Draft Infrastructure Planning (Water Resources) (England) Order 2018

Owen Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 General Committees

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. In a moment, I will continue the musical theme started by the right hon. Member for Wantage with a reference to popular music. However—not to be outdone by the right hon. Gentleman, for fear of the Opposition being dismissed as lowbrow—I do not want to speak for too long, because I have tickets to see some Bach cantatas this evening at the Wigmore Hall, so I will have to get through this quite quickly.

My musical question is to ask the Minister, given her evident expertise, which band was playing at the top of the hit parade in 1976 when we last built a major reservoir in the south-east of England. The Minister is looking perplexed, so given that she is apparently such a legend, I will help her out and say that it was, in fact, “Dancing Queen” by ABBA—I kid you not—[Interruption.] Very good, although the Minister’s leader gives a far better rendition of that particular set of moves, if I may say so.

I say this with serious intent and in direct connection to the speech made by the right hon. Member for Wantage a moment ago: the serious point I wish to make is that we have been waiting since 1976 for the building of a major reservoir in the south-east of England. That is a period in which we have seen enormous growth in housing and population in the south-east. It is a period in which we have seen, as my hon. Friend on the Front Bench so eloquently described, growing crises in our rivers, growing environmental degradation and problems for our wildlife, in particular the fish in our rivers, as a result of over-abstraction by companies in both the public and private sector that have failed to invest, and a planning system that has been sclerotic.

Both for good reasons to do with the need to consult with communities and their concern about reservoirs, and for bad reasons, as privatised water companies have not invested anything like the amount of money they ought to have done in this infrastructure, we have not solved the problem. Now the Government are proposing to build another 1 million homes in south-east England in the coming period, and at the moment nobody is seriously asking the question, “Where is the water going to come from for these communities and these homes?”

While I agree with some of what the right hon. Gentleman said, the reality is that we need to get serious about building infrastructure that allows us to capture water in the winters in periods of heavy rainfall, and not do what we have done for generations, which is to allow that water to flood through our rivers into the seas and then abstract from those same rivers during the summer months, when they are much lower, and deplete them. That has been a pattern under successive Governments and one that we need to break.

I will conclude by saying that we need to get serious about building new infrastructure. The measures included in this instrument seem to me to be directed principally toward making it easier to build new reservoirs, and therefore I am pleased that our Front Bench spokesman is supporting it. However, I too have a specific question about the Abingdon reservoir. It is the one new reservoir that has been on the stocks now for over 20 years, sometimes apparently about to be built and at other times, as we have heard, being blocked. What would this measure do for the Abingdon reservoir? Can the Minister answer a serious question—one that is not about 1970s popular discotheque numbers—and tell us when she imagines we will be building Abingdon, or if not Abingdon, another reservoir or reservoirs, under these proposals to provide some of the water resources that we will need to fulfil the Government’s ambitions for new houses in the south-east of England?