Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Tim Farron and Adam Jogee

2nd reading
Monday 16th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I commend my hon. Friend for his swimming activities, and I agree with him. The regulatory framework should be used to improve our waterways, not to strip them of their vital designations. We take the view that it is our job to campaign with energy and passion for a radical clean-up. We are determined to keep our word to the voters by fighting for that action.

I will take a quick moment to say something that I feel is most important. The people who work on the frontline in our water industry, and those who work for the Environment Agency and Ofwat, deserve our thanks and admiration—yet, because of the failings of the system, they end up taking the blame that ought to land here in this place. The legions of people running our water system do a vital job, so I want us to get the tone of this debate right. We can be rightly outraged about how our water industry is allowed to operate, and at the same time be hugely grateful to those who, despite the system, do outstanding work to serve our communities. I want those people to know, and to hear, that we really value them. They are a blessing to us. They are not the problem; the system is. We are determined to fight for a better system for all those people to work in.

[Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

In a previous life, I drafted many of the amendments to the Environment Act 2021. I am sorry that the shadow Secretary of State would not let me intervene on her, and I am further sorry that she and most of her colleagues voted against every single one of those amendments. The hon. Gentleman was very kind and wisely voted for them. Although Conservative Members now talk about regulation, all the previous Government did was cut the regulator off at its knees, and we are now dealing with the consequences of their inaction and decisions.

[Tim Farron]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his service in a previous life, as well as in this one. He makes a very important point, to which I will turn in a moment. There is no point having great regulatory powers if we do not have a regulator with the resources to do the job that it needs to do. Nevertheless, regulation could be made better.

Water industry regulation is split between the Environment Agency and Ofwat, and that plainly does not work. We have two inadequately resourced regulators, with inadequate powers, being played off against each other by very powerful water companies that are far better resourced and able to run rings around the very good, but very harassed people whose job it is to hold them to account. I welcome the concession made in the Bill requiring Ofwat to contribute towards meeting the targets of the Environment Act 2021 and the Climate Change Act 2008. That is a step in the right direction because I believe it will be the first time that Ofwat will have proper environmental obligations, alongside its business obligations.

We have received promises, as the Secretary of State set out from the Dispatch Box earlier, that this Government will strengthen Ofwat’s powers in ways that we do not see on the face of the Bill. For instance, Liberal Democrat peers asked the Minister to confirm that the Government would ban water company bosses getting bonuses when their company had had a major category 1 or category 2 sewage incident the year before, and the Minister in the other place said:

“These are the type of circumstances in which it would be highly inappropriate for a bonus to be awarded.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. 247.]

That is very welcome, but it is not on the face of the Bill.

I pay tribute to my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place, who forensically engaged with the Bill to make it much better. I also pay tribute to the collegiate and constructive manner in which the Minister, Baroness Hayman, worked with them. To be clear, though, the Liberal Democrats would go even further and create a unified and much more powerful regulator, the clean water authority, absorbing the regulatory powers of Ofwat and the Environment Agency, but with many additional powers, including revoking the licence of poorly performing water companies swiftly, forcing water companies to publish the full scale of their sewage spills, reforming water companies to put local environmental experts on their boards, and putting robust, legally binding targets on sewage discharges.

On the issue of discharges, we welcome the change to require data from emergency overflows to be published within an hour of a discharge. That will require companies to monitor all emergency sewage overflows and to ensure that data is reported to the Environment Agency within the hour. To pursue the point made by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), my concern is that the Environment Agency is already massively overwhelmed. In my constituency, I see good people working very hard, but with Coniston, Windermere, the River Eden and the River Kent competing for time, attention and resource, as well as the ongoing work of building flood defences in Kendal, it is hard for them to be able to focus.