Housing Development Planning: Water Companies

Olly Glover Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is truly a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Lewell-Buck. I join colleagues in commending my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for securing time to discuss this vital issue, which I feel is a symptom of a wider malaise in our planning system, as I shall explain.

First, regrettably, I have to add my local examples of the problem to the many others we have heard. In Didcot, during the early stages of building Great Western Park in 2014, there were major sewage issues—so much so that tankers had to be brought in to deal with the sewage created by the new homes. Before long, temporary tanks were installed. Simply not enough capacity was delivered in the local system before the significant housing growth. As colleagues have said, this was accompanied by all the usual extremely circular and tedious arguments about whose fault it all was and where responsibility for sorting it out lay. I am sure that all Members can agree that our local residents are not particularly interested in whose fault it was: they just want these things sorted out—now, and for the future.

In the new street and houses of Anderson Place in the village of East Hanney, the pump station and sewerage system were not constructed to a standard acceptable to Thames Water for adoption, even though the approved plans listed the infrastructure as “proposed adoptable”. On the Childrey Park estate in the village of East Challow, the council has been unable to adopt the drainage and residents are currently in a state of limbo. A section 104 application was submitted, but everyone is unsure whether that means the infrastructure has been adopted. Thames Water says that adoptions are not a short process and that it has a high standard of inspection before it adopts, so it cannot commit to a timescale.

Meanwhile, local planning enforcement is, as we have heard elsewhere in the debate, struggling with how to deal with sewerage systems that are not fit for adoption by water companies. Developments are being built with drainage and sewerage systems that the water company refuses to adopt and that, in any case, are not capable of being adopted without expensive remedial work.

The Liberal Democrats want to ensure that all new development is accompanied by the necessary infrastructure to support it. Given the missed opportunity of the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, I call on the Government to ensure that provision is made in upcoming legislation to ensure that providers of essential infrastructure are held to account. We will continue to challenge water companies to stop sewage spills, but also hold developers to account so that infrastructure for good water management is built with new developments. This all reflects a wider problem with our planning system. We certainly need houses, but central Government enthusiasm for housing targets is not generally matched with as much passion for ensuring and measuring the improvement of infrastructure and key public services alongside them.

I approach my final point with some trepidation. I have already established something of a reputation as a geek among my hon. Friends, but I will take the risk and continue. I will confess to being a fan of the 2015 computer game “Cities: Skylines”. If the Minister has not yet had the pleasure of playing that game, perhaps he could request it as an early Christmas gift. The game is all about the planning and building of cities, and it teaches us much about effective planning. Insufficient sewage and waste water capacity leads to fewer people moving in, as well as reduced tax revenues. The game elegantly demonstrates how a “predict and provide” approach is far better than reactive chaos. I hope the Minister will tell us how the Government plan to move the real world in that direction.