Water Companies: Water Pollution

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

At a time of concern about household expenditure, it is important that we balance water bills. It is always a balancing act. We want to make sure that, with an average bill at just above £1 a day to provide all the water a household needs and to have all the sewage taken away, water companies can invest in the necessary infrastructure. Most importantly, during the next decade or two, we must eliminate rainwater getting into sewage. This is the challenge. At the moment, we have water coming off roofs and going into Victorian or Edwardian sewers. Many of them have been updated and improved, but billions of pounds still need to be spent to tackle this recurring problem.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I have raised before in this House the River Wye, which is one of the most glorious rivers in our country. We know why it is polluted; my noble friend the Minister has mentioned this from the Front Bench before. Can he give me some idea of when that river will flow clean again so that we can be proud of it, as our forebears were?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am not an aquatic scientist but I can tell my noble friend that the problem in the Wye is principally due to phosphates coming from the poultry industry, which has boomed in that area and for which no adequate planning provision was made to prevent the leakage of effluent. The Environment Agency and other parts of Defra are making sure that we are correcting that. I hope that we will prevent what is happening, which is an absolute tragedy. For large parts of the year, large sections of one of the great rivers of this country are nearly ecologically dead. We want to reverse that.