out new schemes to reward sustainable farming. We launched our storm overflows discharge reduction plan to deliver the largest infrastructure programme in water company history, with £56 billion of capital investment by 2050. Through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, we will place a duty on water companies in England to upgrade wastewater treatment works in nutrient neutrality areas to the highest achievable technological levels. Our new long-term targets will tackle some of the biggest impacts on our water environment by stimulating action towards our ambition in the 25-year environment plan of clean and plentiful water.

I turn to the amendment to the Motion, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, which gave rise to this debate. The amendment raises concern about the level of ambition of this new set of water targets and the recent river basin management plans published by the Environment Agency. The targets we are setting are ambitious and will have significant impact. They will deliver tangible improvements to the water environment. We are going as far as we can as fast as we can, while balancing the costs to business and people’s lives and complying with the Environment Act. I remind noble Lords that the Act says in Section 4:

“Before making regulations under sections 1 to 3 which set or amend a target the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the target, or amended target, can be met.”


I absolutely reject the claim that existing deadlines for our commitments in the water framework directive regulations 2017 have been pushed back to 2063. The updated river basin management plans published by the Environment Agency set objectives for good ecological status by 2027 and are compliant with the water framework directive regulations 2017.

In December last year, the Environment Agency published its river basin management plans, which included modelling that showed that, for a small group of ubiquitous, persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals known as uPBTs—specifically mercury, PFOS and PBDE—the level of pollution will not decline to acceptable levels until 2063. Although most of these are banned from use, there is no technically feasible way to remove this historic pollution from the water environment. This situation is not unique to England. This is an issue faced internationally and EU states that have also chosen to undertake biota monitoring for uPBTs such as Germany, Sweden and Austria have returned comparable results.

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[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

I do apologise, but I wanted to remind the House of the 1880s, when London sewage was all put into the River Thames and there was such a stench that both Houses of Parliament had to rise early for the Summer Recess.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords for their valuable contributions to this debate.

The water targets put forward in this statutory instrument meet the requirements under the Environment Act to set at least one target in the area of water. As the Act requires, the Secretary of State has sought appropriate advice from independent experts and is satisfied that these targets can be met. The targets set out in this instrument will complement our existing water regulatory framework and the actions that the Government are taking on multiple fronts to address specific pollutions in the water environment.

For example, and to clarify my previous statement, we are driving Ofwat to challenge water companies to achieve zero serious pollution incidents by 2030. This includes the amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to reduce phosphorus discharges from treated wastewater and reducing nutrient pollution from agriculture by doubling funding for advice and support to farmers through the catchment-sensitive farming scheme and our new slurry infrastructure grant. That grant addresses precisely the point that the noble Baroness made in relation to slurry lagoons. We are putting money into this area, where there is a specific point-source pollution problem, because we want to solve these problems.

I have not mentioned environment land management schemes—

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I talked about that part of the levelling-up Bill because I am slightly confused. Departments usually are not brilliant at talking to each other. How will this work and who takes precedence on this? Does DLUHC take that bit? I do not understand the set-up.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I hope that I can reassure the noble Baroness. I spend a lot of time talking to other departments on this. Part of the problem on the River Wye is a planning issue. The customer said they wanted free-range eggs, the market responded, but the planning system was not in place. I know this from a previous role that I had. Perhaps I should declare an interest: I was a campaigner on trying to clean up the River Wye. That is the angle that I come from in this debate. The problem over decades has been the mismatch between the demand of the customer and the planning, which has not addressed it. The noble Baroness is absolutely right that these matters need to be controlled. Not only do we deal with DLUHC every day but they are in the same building. We spend our time, at an official and a ministerial level, working very closely with colleagues.

Without these actions, we will see shortfalls in water supply across England and significant strain on the water environment from nutrient and metal pollution. This target, alongside the suite of Environmental Act targets, will ensure that we meet our commitments to leave the environment in a better place than we found it.

I hope that this will clarify the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking. There is a mistake in the amendment to the Motion, which the noble Baroness did not touch on. It notes that

“these targets must be considered in the context of the Environment Agency’s decision to postpone the deadline for improving the quality of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters to 2063”.

No, we are not. That simply refers—and it also addresses the point made by the noble Baroness on the Liberal Democrat Front Bench—to existing measures that are within the water framework directive. If we were still in the EU, these would apply. These are persistent toxic metals and chemicals that cannot be removed by any action that the Government can take now.

These matters will have to be dealt with over the coming months, years and decades to be resolved. They cannot be within the targets we want, because our ambitions are very high. These waste metals are in the environment, and you cannot remove them. That is why they are in the water framework directive. If we were still in the European Union, we would be abiding by this. I absolutely reject the line that we have somehow reduced our ambition since leaving the European Union. That is not true. The 75% figure that was quoted was decided before we left the EU and is an EU target. We are compliant with the water framework directive and, in other ways, we are more ambitious.

Through the way we support farmers in environmental land management, we are trying to give them incentives to change the way they treat soil. In preventing run-off of chemicals, pollutants and soil into our rivers, soil can be our friend. You only have to look at photographs from space, or with your own eyes when standing beside a river: when you see a river in a time of flood, it is very often brown because of the water that is flowing into it.

On the question of environmental laws and the rule Bill, there is no way we will get rid of regulations and measures that will help us hit our targets to reverse the decline in biodiversity by 2030. Many of those species exist in and around our waterways and rivers. There is no way we are going to get rid of regulations that help us to achieve our 25-year environment plan; and there is no way we are going to get rid of regulations that help us fulfil our international obligations, achieved with great effort at the CBD COP 15 in Montreal, with the United Kingdom Government at the heart of that process. There is no way we can do what we want to achieve while getting rid of regulations. So I hope that noble Lords will be reassured on that.

My noble friend Lady McIntosh made a good point about the impact of housing on rivers. A large part of the pollution problems we face comes from individual households that may have poor connections, or from the sheer number of houses that have been built in communities without the infrastructure to support them. That is why, with these targets, we will see hundreds of improvements to sewage treatment plants up and down rivers in this country.

My noble friend will be pleased that we are taking forward the, I grant her, long-delayed SUDS provisions in the Flood and Water Management Act. I am very happy to give her more details on that. She is also right to point out that sewage, if handled in the right way, is a resource. I refer her to emerging technologies around sustainable fertilisers, which can use waste products such as treated sewage to create prilled fertiliser that farmers can put on their land in the certain knowledge of its quality. It stands up against the inorganic, synthetically produced fertilisers that have been part of the problem with pollution, run-off, damage to the environment and the farming sector’s inability to hit its target of achieving net zero by 2040. So, technology is our friend in this field.

I was very interested to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talk about the River Colne, which I was beside this weekend. It is beautiful. If amounts of sewage are being released into it and it is illegal, some of the environmental enforcement agencies, including the new ones we have created with the extra investment we have put into the Environment Agency, will be able to take that water company to court and issue fines, as we have on many occasions, some of which were very large fines indeed.

One of the reasons that £1.3 billion is being spent on a new sewer a few feet from where we are standing is the failure of a previous Government to hit the urban wastewater treatment directive targets. Those targets still exist, and we are cleaning up rivers such as the Thames not only in order to comply but because we want to achieve that.

I turn to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on COP 15. Water and biodiversity targets go hand in hand. Our new legally binding targets to halt the decline in species abundance is a good proxy for the health of wider ecosystems. These targets will drive domestic action. She asked about weakening the water framework target. I hope that I have covered that. It is categorically untrue that the Government have reduced in any way the water framework directive regulations since Brexit. All EU nations have exempted some water bodies from the target where it is neither practically nor technically feasible to meet it, and I have covered that. The 75% target was set before we left the EU, and we remain committed to it.

Turning to the baseline issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, the water targets do have different baseline years. This simply represents the latest years for which we have robust data. It reflects the different reporting cycles for these targets and it is important to use the most recent data. That is why, on occasions, there are different baselines. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, also raised issues regarding the OEP. The OEP commended several of the targets, including on waste reduction, agricultural water pollution and particulate matter pollution.

We all want to do things as quickly as possible. If I was on any side of the House, but not on the Front Bench, I too would be pushing the Minister of the day. I do not resile from, or have any less respect for, any Member of this House who pushes the Government on this. I want things to be done as quickly as possible, but let us do it on the right basis. The way this 2063 target has been used in this regret Motion is totally inaccurate, and I hope that noble Lords understand that.

We have been consistently clear with water companies that they must act rapidly to prioritise action on sewage-overflow pollution. Water companies are investing £3.1 billion to improve storm overflows between 2020 and 2025. Our storm overflows plan balances ambition and pace with the impact on consumer bills. Our plan will see £56 billion of capital investment and an estimated £12 average increase in customer water bills between 2025 and 2030. To promote sustainable solutions, green infrastructure projects, started before 2027 and delivered as quickly as possible, will count towards the completion of targets. This is a huge opportunity for the natural environment to see large amounts of private sector money being put into the environment. I will add, on enforcement, that, since 2015, the Environment Agency has concluded 59 prosecutions against water and sewerage companies, securing fines of more than £144 million.

I will now address the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, on our targets and ambitions on water use. We want to be serious about this and we want to be effective in reducing it. A cultural change needs to take place. We use potable drinking water to water our plants and wash our cars, as well as for household needs. I am not suggesting that there is an easy cure for this, but, in a changing climate, where there are real pressures, we want to make sure that we are driving down water use, helping those on low incomes to understand that this is a way they can save money—not in a preachy, patronising way but with real assistance. I have seen this at first hand, where a water company shows people how, through small additions to their households, sometimes provided free, they are able to achieve this.

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[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

Before the Minister sits down, can I take him back to the need for an overall ambition and overall target? The Environment Act says that it should be long-term. We understand that is what the Government are doing, so we might have other targets—and there is an awful lot of targets being floated around at the moment—but we also have the hope of a long-term target for water. So let us say within 15 years, which is what the Environment Act is talking about, could we say, notwithstanding pollutants that are leaching into the water that you cannot do anything about, which the Minister was specific about and will take longer, could we then have a guarantee that we will have clean water in our rivers, waterways and coastal waters within that 15-year deadline? That is doable, I would have thought, and I do not know why the Government do not say that and do not actually set that out as an ambition.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

That will, of course, be our aim. Dates are just dates; they are moments in time. The idea that we are going to allow pollution to carry on and then it is suddenly going to fall off a cliff is of course nonsense. Whoever is responsible, whether it is the Government, their agencies, private landowners, water companies, farmers or whoever it is will be tackling this either because they are forced to do it or because they are incentivised to do it, and they will get the graph moving, as they have already, downwards. They will deal, like we all do, with the low-hanging fruit first, and then they will move on to the more difficult and the hardest to reach.

There is absolutely that target that we should achieve. We set ourselves a really difficult target with continuing with the water framework directive in its form because a river will be divided under that regulation into reaches. If it fails on one factor in one of those reaches, the whole river fails. That is why only 16% of our rivers qualify. Some reaches of those rivers are in quite good condition. I do not mind that target being demanding, but we need to understand that it is very hard to achieve what we are setting out. We think it is achievable and is doable, but if there is one point-source pollution incident resulting in a spike in phosphorus on one reach of a very long river, that river fails. So these are hard targets to hit, but we are determined to achieve that, and that is why I commend these regulations to the House.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

I would like to thank the Minister before he sits down—although he has completed that act—for his very clear exposition over my concern about the postponement date of 2063. I offer my gratitude to the Minister.