Water (Special Measures) Bill [ Lords ] (Third sitting)

Debate between Neil Hudson and Helena Dollimore

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Hudson]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

New clause 3, which His Majesty’s Opposition will again push to a vote, has at its heart the people we want to protect—the very individuals who this Committee has acknowledged are most affected: the consumers and bill payers. They are the pivotal reason why we have tabled the clause.

The clause would require the Secretary of State to make provision so that where a water company has faced financial penalties for failure to comply with the law, a financial amount equal to those penalties must be removed from the bills of that water company’s consumers. Of course, one might suppose that it is difficult to make an equivalence between the amount of a financial penalty and the amount to be reduced on the bills, but subsection (2) sets out that it must be calculated by dividing the total financial penalty by the water company’s number of customers. We have laid out a formula that the Secretary of State could follow in fulfilling the duties under the clause.

The Government might object that the clause would create additional duties for the Secretary of State on top of their existing ones, but the Opposition believe that the measure is relatively simple, can be calculated and is worth adopting for the very principle of accountability for which all of us across this House are striving.

I have already mentioned that, when the Conservatives were in government, we took action to set out that water bosses would be banned from receiving bonuses if a company had committed serious criminal breaches. The Bill copies that and takes it forwards, but the new clause takes the principle of accountability, which has been raised in the Committee’s last couple of sittings, even further.

[Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. The hon. Member referred to the record of his party while in government for the last 14 years, and said that it set the threshold for a water boss being denied a bonus at the level of criminal activity. Does he agree that many of our constituents would find it strange to set a bar for not having a bonus at the level of committing criminal activity, given that in many workplaces up and down the country a bonus is based on good performance and on serving customers? The last Government set the bar for banning bonuses far too high, and that is why, despite repeated failure, the boss of Southern Water still received a bonus, as the boss of Ofwat confirmed to the Select Committee.

Water (Special Measures) Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Debate between Neil Hudson and Helena Dollimore

Committee stage
Thursday 9th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Neil Hudson (Epping Forest) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers.

On behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition, I rise to challenge the Government on their plans in Government amendments 1 and 2. Before I go into the detail, I will make some general comments about the clause that are pertinent to the amendments.

The Opposition worry that the Bill, rather than taking original and new measures to tackle these issues, is purely an attempt to copy and paste the work done by our previous Conservative Government. In fact, many of the measures have already been copied from previous measures that we introduced in government.

[Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)]

In the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, we took evidence from the chief executive of Ofwat, who was clear that the bonus that the boss of Southern Water, Lawrence Gosden, received this year would not have been paid had the previous Conservative Government brought the measures in this Bill before the House. The Conservatives had 14 years to change the rules, but they failed to do so.

[Dr Hudson]

With the greatest respect, I sat on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in the previous Parliament, and we took evidence from the chief executive of Ofwat on some of the key measures that the Conservative Government brought forward. Our Government gave Ofwat teeth and powers, and we need to make sure it uses them.

As detailed in the explanatory notes, Ofwat already has wide powers to set the conditions of water company appointments and licences. The Conservatives worked hard to strengthen its ability and power to do that since this issue came to the fore in order to drive the regulatory change that was vitally needed to tackle the scale of the crisis that came to light.

I again remind Members on both sides of the House that when Labour left office in 2010, only 7% of storm overflows were monitored; when we Conservatives left office, 100% of outflows were monitored. We found the scale of the sewage problem and were the first party to start to address it. The Conservative Government’s Environment Act 2021 gave Ofwat the power to consider, when deliberating about dividends, the environmental performance of a company and its credit rating, whereby Ofwat could stop the paying of dividends if it felt that the firm faced financial risks as a result of its actions.

[Dr Hudson]

If the hon. Gentleman checks Hansard, he will see that in my speech on Second Reading and just now I said “storm overflows”. I gently remind the third-party spokesman that in the coalition Government the Liberal Democrats had a Water Minister who did absolutely nothing on this issue.

[Helena Dollimore]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?