Rivers, Lakes and Seas: Water Quality
Debate between Peter Dowd and Catherine Fookes(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. Lots of Members wish to speak today, so we could end up with a two-minute limit on speeches. I ask Members to keep their interventions very short, otherwise the limit will go down to one and a half minutes and then down to one minute.
Catherine Fookes
Thank you, Mr Dowd. To continue with diffuse pollution, Lancaster University estimates that around 83% of phosphates in the Wye come from diffuse agricultural sources, and only 15% or so from Dŵr Cymru—Welsh Water—assets. Indeed, Dŵr Cymru’s £80 million investment in AMP 7—an AMP is an asset management period, or the investment round that is done in five-year cycles—and the planned £150 million investment in AMP 8 will eliminate 100% of its fair share of phosphates in the Wye catchment by 2032. By 2030, over 90% of the phosphate load will be from diffuse agricultural sources. It is not sewage that is our main problem here.
I know this will be a hard conversation with farmers, but we need to start having it. We need to incentivise the right fertiliser applications and the right stocking rates in our river catchments on both sides of the border in order to ensure we remove the annual accrual and legacy surplus of excess phosphates and restore our rivers back to full health. Business as usual will not work.
Also, we need better enforcement of existing regulations by both the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales. The RePhoKUs project—the role of phosphorus in the resilience and sustainability of the UK food system—at Lancaster University, which re-focuses phosphorus use in the UK food system, estimates that phosphorus leakage from land to water also causes widespread and costly pollution worth £39.5 billion to the UK economy—a huge external cost that we must try to avoid.
In summary, we have been left a very difficult legacy due to inaction by the Tories. It will take much work by the Government to clear up the mess and the water quality in our rivers, lakes and seas to fix this broken system. I am confident that, by working cross-border and in partnership with all those involved, as the current Government are doing, we can clean up our water once and for all, as the Wye catchment partnership aims to do.
Several hon. Members rose—