Water Scarcity

Pippa Heylings Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. Along with many others, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) on securing this important debate.

Only last week here in Westminster Hall, I was highlighting the issue of water scarcity in my constituency in the context of the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor. If we do not get this right, all those ambitious development plans will be dead in the water—or rather, dead in the lack of water. Our precious chalk streams, which the Liberal Democrats have been campaigning constantly to protect and are prioritised in the new environmental improvement plan, are already being degraded due to over-abstraction from the aquifers that sustain them. Far too many of them in my constituency now depend on artificial augmentation, which is when water is pumped from the boreholes into the headstreams just so that there is enough flow to sustain the wildlife within them. The fact that there is any flow at all is false. Sustainable water management must be the core principle that underpins growth across our region—as was said, it should be the backbone of our growth.

How are we doing? The Cambridge Water and Anglian Water plans say that they can meet existing and future demand, but last year, the Environment Agency did not accept that. It withdrew its support for already approved development plans for 9,000 homes and the cancer hospital, pausing construction and lodging an objection because it said there is not enough water. Never mind existing water; these plans do not include the additional thousands of homes being proposed as part of the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor. For example, the Fens reservoir, which we celebrate, will meet the already ambitious local plan for Greater Cambridge, but the thousands of homes planned by the Cambridge Growth Company are not included.

We need to end the doublethink; growth plans and water-resource plans must be aligned from the start. That requires projected demand—how many additional houses are we actually talking about?—as well as handling both sides of the equation.

First, we need to increase supply, potentially through more new reservoirs or infrastructure—the existing and planned reservoirs are not enough—and no more water should be abstracted from our chalk aquifers. Secondly, we should reduce demand by cutting leakage. As we have heard, in England, leakage stands at almost 50 litres per person a day. That dwarfs the potential savings from household behaviour change or efficiency measures in new builds. Alongside tackling leakage, as my hon. Friend said, we need changes to the permitted development rights to enable farmers to invest in farm reservoirs on their land.

My central question to the Minister is this: who will be responsible for ensuring that plans for growth and plans for water resources are properly aligned in South Cambridgeshire and across the UK, and that action to increase supply and reduce demand is delivered? The current governance for water is fragmented, with multiple institutions producing plans that do not include new growth ambitions, and that is a failing of the regulator. People no longer trust water companies to act in the public interest. We Lib Dems welcome the intention to abolish Ofwat, but we continue to call for a truly independent water authority.

Therefore, will the Minister join my calls for the Cambridge water scarcity group to be reconvened urgently, together with Lord Vallance and the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor team, to honestly address the mismatch between plans for growth and the measures needed to eliminate the water deficit, and for the water scarcity group—which brings together all the actors: the water companies, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the planning services and the growth company—to continue to play a role, even if a development corporation comes forward?