Water Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Jeremy Corbyn

2nd reading
Friday 28th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[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.