Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Raw sewage is the perfect metaphor for 13 years of Tory Britain. It is hard to find an NHS dentist or get a GP appointment, and it is hard to get a passport or find a lettuce or a tomato in a supermarket, but we can go for a swim among human waste, faeces, nappies and used condoms in our lakes, rivers and seas. Britain deserves so much better than this.

There were more than 37,000 sewage spills in the south-west last year. In Plymouth alone, there were more than 2,000, an average of five spills every single day—that means that it is only 1,220 sewage spills until Christmas for us Janners—so why has South West Water been let off the hook? It is failing as a company to close down the raw sewage outlets that we need it to close in order to have a protected and safe region. In Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, there have been 8,750 hours of dumping from 1,574 spills. In Plymouth, Moor View, there have been 4,000 hours from 540 spills, with more in South West Devon and in Torridge and West Devon, whose rivers flow past Plymouth. It is not good enough.

Clean water matters to me—it mattered to me when I spoke from the Front Bench, and it matters to me when I speak now. In 2017, I proposed that Plymouth sound be designated as the UK’s first ever national marine park. In 2019, we achieved that status, and thanks to £10 million of heritage lottery money, we are improving access to the water, celebrating Plymouth’s maritime history and cleaning up our waters. For the past year, I have been campaigning for Devil’s Point and Firestone bay to be designated as an official bathing water, with regular water testing so that people like me who swim in that part of Plymouth sound can see what we are swimming in. I am grateful to Ministers for agreeing to the campaign; that status starts in only a few weeks’ time.

The truth is that ending the sewage scandal is in the Government’s hands. They can mandate investment in closing raw sewage outlets in water company business plans. They can introduce automatic fines for sewage dumping. They can introduce mandatory monitoring for all sewage outlets and make sure each one of those monitors is working. They can introduce legally binding targets to end 90% of raw sewage discharges by 2030, and they can prioritise rivers and sewage in the next set of business plans. But they could do more: they could introduce more stormwater retention tanks, automatic fines and real-time data so that we can see what is happening, and they could close the gap between a spill and a fine that currently takes many years to deliver. I would also like to see more of the money from fines go to improve our environment. Higher-level fines nearly all go to the Treasury: we need more going to our environment to improve it along the way.