South West Water

Debate between Richard Foord and Selaine Saxby

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord]

Liberal Democrat policy is to abolish Ofwat but very much to bolster the Environment Agency. We need to ensure that we have a regulator with teeth. As I have said to the hon. Member before, if the Environment Agency has teeth, they are in a glass of water by the side of the bed. He says he thinks that South West Water will hear his concerns, but I point out that the chief executive only forwent her bonus when it was plain that the level of outrage and campaigning in the west country was such that anything else would have been unacceptable. I should say that it is under pressure from parties like the Liberal Democrats that the Conservatives seem to have been talking in recent weeks about water companies and their executives not taking their bonuses when their performance is so poor.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

In clarifying Liberal Democrat policy and the actions they have taken, perhaps the hon. Gentleman could explain what his party’s leader, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), did to tackle this issue when he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change between 2012 and 2015.

[Richard Foord]

I would be very happy to. Of course, at that time the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change had different responsibilities.

Our policy now is very much about reforming water companies’ boards. They need to be transformed into public benefit companies. We need boards to have grassroots campaigners such as those I gathered together last night. We had Surfers Against Sewage and the Women’s Institute, which is pushing its “Water You Waiting For?” campaign. Fantastic campaigners such as these need a voice at the board level of these companies, otherwise we will face the catastrophe of our tourist hotspots being struck with the affliction that is water pollution. According to Blue Flag, four of the 10 beaches most affected by pollution last year were in Devon, including Sidmouth, which endured over 600 hours of sewage spills.

We heard earlier in the debate about the Environment Agency. In my view, we need to see the end of operator self-monitoring, which is where water companies get to gather their data themselves before passing it to the regulator. It means that they can potentially vary the data they are collecting. Water companies are essentially marking their own homework. This is having a devastating effect on some tourist areas such as the ones in Honiton.

I feel that there is a mismatch between the rhetoric we have heard this afternoon from some hon. Members and their voting records. I point them to 25 January 2023, when we voted on the draft Environmental Targets (Water) (England) Regulations 2022 and when I was very proud to insist that the Government should have more stringent targets for water pollution. I can see, Mr Henderson, that you are suggesting I have reached the end of my time, but I am grateful to have had the chance to make my remarks.

NHS Dentistry

Debate between Richard Foord and Selaine Saxby

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

I rise for the 15th time during my time in this place to raise my concerns about the state of dentistry in my constituency. On being elected, the first letter I wrote was about dentistry, and although I fully accept the Government’s position that things have got worse following the pandemic, they were pretty bad in North Devon before. When I moved to Devon six and a half years ago, it took me two years to find an NHS dentist, and then I had to travel 45 minutes to get there.

One of my concerns about the statistics used is that they compare dentists per 100,000 of population. As a very sparsely populated rural location, we might not look like as much of a dental desert as some other places, but at present the nearest dentist taking NHS patients is over 100 miles away. A constituent contacted me before Christmas to say

“with regards to the extremely limited dental care in North Devon. My partner, who suffers from mental health issues which limits him from performing daily tasks and travelling, was in need of dental treatment this weekend. However, after being on hold for almost an hour I was told that there were no appointments in the whole of North Devon and the nearest appointment was in Exeter. Travelling that distance is just not possible for someone who has mental health issues, and due to the nature of his illnesses, he cannot drive and I don’t either at present.”

Exeter, which is the nearest city to my constituency, is over 50 miles away for most North Devon residents. Even private practices in North Devon are unable to take on the volume of patients in some parts of my constituency. I have parents writing weekly to ask what to do when their appointments are cancelled because dentists are handing back their NHS contracts. And because residents in North Devon are unable to get check-ups, by the time they are seen they have extensive dental needs costing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. Calling us a dental desert is no help at all. Given the structure of dentistry, dentists are not going to want to deal with the oral backlog each unseen mouth potentially holds.

I welcome the new dentistry Minister to her role, and thank her for her immediate engagement on this issue. I very much hope that her experience will ensure that the Government’s plan to further recover and reform NHS dentistry is expedited because, frankly, the good people of North Devon have waited long enough to see a dentist.

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving way, and I recognise what she is describing in North Devon. A 75-year-old and his wife who live in Tiverton told me that they were contacted by their dentist, who said that they were not seeing NHS patients any more. They called a further 20 dental practices and were told by several receptionists that no NHS appointments were available in Devon at all. Does she recognise the experience of my constituents?

[Selaine Saxby]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. While I recognise some of those concerns, I will come on to the response that the Minister has given to my petition in this place.

The waiting list for dentistry is reportedly over 100,000 in Devon, and there are reports of children having all their teeth extracted. While that is horrific, we need to encourage children and adults alike to practise good dental hygiene, as schools and nurseries have more than enough to do to educate their children without also brushing their pupils’ teeth every day. When I visit schools in my constituency, they raise concerns about why dental hygienists with plaque-disclosing tablets no longer visit schools at least to highlight where poor brushing at home might be an issue. When I visited the Marines based in my constituency, they raised the issue of dentistry. On every social media post I put out, whatever topic it is on, someone raises dentists. Can the Minister please confirm when we will see a catch-up plan, since the last one apparently got stuck at the Treasury? As I have said before, I understand that money does not grow on trees, but neither do teeth.

I have presented a petition in this place about dentistry in North Devon, and I thank the Minister for her response, which details some improvements such as the Access Dental helpline in Devon. However, we know that even the post-covid schemes to help dentistry catch up did not reach places that needed it most, with the majority of the funds not actually being spent on dentistry. I have listened to my ICB’s plans for catching up, but I am not sure that anything I have heard fully reflects the issues around rurality and dentistry. Delivering most healthcare solutions in a rural environment is different from delivering them in an urban one: in rural constituencies, the closure of one dentist can leave patients travelling an additional 50 miles. As I have explained, popping to Exeter for treatment is not an option for many, and far too many of our health treatments involve that 120-mile round trip. We need the dentists to come to us, not us to the dentists, please.

I warmly welcome the steps that this Government are taking to train more dentists, but as even the Prime Minister conceded when he spoke to local press on his recent trip to the North Devon District Hospital, those steps will not help in the short term. The Opposition clearly have no plan in this area, and they have very little grasp of what rural life is like, given that most Opposition Members represent urban seats. I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State commit to fairness in rural and coastal areas, but I ask the Minister to see whether it is possible to get some dentists on to buses and into rural areas, and especially into our schools. Over 50% of children in North Devon have never seen a dentist. Dentists come to see our fishermen; why can we not similarly arrange for them to see our servicemen’s families, our schoolchildren, and those who simply cannot travel to an NHS dentist or afford to see one locally?

I do fear that the magnitude of the issue is not well understood by those living in London. People who call an NHS dentist in London will likely be seen almost immediately, and probably quicker than someone back home would have their phone call answered. Ideally, we would have regular dentist check-ups prior to getting toothache, but as even the bard said,

“there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently”.

My patience and that of my constituents is running thin with the ongoing delay in hearing that the dentist will “see you now”.

Broadband: Rural Communities

Debate between Richard Foord and Selaine Saxby

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd.

The internet has plainly revolutionised the way we live our lives and the world we inhabit, but the trouble is that it is increasingly a tale of two halves: those people who have fast, superfast or ultrafast broadband in urban areas, and those of us who live in rural areas, who go without. In huge swathes of the countryside, people find it hard even to get a mobile phone signal, so this is exacerbating a problem that we have already.

I would like to give the House some examples of situations that I have encountered in Devon. In Northleigh, a small village outside Honiton, fewer than half the residents can access full-fibre broadband. One constituent, a surgeon, has written to tell me that because of the stuttering delivery of the Project Gigabit vouchers, he has wi-fi so bad that he is unable to download crucial scans the day before an appointment. The Government say that they are trying to wrestle with the waiting list of 7.7 million operations that is bringing this country’s economy almost to a standstill. If that is the case, addressing wi-fi has to be one of the places where we start.

The 900 residents of Kilmington have had a dreadful experience. They often use the village hall, so they tried to get a business broadband service for it. When they got in touch with various internet service providers—I have all the correspondence here—they were not informed about the universal service obligation and the funding to which it entitled them.

Meanwhile, the parishioners of All Saints, near Axminster, have taken it upon themselves to appoint a broadband champion. So great is the issue for people in the village that they feel that that is necessary to give the matter some status and authority.

Those are just three examples, but I could give many more from my part of Devon. The south-west in general has dreadful download speeds. The UK average is 111 megabits per second. In the south-west, we have an average speed of about 99 megabits per second, but in my corner of Devon it is more like 57 megabits per second, which is half the national average. Even some of the towns in and around my patch, including Axminster, Seaton and Sidmouth, have some of the worst speeds in the country and are in the bottom 10% for download speeds. The contrast with the urban areas is stark.

Openreach has written excitedly to constituents in Tiverton extolling the virtue of ultrafast fibre to the premises, which it claims will have download speeds of more than 1,000 megabits per second. Yet Devon homes and businesses should not hold their breath, as there is a target of 25 million by 2027. We heard from the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) that it will be difficult to reach that extra 5% and that perhaps those people living in rural properties in those places should simply wait for 5G. I am sorry, but I do not feel that we should accept that. If there is a universal service obligation, we should, as a country, make sure that that is rolled out everywhere. It is not just affecting people’s social cohesion or their feeling of connection to others—

[Selaine Saxby]

Could I correct that statement? I did not say that people should just wait; I said that we should be looking at how we can connect them. Like the hon. Gentleman, my Devon neighbour, I agree that there is a need to speed up, but I encourage him to speak to Connecting Devon and Somerset to better understand the work that has already gone on and which premises are affected. It has detailed stats available and will be able to update him.

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful for that clarification. The hon. Member mentions Connecting Devon and Somerset; I have heard from constituents about how CDS did not draw down funding from Project Gigabit and has missed out on substantial sums of money that it could otherwise have garnered.