Sewage Pollution Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Peter Bottomley
Main Page: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West)Department Debates - View all Peter Bottomley's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
We now come to the Father of the House, Sir Peter Bottomley.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
Those of us who have been around for a long time do not believe that nationalised industries would allow the necessary level of investment to be continued. Can I ask the Secretary of State whether the companies, the regulator and the Environment Agency knew the scale of the discharges?
George Eustice
My hon. Friend raises an important issue, and it was only when this Government required increased monitoring that we discovered the scale of the problem. The reality is that this has been a problem for some time, but successive Governments down the decades have not had the right monitoring in place to recognise it. As soon as we recognised this, the Environment Agency started to bring record numbers of prosecutions against companies that appear to have been breaching their permit requirements. We are not sure whether that was an error that those companies were making, and that they did not realise they were making some of those discharges, or whether it was deliberate. There is a moot point about why the Environment Agency did not detect this earlier, and that is now the subject of an investigation by the Office for Environmental Protection, which was set up under our Environment Act 2021.