Water Companies: Executive Bonuses

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

Thank you very much for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate my party on securing this important debate.

Last year, in my constituency of Birkenhead alone, there were the ominous number of 666 sewage discharges, running for a total duration of over 8,000 hours. The effect for businesses and families in coastal communities like ours is devastating: it denies young people, many of whom are from deprived areas with little access to nature outside of our borough, of the natural spaces that by rights belong to them, while jeopardising the many businesses that rely on tourism.

Elsewhere across the country the situation is even graver, particularly for our precious chalk streams—which can be found almost exclusively in Britain—many of which now face an existential threat. Meanwhile, water company bosses continue to pay themselves millions of pounds in inflated salaries and bonuses, while the Government seem content to look away, even as evidence emerges of water companies covering up sewage discharges and making evidence of sewage disappear from official records.

The motion my party laid before the House today seeks to tackle the perverse injustice at the heart of our broken water system—a system that guarantees private profits for the water bosses and public squalor for the rest of us. The motion signals a clear and welcome change from the attitudes of successive Secretaries of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who all too often, when speaking from the Government Dispatch Box, have acted as if their job is to defend the interests of the water companies and their shareholders, rather than the constituents who elected them to this place.

From the hundreds of messages I have received from my constituents on this issue, it is clear that the people of Birkenhead expect us to go much further. They are sick to death with the decades-long rip-off that began with the privatisation of the water industry in 1989. They have had enough of pernicious standing charges and their bills rising year on year—they are set to rise, on average, by another 35% by the end of this decade—while water bosses who preside over crumbling infrastructure pocket millions in bonuses.

My constituents want to see water returned to public ownership. According to research conducted by Savanta, on behalf of the publication Left Foot Forward, 70% of the British public share that view. We need to deal with the practical and deep-rooted issues facing the water industry here and now, and confront the simple truth that seems self-evident to the vast majority of the British public: the three decades in which we have treated water as a private commodity have been a manifest failure.

There has been much discussion in recent days about the entrepreneurial spirit that the Thatcher Government are said to have let loose with their policy of privatisation and deregulation. Today, that spirit can be seen most clearly in the tide of sewage swelling our rivers and lakes and drowning our beaches. We must prepare to face the challenges to come, because as we confront a future that will be increasingly defined by climate breakdown, drought, water scarcity and extreme weather events, the question of how we most effectively marshal our shared natural resources will be crucial.

I remind the House, as I have before, that the chief executive of the Environment Agency warned that large parts of the country are now staring into the “jaws of death”—the point at which we will not have enough water supply to meet our needs. To allow the profit motive to continue to dictate the management of a resource as vital as water, and to perpetuate a system in which shareholder profits take precedence over much-needed investments in infrastructure improvements, would be not just short-sighted, but an absolute dereliction of duty.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the shadow Minister.