Water Companies: Regulation and Financial Stability

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Pritchard.

Water is fundamentally a human right; everyone needs to use water at some point. The water companies, all now in private ownership, are responsible not just for the supply of water but, jointly with the Environment Agency, for river basin management, flooding and many other things. The private ownership of water since 1989 has resulted in £78 billion paid in dividends, mostly to foreign-owned companies, many of which do not pay tax in this country. It has resulted in a £60 billion debt collectively and £9.1 million has been paid to chief executives in utterly excessive salaries.

The argument for privatisation was that there would be more investment, and the water would be cheaper and the service more efficient. Well, that has worked out well, hasn’t it? We have massive levels of sewage discharged into rivers and the sea, lower-quality water all over, and less and less investment in many areas.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Ind)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the 285,000 people who signed the petition about renationalisation that I helped to present to Downing Street a couple of years ago, particularly those in the beautiful coastal town of Whitstable, have been badly let down by Southern Water on a daily basis?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. She put forward an excellent initiative at that time, calling for public ownership of the water industry. I will conclude my short remarks in a couple of minutes by addressing the question of public ownership.

I now want to refer to Thames Water, which covers my constituency and much of London and the south-east. It is one of the biggest water companies, the most indebted and the most inefficient, and it would be interesting to know how it survives. Two years ago, when even the Financial Times called for public ownership of the water industry and said that it was the norm around the world, I am sure it was Thames Water it had in mind.

Thames Water on its own has racked up £14 billion of debt. In 1989, on privatisation, its debt was zero. It has paid out £2.7 billion in dividends and £37 million in what it euphemistically calls internal dividends to its parent companies. The company could require as much as £10 billion to get its infrastructure up to regulatory standards. That would be compounded by the interest payments on its massive debt pile. My constituents suffer flooding and endless traffic disruption because of the lack of maintenance over many years. There have to be endless replacements of short sections of pipework, because there has been no proper planned investment programme.

My call is simply this. I am sure that the Government’s proposed regulatory regime would be better than what we have at present, and it is good that the Secretary of State acknowledges the issues facing the water companies and all of us as consumers around the country. However, I simply say that once more we are into a debate between a regulator and the water companies, who this morning claimed they could not invest because of the regulatory framework.

I think we should go back to the issue of public ownership. I have no idea where the figures given by the Secretary of State today came from; perhaps he can explain that. The reality is that under public ownership Parliament would decide the share value and the amount of compensation paid, which would have to take into account the inefficiency and waste of the companies, and people would be compensated with Government bonds at a fixed rate of interest. That would give us public ownership and control. I do not want an old-style nationalisation; I want community nationalisation.

I will finish by saying that were local authorities, the workers in the industry, local communities and the Environment Agency jointly involved in how the water companies are run, their performance would be a lot better than it is with distant shareholders raking in massive profits from our water supply.

Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

All of us here are familiar with the term “trophy hunting”. We have come to recognise the evil acts that those two harmless-sounding words represent, but for those watching who may be less familiar with the term, animal welfare organisations such as SPCA International define it as

“the hunting of…animals for sport, not for food. Usually, the animal is stuffed or a body part is kept for display.”

They go on:

“Many hunters claim that trophy hunting isn’t bad for animals. They say they are supporting animal conservation. The opposite is true, live animals support the population of their species.”

The League against Cruel Sports says:

“We believe this multi-million pound industry is unjustifiable from an animal welfare point of view, but also for conservation, as it is responsible for endangering several species around the world.”

As for “sport”, that word is usually reserved for activities that revolve around the more positive aspects of life: fitness, healthy competition, teamwork, friendship, personal achievement, endeavour and endurance. Not a single one of those could be attributed to an activity that involves an individual choosing to photograph themselves grinning triumphantly as they celebrate killing a once gentle and graceful giraffe, whose lifeless body now lies slumped and twisted at their feet, pumped full of deadly bullets. My good friend the vet and animal welfare campaigner Dr Marc Abraham OBE agrees. He says:

“Anyone with an ounce of compassion and kindness despairs at seeing these images of cowardly, pathetic trophy hunters grinning over their still-warm kill. Exploited animals used as pathetic props to maintain, even elevate, an online self-image of superiority, without any shred of guilt or conscience.”

He describes those taking part in these killings as having

“a tragic lack of empathy and the highest form of narcissism”,

and says that

“to be complicit in this most extreme, callous form of animal cruelty, plus then to harvest the body parts and ship them back home to the UK, couldn’t be a clearer indicator of violent antisocial behaviour.”

Every Member of this House will have had emails and letters from, and meetings with, constituents who love and value animals, and loathe those who exploit, harm or kill them. There are so many British people who show such kindness—who campaign on behalf of animal charities, who volunteer, who make donations or fundraise, and who share a love for our planet and the incredible, breathtaking wildlife that we are so fortunate to benefit from. How dare a few wealthy individuals decide that they have the right to buy and cause the death of a lion, polar bear or elephant.

Alongside our constituents, there are those who use their fame and public platforms to fight for the protection of animals. Those campaigners include frequent visitors to Parliament whose passion is infectious—people such as the wonderful Peter Egan, friend to many in this place, who for years has fought hard to raise awareness and keep a ban on trophy hunting imports at the top of MPs’ agendas. Peter works with the fantastic campaigner Eduardo Goncalves, who we talked about earlier, and who is supported by many across this House, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar), who has never given up fighting to protect animals during his time here. He steps down at the next general election, but it is vital that we carry on his compassionate work. I absolutely pledge to do that to the best of my ability.

No speech about animal welfare should leave out top animal champion Ricky Gervais. He could spend his days polishing his many awards, but instead he chooses to condemn trophy hunting and shame those who consider the murder of animals to be a hobby. He supports the ban and has called trophy hunting

“humanity at its very worst”.

The murder of animals for fun is also condemned by Chris Packham, Bill Bailey, Joanna Lumley and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, as well as MPs and activists across the political divide and those with no political affiliation whatsoever. The legendary Jane Goodall said:

“Trophy hunting is utterly cruel, utterly unnecessary and utterly disastrous from a conservation perspective. It inflicts pain and suffering on animals for no other reason than to boast of some ephemeral ‘prowess’. There is no material human need met by it; it is a hobby, pure and simple, and a deeply wrong one at that.”

I urge colleagues to support the Bill. I sincerely thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley for bringing it forward. I echo the words of the Humane Society and say that there is “no excuse” for trophy hunting, so let us get the ban done.

Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

To be frank, for the past three or four years, my team and I have had to discuss excrement on an almost daily basis. It is the stuff ruining the lives of my constituents in Whitstable.

In a coastal town such as ours, so much revolves around the sea: our sailing clubs, seafood and hospitality businesses, and our reputation as a top British tourist destination. Whitstable is always thriving, busy with dog walkers, boats coming and going and visitors enjoying a pint at the Neptune or a tub of locally caught whelks with their chips, but there are days when regular swimmers and sailors cannot enjoy our waters at all, something we see far too often.

So-called rare storm events are not that at all. We have not had any storms, yet Southern Water has again been releasing sewage water into the sea for 24 hours straight this weekend—why? Whitstable is still a great place to visit, but while these incidents keep happening, there is a real danger to UK tourism, which has already suffered a great hit to visitor numbers since Brexit. French schoolchildren, who did not previously require a passport, are no longer flocking to Canterbury’s market stalls or studying at our language schools. We simply cannot afford the added damage that the headlines about sewage are doing to our economy.

However, it seems that not everyone is suffering. Those at the top of the water companies can probably afford to holiday elsewhere, while my constituents, whose incomes have taken a considerable hit, are expected to pay their water bills in full. It is little wonder that many are really angry about this. SOS Whitstable is a campaign group that was formed following a public meeting I held in the summer of 2021 so that residents could directly confront the bosses of Southern Water. It is a group of very driven and knowledgeable campaigners who give their time for free, holding the water company to account and refusing to let it get away with dumping sewage on our beaches.

SOS Whitstable recently appeared in Paul Whitehouse’s excellent, must-watch BBC documentary “Our Troubled Rivers”. I urge anyone who wants to understand more about this situation to watch it on catch-up. SOS also started a petition, recently handed in to No. 10, calling on the Government to reconsider renationalising the water industry.

I have asked three Secretaries of State to visit our town and hear from residents about exactly how they are affected. I say to the current Secretary of State, “Please come and take me up on that offer and listen to our sailors, our swimmers and our tourist businesses.”

Water Company Performance

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. In 2019, transparency became much more critical in Ofwat’s holding the water companies to account, because it had to agree, in the price review, how much they should be spending on infrastructure to provide clean water and to ensure the supply. Ofwat has now been directed to ensure that water companies can demonstrate that payments to bosses and so forth are linked to environmental performance.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree with the almost 209,000 voters who have signed a petition started by my constituents, SOS Whitstable, calling on the Government to at least consider renationalisation of the water companies? Profit-driven, largely foreign investors do not prioritise the cleanliness and economy of British beach communities or the way of life in constituencies such as mine? If the companies were answerable directly to the taxpayer, they might start to act at last.

[Rebecca Pow]

The hon. Member forgets that since privatisation £120 billion has been invested by the water companies in the critical infrastructure that we need not only to provide clean and plentiful water but to ensure the supply, so I do not agree with her that we should be renationalising them. What we do need to do is hold them to account where they are doing wrong, but also enable them to continue to invest the £56 billion they are now required to spend to deliver our future water system, with our growing population and the demands of climate change.

Sewage Pollution

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I commend my hon. Friend for her role in progressing this agenda and for the work that she did on the Environment Act, which sets out all the new powers that we need to address this challenge. She is absolutely right: we introduced powers under the Act to give Ofwat new abilities to scrutinise and to change dividend awards. It is consulting on measures to do that now. It is because of the work of my hon. Friend and others in government and in the Department that we have the powers under the Environment Act to finally tackle this long-standing challenge.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

Recently the Environment Agency branded Southern Water “appalling” and awarded it a one-star rating. Frankly, in the view of my constituents, that was one whole star too many, and many of them are considering not paying their bills. I have held two public meetings in Whitstable so that representatives from our sailing clubs, swimmers, fishers and residents could confront Southern Water directly. Will the Secretary of State—or one of the Ministers, because we do not know who it will be—come to my constituency and meet groups such as SOS Whitstable, and hear from them what damage this is doing to our economy on a daily basis?

[George Eustice]

Southern Water is one of the companies that were recently investigated, and was subject to a record fine of close to £90 million. That significant fine actually precipitated a change in ownership of that company. I know that the new owners are committed to addressing the historic problems that they have had. As for whether a Minister will visit the hon. Lady’s constituency, if she would like to write to me or wait and see who is around tomorrow, I am sure they will look favourably on her request.

Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for securing this debate.

For several years, Whitstable, in my constituency, has suffered from the effects of sewage leaking—or, in actual fact, being dumped—into our seas along a beautiful stretch of the east Kent coast. More than 111,000 people clearly feel as angry about this as the nearly 900 constituents in my area who have signed this petition do. In a seaside town, it should go without saying that so much of our everyday way of life revolves around the sea. We have a fishing industry, swimming groups, sailing and paddleboard schools, and, of course, tourism—the heart of our economy. We should not just have to get used to these increasingly frequent incidents that keep us away from our beaches. Not only are we unable to swim or sail, but basic everyday things such as hanging our washing, opening our windows—including in my office—and walking the dog are impossible on the worst days.

One of the loveliest aspects of living in such a beautiful part of the country is that, during the pandemic, our daily exercise was a walk around Whitstable harbour, taking the dog up to our local coastal nature reserve or just jogging along the seafront, and maybe picking up some locally caught seafood on the way home. Instead, we are now often avoiding a dip in the sea or a visit to the beach hut in case bits of human waste float past us. Instead of good, fresh, healthy sea air, our children have been gulping down lungfuls of foul-smelling polluted stuff that contains plenty of potentially toxic bacteria. No wonder my constituents have had enough.

In the summer I held a public meeting so that residents could demand answers and action from Southern Water, the company that is responsible for our water works and paid by us, for us, for the safe removal and treatment of waste. In July this year, Mr Justice Johnson handed down a record £90 million fine to Southern Water for thousands of illegal dumping incidents. That was just the latest in a list of fines dating back to 2007. One has to ask why, despite these frequent and increasingly huge fines, essentially nothing has changed. This is the greatest sewage scandal in this country since the great stink of 1858, which forced our predecessors in this place to take action and build the first public sewers. Could it be that a profit-driven private company such as Southern Water would rather pay fines than invest in expensive but completely necessary upgrades to the sewage infrastructure that would stop these incidents happening altogether? The damage to my community’s health, wellbeing and way of life is of far greater cost than that paid out by a private company. No wonder some of my constituents are now refusing to pay their water bills; they understandably feel that they have paid more than enough already.

I echo my hon. Friends the Members for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and others, in their view that companies responsible for providing these services should be publicly owned and controlled—not primarily driven by making money for shareholders. Instead of swimming with sharks in the Cayman Islands, we need to enable my constituents to swim in clean waters.

Following the summer public meeting, I have continued to meet with Southern Water, as the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) has done. Individually, their representatives are good people who are willing to engage with groups such as the great Save Our Seas in Whitstable, and other Whitstable activist groups. It is the wider corporate attitude that urgently needs to change. We want to be able to swim, eat our shellfish and breathe healthy air. That should be something that we take for granted, instead of having to protest about it on a weekly basis.

Environment Bill

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Commons Chamber

It will be impossible to have clean rivers with the pedestrian approach that Ministers are currently taking, which is why the cross-party concerns that we have heard during this debate and throughout the passage of the Bill should be taken more seriously. However, it is not only Ministers who are to blame for the poor state of our rivers; we must hold water companies responsible too. Research by The Guardian has found that raw sewage was discharged into rivers across England and Wales 200,000 times in 2019, for a total duration of 1.5 million hours. I think we would all have sympathy with the Minister’s argument that in extremis, in the event of severe weather, raw sewage discharges into rivers should be permissible, but we need to ensure that that happens only in extreme circumstances. This is a daily, regular, continual occurrence, and it is unacceptable.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

Would my hon. Friend agree with me and my beleaguered constituents in Whitstable that this is not an unusual occurrence, and that it is happening more and more frequently? On the Whitstable coast, for example, it is ruining the lives of kayakers, sailors and swimmers and ruining the tourist industry. The removal of the lines in the amendment that have teeth would be a real disappointment.

[Luke Pollard]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. As a regular wild swimmer myself, I recognise that this is a concern not only to people who swim in our nation’s rivers but to those who value their biodiversity. I think that the Minister has underestimated the strength of feeling in this area.

There is a way through this, however. There is a route that could result in progressive improvement in the reduction in the number of raw sewage discharges, that could simultaneously collect the required data and that could protect our environment without big increases to bills, with appropriate investment and a sense of urgency from Ministers. There is a route for that, and I suspect that further compromises will be necessary on this point when the Bill returns to the House of Lords and then comes back to us. I do not think we are yet done with this.

Environment Bill

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab) [V]]

We have lost many of the safety nets provided by membership of the European Union. This skeletal, post-Brexit Environment Bill is somewhat disappointing, unambitious and the opposite of progressive, but it is currently the only mechanism we have in Parliament to protect basic standards and try to build on them. This is not—nor should it be —a partisan political issue; it is an issue for every single human being. It has therefore been reassuring to hear of the many important amendments from Members from all parties.

If I was to represent my constituents’ many concerns in this debate, I would have to speak for several hours, not the few minutes we have been allocated. I represent a beautiful part of Kent that has a varied coastal and rural geography and is home to several farmers and wine producers. Our farmers work hard to uphold the highest standards of environmental responsibility, and my constituents are in regular contact about wildlife, protecting our vital pollinators, the unethical concreting over of our precious green spaces and the short-sightedness of building on floodplains.

In May 2019, Parliament declared an environmental emergency. Although this is obviously partly due to events beyond the control of Parliament, it feels at times as though we are plodding towards any meaningful change, when we should be racing at full speed against the clock to stop the devastating damage that climate change is wreaking on our planet. Adults around the world make and change laws, yet it is children who are dragging us to do so—crying out for us to notice that we have a duty to protect those who will have custody of the world after we are gone. I am talking about children such as Greta, who has led a global network of young people and become a household name.

Another child we remember today is Ella Kissi-Debrah. I am glad that her name will yet again be in Hansard, but deeply sad about and ashamed of why that is. Instead of being remembered as the bright and happy nine-year-old girl her mother Rosamund tells us about, Ella should now be 17-year-old young woman thinking about the next stage of her education and looking forward to and embracing adult life. But that opportunity was stolen from her as her little lungs gulped in a toxic cocktail of lethal pollutants. All she was doing was breathing. Her mother has battled to get a verdict from the coroner that proves how poisonous the air that our children breathe actually is. We need to support the amendments that promote improvements in air pollution —we need to get behind those amendments—so I urge all colleagues to vote to improve air quality and protect any more Ellas and the children who will inherit this planet from us.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab) [V]]

The Government do not seem to appreciate the dire position we are in, for although our air is far cleaner today than at any point in our lives, some communities have not seen the benefits. My constituency is one of them. We know that deprivation and race make us more susceptible to pollution. We in Ealing, Southall are suffering because of that and, cruelly, the system keeps making things worse. This is a matter of justice and equity.

Last week, at the communities of colour meeting on air pollution, I met Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, a woman driven to secure change for her daughter Ella, who was killed by pollution. Her story is a powerful one that is sadly repeated all too often across the country, because there is never really a safe limit for air quality. Sadly, the most polluting activities tend to be left in the worst of places.

Campaigns such as CASH—Clean Air for Southall and Hayes—in my constituency are saying no and holding us all to account. For thousands living near the gasworks, this is an issue of equity. That is why action must be targeted on the areas with the most polluted air today. People are dying and this Government deny the problem.

Environmental justice has to be available to all, or it is available to no one. Please, Ministers, act so that the Environment Agency can. Act so that Public Health England can. You can give justice to thousands who are without it today. Your Government say that pollution contributes to more than 30,000 excess deaths a year. Ella’s is just one story in thousands. Act for all of them.

Fisheries Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

Greener UK, one of those NGOs, has pointed out that the UK is currently not achieving sustainable fisheries management and that decisions are often taken by the Government that end up giving priority to short-term economic factors over environmental factors. UK cod stocks are at a critical level, and the Natural Capital Committee has highlighted a lack of progress on sustainable fisheries. I point out to the Government that other countries, such as Australia, have included sustainability as a prime objective in their fisheries legislation.

Fisheries Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

I agree with the hon. Member, but where levels are set above MSY levels, it is often for practical reasons to do with the sustainability of a particular fishing industry. It is also to do with choke species. We heard from the Minister how some fisheries would be closed completely were they not to be allowed a degree of choke species to be caught for which a quota is not allocated.

The point I am making is that the law of unintended consequences has not been seen clearly by the Lords. I believe many of our fishing communities would be decimated by action taken not by Ministers but by judges in interpreting the prime fisheries objective as sustainability. That would be an overriding objective and not one that Ministers could reasonably take to fishing communities in the four nations of the United Kingdom sustainably. I am therefore pleased to support the Minister in her amendment, which will prevent such an unintended consequence that even the shadow Minister, I think in his heart of hearts, understands could be a real problem.

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

I echo the words of the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport. We must set the tone and objectives for the negotiations, so it is critical to retain the cross-party amendment passed in the other place to make environmental sustainability the driving force and priority of the legislation. Removing that objective would put the fisheries sector at risk in the long term.

On Second Reading, the Secretary of State warned against creating a hierarchy of objectives, but the simple truth is that environmental sustainability must go hand in hand with economic sustainability, as we just heard. We cannot have long-term economic sustainability without first prioritising environmental sustainability, and that means prioritising fish stocks. Fisheries businesses cannot operate if there are no fish left for them to catch.

The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine made the good point that fisheries are striving to get those goals and achieve sustainability, but that must be enshrined in law. If we put environmental sustainability front and centre in the Bill, the rewards in the long term will be there for the fisheries sector to reap sustainably. We want fish stocks to recover and thrive, resulting in a more resilient marine ecosystem. That obviously leads to greater catches over the long term, supporting the fisheries sector and the coastal communities that rely upon it.