Water Bill

Mark Garnier Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I hear his passion and his helpful iteration of those historic examples. However, I would also say that we need to be clear about who the shareholders are—very often, they are our pension funds. Pension fund trustees have a fiduciary duty to ensure they are maximising the income for those pensioners. If that does not happen, we know that, effectively, the taxpayer picks up the tab. A reality of privatisation was a drive to have a shareholder society. We can argue about whether that was the right or wrong thing to do, and I think we would probably agree in many respects on that. However, that is the reality of the situation now.

Earlier today, before the House was sitting, I was on a call about constituents who had lost money in an investment and are in a desperate situation. In that case, it was because of criminal activity by a fraudster. Their life savings have gone. The people who have invested and bought those shares, often very humble families who have worked hard all their lives, need some compensation. A student debating society might be tempted to say, “Let’s take it all back, and forget about the impact,” but we cannot forget about the impact, because it often falls on low-paid, hard-working people who are taxpayers too—they would end up paying a double whammy.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I thank the Chair of the Treasury Committee for her wise words about the risks that shareholders take when they invest. Has she considered the alternative? At the moment, we are talking about privatisation versus nationalisation, but the alternative is mutualisation, where a water company’s customers would own and control the company on their own behalf.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

It seems there are an awful lot of mind readers in the Chamber today, because the hon. Gentleman anticipates my comments. I am proud to be a Labour and Co-operative Member, so I have thoughts on how, one day, we may be able to move to that nirvana of co-ownership.

We have seen too often that dividends and bonuses are paid without investment in infrastructure, which is where my hon. Friend and I would agree. We have a privatisation model that was supposed to deliver investment on the back of people investing in shares. In return for getting a dividend, there would also be an investment, but we have not seen enough of that.

Of course, under Ofwat rules, water customers bear a share of the cost. In Hackney, under Thames Water, which has been a poster company for the problems in this sector, bills are going up by more than a third. A number of constituents who are very worried about their water bills have written to me just in the last fortnight. When we talk about money in this place, we sometimes talk about millions or billions of pounds, but £100 a month is a great deal of money for many of my constituents.

To set that in context, I have a number of fantastic street markets in my constituency—ones where people can buy fruit and veg, and clothes and underwear at a reasonable price—and I also have the lovely Broadway market, where sourdough bread costs about £5 a loaf. I have constituents who do not have £5 left at the end of the week, let alone at the end of the month—those are the margins that people are working with. Water bills are therefore a significant issue, which is another reason why I am delighted to be here today, supported by colleagues of all parties who want to talk about the challenges of water.

On the face of it, the argument for nationalisation sounds appealing to many, but there is a cost—and it is not a hidden cost: to those who bought shares in good faith, to those pension funds that are investing, and in the upheaval of turning around these companies. Where would we get the people to run a nationalised water company? It is likely to be the same executives, if they would take the pay cut. There is not a wealth of expertise.

I spent a decade examining the work of Whitehall, and there are some excellent civil servants in this country who have done amazing work—many of the civil servants who did not do such amazing work appeared before the Public Accounts Committee—but finding somebody overnight with the technical and management expertise to run a major water company is a challenge.

To take the corollary, I am passionate about seeing insourced services in our hospitals, but after having intense conversations with executives at my local hospital, I know that, when the public sector has not done something for many years, it takes a very long time to build up the expertise. Let us take catering. If hospitals do not cater well, they could kill patients, so they need to make sure they have the management structure in place to deliver those skills. It is the same with water companies—it is not as easy as saying, “One day it’s private, and the next day it’s national. No problem at all.” The upheaval would be immense, so we need a measured plan, and I think this Government have begun to develop that plan, for all the reasons I will outline.

I will talk a little about what the Government will do to improve the situation, and then I will talk about the Bill, but I want first to touch on the comments of the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer). I am very interested in her passionate commitment to citizens’ juries. She has been elected, which is a privilege as we all know, to represent her constituents in this place, yet months after her election, she wants to pass responsibility for this big, difficult decision to a citizens’ jury, rather than taking responsibility for that decision as an elected MP.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.