Rivers, Lakes and Seas: Water Quality

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your stewardship, Mr Dowd. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes), who made a great speech, and has introduced this important issue to this place this morning. I pay tribute to all Members who made remarks during this debate, including, of course, the references they made to the issues that they face in their communities. This is a nationwide issue, which the Liberal Democrats have chosen to champion—we are so committed to cleaning up our waters that our leader refuses to stop falling into our waterways until this matter is resolved.

We are talking about lakes, rivers and seas, and I have them all in my patch—well, not all of them, but a large chunk of them, as the Member of Parliament for the English lake district. I will not list off all the lakes and rivers, as I have been known to in the past, because we only have so much time. We are all proud of our constituencies, and it is a huge privilege to represent mine, but we recognise that in our communities we are there to be stewards of, and to preserve, the lakes, rivers, becks and tarns, and Morecambe bay in my constituency —not just for us, but for everybody else.

Those are national parks, and the lake district is even a world heritage site, so while what happens in our waterways is deeply personal to us, we also recognise it is of great significance to the future of our country and indeed even of our planet. The impact on our ecology, biodiversity and water quality is important, but let us not forget—as has been mentioned by other Members—the importance to our tourism economy. Some 20 million people visit the lakes every year and they deserve to visit a place that is as pristine as it should be.

I will run through some of the issues affecting our communities. Just last year, the Shap pumping station released sewage for 1,000 hours into Docker beck and sewage was dumped into the river Lowther at Askham water treatment works for 414 hours. In November last year, we found that the number of poor bathing waters had risen to the highest level since the introduction of the four-tier classification system. That shamefully included Coniston Water. Windermere had sewage dumped into it 345 times, totalling 5,259 hours over the course of 2023.

I will say a quick word about pollution in lakes. A drop of water that enters Windermere at the north end takes nine months to work its way through, so the impact of sewage on bodies of water such as lakes and tarns is even greater than it is on our rivers and seas. The impact on Morecambe bay is hugely significant as well. We saw 757 sewage dumps there just in 2023. One of the things that is so grievous is the impunity with which those things take place. In 2021, there were 500,000 sewage dumps across the United Kingdom, and a grand total of 16 of them were deemed liable for prosecution. Of those, eight attracted fines of less than £50,000. In other words, it was worth the water company’s while to dump that sewage, because there was no way of holding it to account.

I have said this before, and it is so important: we speak with such passion on all sides about this issue, yet thousands of people are working in our water industries—for the water companies, for Ofwat, for the Environment Agency and for various other bodies—and I pay tribute to them. The temperature of this debate can often be high, and I want them to know that they are valued, and that we do not blame them; we blame the system within which they work. Radical change is needed.

It is a privilege to serve alongside the Minister and others in this place on the Water (Special Measures) Bill Committee. Alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard), we have tabled 44 amendments to that Bill; not one of them has been accepted so far, but we have one more day to go, so here’s hoping. That demonstrates our commitment to trying to engage proactively with this issue. We think it seriously matters. The issues we have sought to highlight through that Committee include the need to create a new clean water authority, to have special priority for waterways in national parks and for chalk streams, to protect our rivers and drinking water from forever chemicals and to put environmental experts on the boards of water companies.

The Government—I praise them for this—are rightly putting citizen science at the heart of monitoring. They need to do two things if they are serious about that, and one is to make sure that they equip, support and resource those citizen scientists. I pay tribute to Save Windermere, the Clean River Kent campaign, the South Cumbria Rivers Trust, the Eden Rivers Trust and many others in our communities, but those people need to be on the boards and committees so that they can influence decisions, as well as being equipped to hold people to account. We need radical change, and I fear that this Government are not quite proposing it.

We have a real problem when it comes to regulation. In the end, we have a fragmented regulatory framework. Ofwat, the EA and other bodies are under-resourced and underpowered and the system is fragmented, so the water companies simply run rings around them. The evidence of that is that Ofwat levied £168 million of fines nearly four years ago against three water companies, and it has collected a precise total of zero pounds and zero pence from them, because it simply does not have the culture and powers it needs. Before Christmas, it sanctioned a more than 30% increase in our water bills. In the north-west alone, 11% of all our water bills is going to service the £8.9 billion debt of United Utilities, and it is far worse with Thames Water and in other parts of our country.

People have mentioned farmers and farm run-off. One of the major problems with the agricultural impact on pollution is the past Government’s and this Government’s botching of the transition to the new farm payment scheme. This Government taking 76% out of the basic payment this year will push a load of farmers to move away from environmental action altogether. It will be massively counterproductive. Back our farmers and they will help us to clean up our environment.

In short, we in the Liberal Democrat corner of the Chamber—well represented this morning, as always—are impatient for change. We welcome and support the Bill. As a bit of an old-timer, I neutrally observe that Labour Governments tend to fall into one particular trap: they always assume they will be in power for longer than they actually will be, and they drag their feet and do not do the radical things they should. I say to them: “You’re already at least 10% of the way through this Parliament—get on with it!”