Sewage

Roz Savage Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

My constituency contains the source of the Thames, so I could, in theory, row from my constituency to the House. I would like to celebrate the opening of the Thames tideway tunnel, as mentioned by the Secretary of State. Back in 2013, I was campaigning for the tunnel, which included frowning at a sewage outflow under Putney bridge, so it could be said that I have been in the excrement for quite some time. Sadly, the situation has not improved in the 12 years in between. Just this morning, I had Ben Thornbury, an impressive young man, in my office to commend him on his work cleaning up the River Avon in Malmesbury. Sadly—let no good deed go unpunished—he had picked up sepsis from the pollution in the river. I am grateful to say that he made a full recovery, but, still, that is a sign of the times.

Perhaps surprisingly, I would like to use a word rarely heard in the context of the water industry: hope. I would like to highlight some ways in which good things are happening, largely at the grassroots level. First, there is citizen science. Eighty pollution incidents were reported by citizens just in my constituency in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire last year. Citizen science can often highlight pollution incidents up to three days before official sources of information.

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

In my constituency, I am lucky to have Friends of the River Frome and Frome Families for the Future who do lots of citizen science in testing the river, but does my hon. Friend agree that we should not be relying on such groups to test the water quality and that we need to empower and resource the Environment Agency to be doing that? We cannot rely on areas that are lucky enough to have these groups.

[Dr Savage]

I completely agree. Although I commend those grassroots efforts, that is not their job. I was delighted to hear from the Secretary of State that we will soon have real-time reporting on water pollution, and I look forward to seeing the visible—and smellable—results of that. It is also the Earthwatch WaterBlitz this weekend, so hon. Members may still have time to get their water testing kits do their own bit of citizen science.

Secondly, again, I applaud local efforts, and especially the Malmesbury River Valleys Trust and the Cotswold Lakes Trust, for doing such exemplary work in taking care of our waterways and our wetlands in the South Cotswolds. I recommend to hon. Members across the House that we use our power to convene to bring together people around these issues. In the South Cotswolds, we recently held two fruitful summits—one on the Gloucestershire side and one on the Wiltshire side—bringing people together on the issue of flooding. They yielded a lot of enthusiasm, expertise and actionable solutions. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) mentioned, we cannot leave it all to the grassroots. We have a deeply dysfunctional water industry in this country, and we need to get upstream of these problems to the source.

[Mr Angus MacDonald]

We have been hearing all about monitoring in one hour and the huge amounts of discharges. We do not have any of that information in Scotland as it is not a requirement for Scottish Water to release that and the SNP Government are not taking any steps to do so. We have no idea about the extent of the problem, but we know that it is substantial. Will my hon. Friend back me in supporting the cause for the Scottish Government to release the same information as there is England?

[Dr Savage]

I would be more than happy to back my hon. Friend’s calls for an equivalent system in Scotland.

Finally, I thank the Government for everything they are already doing to reform the water industry and look forward to seeing real results in our waterways. I will add that, while I welcome the Cunliffe review, I was disappointed to find out that the ownership of water companies is outside its scope.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I sit on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and we are also making submissions to the Cunliffe review. I do not believe ownership of water is outside the scope of the review. It will be looking at how our water is owned—maybe not nationalisation, but certainly other methods of ownership.

[Dr Savage]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. That was not what I had been led to believe from a roundtable with Sir Jon Cunliffe, but maybe I misunderstood.

The truth is that the profit motive has no place in a vital public utility such as the water industry. We are one of only two countries in the entire world that has a privatised water industry, and clearly it is not working and needs to be reviewed.