Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley; thank you very much for calling me to speak. I am hugely grateful to the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for not just securing the debate, but making an excellent start to it. I am sure that Members will forgive me if I focus much of what I say on the situation in my communities—the English lakes in Cumbria. We are probably the wettest part of England. Storm overflow is a daily thing for us, and we need to keep those lakes topped up, so we do not complain. We do complain about the water companies taking advantage of that in order to justify overflows that I think none of us would consider in any way acceptable.

Windermere, the largest lake in England and the reservoir of last resort for Greater Manchester, contains three designated bathing areas, which are of a good standard. I do not want to make the case that Windermere is an open sewer or anything like that; of course it is not. Nevertheless, on 71 solid days last year, United Utilities dumped raw sewage into that lake, and that is utterly unacceptable.

If we look at the other issues affecting phosphate levels in the lake, we see that perhaps a quarter to a third of all the phosphates in the lake are coming via septic tanks. There is a complete lack of registration and regulation of septic tanks, and no help for those people who have them. If we talk to people in the Environment Agency, who do a great job on the ground in Cumbria, they will say that the only way they know where the septic tanks even are is by a process of elimination, because they know what is on the mains and therefore what is not. That is not acceptable; we need to ensure that there is a proper system of registration, regulation and help for people with septic tanks, so that we can preserve and protect our lakes and the quality of them.

It is not just the lakes in south Cumbria that struggle and see the water companies take advantage of the permission that they effectively have to dump sewage into our waterways. The River Kent at Burneside, the Kent and the Gowan at Staveley and the Kent at Wattsfield in Kendal have seen sometimes catastrophic emissions. And in the likes of Burneside and Staveley, it does not even take much of a storm—not even a huge downpour—to see terrible raw sewage on the streets in those beautiful lakes villages. That is not acceptable.

We have to look at what the Government are willing and able to do to ensure that water companies do the right thing to keep our waterways clean and at a level that we would consider acceptable. I hear what has been said about the Environment Bill. I am massively sceptical about the Government’s amendment at the last minute. It does indeed take the Duke of Wellington’s wording about progressively reducing harmful emissions, and the duty on water companies. And there is a timescale for a report, but there is no timescale for improvement and there are no volume references when it comes to improvement, either. How much sewage is acceptable, for example? I can tell the Chamber that 40% of the phosphates in Windermere are down to United Utilities. Will 39% be acceptable, after five years—two years? These are the things that leave people sceptical about the amendment that the Government made last week, providing good cover for Conservative Back Benchers and a free rein for the water companies to effectively carry on doing what they have already and always been doing.

The hon. Member for Gower asked really important questions about fines that the water companies have paid. I submitted a written question to the Minister and I am very pleased that she answered a very similar question. The answer to the question of how many water companies in the last four years have been prosecuted and fined is that there have been 11 successful prosecutions in four years. Four of those prosecutions were for less than £50,000. In the north-west of England, there has not been one single prosecution since 2018. United Utilities nevertheless was guilty of five of the 10 longest discharges in the last year. We are seeing here a pattern of water companies being allowed to get away with murder and not being held to account.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene; he is making a very important point about enforcement. On Friday of this week, Thames Water will appear in court—I will not go into the details, for obvious reasons—for a case that it has taken the Environment Agency five years to bring to court. It had known that it was serious enough to require prosecution. Why does it take it so long?

[Tim Farron]

I am very grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention and for his work in this area highlighting this issue. We have much to be grateful to him for. The point that he makes is absolutely right. We can have policies, but what good are they if they are not enforced or the water companies can factor into their spending plans that a fine of perhaps less than £50,000 is a small price to pay when they are able to dish out to their shareholders £2 billion in dividends each year?

I am absolutely proud of the English lakes and of our waterways. We have glorious lakes, rivers and streams in our community, and I want to keep them clean, but at the moment the water companies have permission to take advantage of the fact that they are allowed to have these emissions, and they are not being held to account via the legal process.

I would like the Minister to reflect on the issues raised today and to tell me what plan she has to help us in the Lake district to ensure that the best visitor attraction in the country, and the biggest outside of London, is kept clean and pristine, and something that we can all remain proud of.

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[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I am very grateful to you, Mr Paisley, for allowing me to contribute briefly to this important debate.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Well, you did write to me.

[Philip Dunne]

I was intending to intervene, but if I have a couple of minutes, I will take advantage of them.

The petition that the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) spoke to—I apologise to her for not being here for her speech—was stimulated by some of the campaign groups with whom I worked when I introduced my private Member’s Bill in 2020. It reflects, as Members have said, the widespread growing awareness of, and horror at, the state of our rivers as a consequence of the uncontrolled dumping of sewage in river systems by water treatment works and the water sewage system, which has been overwhelmed for a variety of reasons. I want to touch on two areas where it is really important that we take things forward, now that the Environment Act has become law.

I completely disagree with the description that the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), for whom I normally have a lot of time, gave of the amendment that was finally made to the Bill. He is simply wrong. The Act will lead to a progressive reduction in sewer discharges, and that will be enforceable in the way described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and as I described in the closing stages of consideration of Lords amendments.

I want to touch on two points, one of them raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke. We will have a planning Bill before us before long. It has to include measures for the proper separation of surface and foul water systems for new developments. Water running off hard standing in all new developments across the country can, through the right to connect, be connected to foul water drainage systems. That is what leads to an overwhelming quantity of water causing problems in the treatment works, which have not been expanded to cope with development over the last 60 or so years. It is a problem that successive Governments have contributed to by not investing enough in the infrastructure of our drainage systems.

The right to connect needs to be dealt with by our having the subsystem to require separation by developers. They should be required to contribute to the capital costs of infrastructure works under the ground; at present, they are not. They have to contribute to the connection charge, but not to the capital for works that would allow full separation for new developments, which is essential.

Finally, I encourage the Minister—I pay tribute to the work that she did to improve the Environment Bill, particularly as it went through the Lords—to adjust Ofwat’s priorities. She has the opportunity to encourage Ofwat, through its forthcoming strategic policy statement, to focus not just on leakage and keeping bills down, but on keeping sewage out of our rivers by investing more in the treatment network for which our water companies are responsible.

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[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in this debate. I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) on opening the debate. I want to underline in particular the figure that she used: 39 million tonnes of raw sewage was dumped in the River Thames in 2019. As someone who loves walking by the Thames, occasionally swimming in it, and certainly canoeing on it, that figure gives even me pause for thought.

The contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) were very powerful in their critique of the ownership of water companies. Since privatisation, there has been a 40% real-terms hike in bills, almost £60 billion in payments to shareholders, and more than £50 billion in debt loaded on to water companies to make those payments to shareholders.

One of the problems with the argument made by the right hon. Members for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) and for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), and by the hon. Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore), is that it glosses over the issue of ownership and, in particular, the fact that annual investment in water supply infrastructure was lower in 2018 than in 1990. That rather suggests that there has been, for some time, a serious question mark about whether our privatisation is delivering.

[Philip Dunne]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to defend my remarks. I made no remarks on the subject of privatisation. As he has raised it and accused me of having done so, I ask him whether he recognises that the amount of capital investment by the water companies in the 10 years prior to privatisation was half the amount invested in capital treatment works in the 10 years post-privatisation.

[Gareth Thomas]

The right hon. Gentleman will have to forgive me. I was concentrating on other things in the 10 years before privatisation—I am not quite that old. If he shares the Opposition’s concerns about the quality of performance of the privatised water companies, I welcome that.

I recognise that the Minister is not likely to give a commitment today to bring the water companies back into public ownership of one sort or another. I will therefore suggest a third way. We could maintain pressure on water companies to bring down the amount of sewage dumped in our streams long after the news cycle has moved on to other issues by giving the consumers of water companies more power, perhaps in the form of a requirement that any increase in bills—or if the Minister were willing to be radical, any increase in the salary of the chief executive and board—has to be approved by the consumers of that company. There should be a water users consumer committee for each water company, with real power to hold to account the board of that company. At the moment, only two committees, without any substantive powers, cover the whole operation of the English water companies. They are clearly not having much impact. I urge the Minister to take away the need to give consumers more direct power over and say in the operation of the water companies on which we all rely.