Sewage Discharges

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) for introducing this debate. I share the anger of many constituents, Members and the petitioners at the actions of water companies as they continue to pump sewage into our rivers and seas.

As another riparian MP, I know how important the Thames is—it gives space for rowing, paddleboarding and kayaking. It helps local businesses such as boat companies to thrive and it supports wildlife and our natural environment. Thames Water pumps raw sewage into the Thames every time it rains more than a drizzle. Last year, over two days it pumped 2 billion litres into the Thames. It came from Mogden sewage treatment works in my constituency, which has released raw sewage 45 times already this year.

I have challenged Thames Water about odour, mosquitos and sewage discharges over the 25 years that I was councillor and the seven and a half years I have been an MP. On 31 January 2021, my constituency saw at first hand the impact of a chronic lack of investment in sewage infrastructure. When the brick wall of the sewage inlet at Mogden collapsed, sewage spilled into the pristine Duke of Northumberland’s river, then into surrounding homes and parks in Isleworth, and then into the Thames.

We have seen a decade of failure from successive Conservative Governments. When the Prime Minister was Environment Secretary, she had a near puritanical obsession with cheese and pork, but what about sewage? She did not have a single meeting with water companies to discuss their performance on sewage spills, but she found time to push through savage cuts to the Environment Agency and to its enforcement and monitoring work, which is a disgrace. People across the country are rightfully angry. This has been a systematic failure, a failure by Ofwat and a failure by successive Conservative Governments over a decade.

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[Trudy Harrison]

My right hon. Friend raises an excellent point. Reforms are taking place in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to look at the plethora of opportunities for speeding up some of those planning processes, with no regression in environmental protections. He raises the issue of nitrogen and phosphates in our water system. Nutrient neutrality has caused significant delays—in fact, entire blockages—for many house builders across the country. That is exactly why we are coming up with systems to ensure that those developers contribute to environmental processes that improve the reduction of nitrogen and phosphorous in water, and enable those developments to go ahead.

I have talked about the challenge of combined sewers. The options are both intolerable as long-term solutions: either to allow water, including foul water, to back up the system, flooding into people’s homes and businesses—I was flooded, and I agree with other Members that it is an incredibly unpleasant situation to be in—or to discharge sewage into watercourses. Neither of those options is acceptable or tolerable.

In August, the Government published the storm overflows discharge reduction plan, which found that achieving complete elimination could cost up to £600 billion and increase annual water bills by up to £817 by 2049. It would also be, as suggested by the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, highly disruptive and complex to deliver nationwide. Our storm overflow discharge reduction plan will see £56 billion in capital investment by 2050—the largest infrastructure programme in water company history. By 2035, water companies will have to improve all storm overflows discharging into or near every designated bathing water, and improve 75% of overflows discharging into high-priority nature sites. By 2050, that will apply to all remaining storm overflows covered by our targets regardless of their location.

There has been some talk about the Environment Agency being resourced to be able to carry out that role. DEFRA and its agencies received £4.3 billion in the 2021 spending review to do more to tackle climate change and protect our environment for future generations. In terms of the response to Ofwat, Ofwat’s investigations will consider how overall companies operate, manage their sewage treatment works and report on their performance where the investigations can find failings on obligations. Ofwat is responsible for enforcing; it will use its full range of powers accordingly to hold companies to account for their failures, and to require them to put things right in short order.

The subject of sewage also brought to the fore the Thames tideway tunnel, which is a £1.9 billion investment. Once operational and taken together with the other improvements, it will achieve a 95% reduction in the annual volume of untreated waste water entering the tidal Thames.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Could the Minister please remember that tideway starts downstream of Mogden sewage works, which is the second largest sewage treatment works in Greater London and, I believe, in the country. None of the sewage discharges from Mogden will be captured by tideway.

[Trudy Harrison]

I am happy to pick that up separately. I have not got time to go into the detail now, but I would be delighted to have a meeting with the hon. Member to go into that in the future.

The Secretary of State made our commitment to tackling sewage discharges absolutely clear on his very first day in office. He held a call with water companies’ chief executives, and we are now working with them to explore the acceleration of infrastructure projects. Water companies are investing £3.1 billion to deliver the 800 storm overflow improvements across England by 2025, but if we can go further and faster we will. The Secretary of State and myself are challenging those water companies to come up with acceleration plans to clean our water system and ensure we have the infrastructure and the supply for the future. We have also recently announced that we will bring forward plans to increase the amount that the Environment Agency can directly fine water companies that pollute the environment by a thousandfold, from £250,000 up to £250 million.