Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Oliver Heald Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Lady should be aware that during the last decade we put in place legislation that made it tougher to meet ecological status. That includes taking on the monitoring of certain chemicals, which is not done by the Welsh or Scottish Governments. That is why we will continue to work on this issue in a specific way. We are leaning into the issue.

I genuinely wish that Labour had started to sort out the issues when in office. I am not saying that the Labour Government did completely nothing, but they were certainly not clear with the public about what was going on. In 2010, we knew there was no money left after Labour’s damage to the public purse. Indeed, the former Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury was honest enough to tell us that in his own writing. What we did not know was quite how much mess was left behind for a Conservative Government to clean up yet again, which is what we set about doing.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that since the privatisation that has just been criticised, investment has doubled to £160 billion?

[Dr Coffey]

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. We are talking about sources of financing. Do the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and Opposition Members want to see fewer hospitals and schools being built, or less going towards all the other ways in which we are spending taxpayers’ money?

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[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

This is an important issue, and I agree with the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) that all parties in this place should work to improve what is a very difficult situation for our constituents and the country.

My constituency has eight chalk streams, and I have been campaigning for many years to improve their quality, often with support from Labour Members such as Martin Salter—he is a keen angler—and cross-party members of the all-party parliamentary group on chalk streams, which I helped to set up.

I was shocked when two of my substantial chalk streams, the Beane and the Mimram, ran dry in 2007. I took the Labour Minister to see them, and he was shocked by their condition. The World Wide Fund for Nature joined me and others in starting a campaign, “Rivers on the Edge”, to reduce the huge amount of water being abstracted from these streams. We were successful in that campaign, although by then the Government had changed. It then became clear that not only were these poor streams being abstracted, but they faced pollution, problems with agricultural practice next to them, with nitrates going into them, and all sorts of other problems, including sewage overflow.

I pay tribute to Charles Rangeley-Wilson, who has been involved in all the campaigns, including those against pollution and soil erosion, and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), whose Bill I supported; we both rebelled slightly against the Government on one occasion over that issue. Charles chaired Catchment Based Approach in producing a restoration strategy for chalk streams, which is a good document that the Government support. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) came to its launch by the River Mimram in my constituency, and it sets out a national chalk streams strategy. Although many of its recommendations are not about the problem of sewage overflows, it does cover that.

The Government have taken powers in the Environment Act 2021 and the Agriculture Act 2020 that would enable a catchment-based approach to tackling the range of issues involved in river quality. The water plan, which has been released recently, shows where the investment would be, with fines imposed and money reinvested in improving water quality. One of the main recommendations was to have some sort of protection and priority status for chalk streams. I know that the Secretary of State is concentrating on water generally, but Lord Trenchard has tabled an amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and I wonder whether she would be prepared to consider it.

We know that the state of our rivers and streams is not what it should be, but between 2000 and 2010 we really did not know that, because the monitoring did not take place. It came as a shock that our rivers were in the state they were in. I welcome the fact that the Government are now being transparent, are committing to targets and are really taking this on.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

The time limit has now reduced to three minutes.