Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will take legislative steps to end the practice of operator self-monitoring, in the context of recent trends in the level of river pollution discharges.

The Water (Special Measures) Bill will introduce a requirement for water companies to publish information on discharges from emergency overflows in near real-time (within an hour of a discharge occurring). This requirement will be in addition to the duty coming into force for companies to publish discharges from storm overflows in near real-time.

The increased availability of near real-time data will be independently scrutinised by the regulators and will fulfil the Government’s commitment to ensure independent monitoring of every outlet.

The Environment Agency (EA) are already recruiting up to 500 additional staff for inspections, enforcement and stronger regulation, increasing compliance checks, and quadrupling the number of water company inspections by March next year. The increase in inspections will allow the EA to conduct more in-depth and independent audits to get to the root-cause of incidents, reducing the reliance on operator self-monitoring.

On 23 October the Government launched an Independent Commission into the water sector regulatory system. The Commission includes specific objectives around ensuring water industry regulators are effective, have a clear purpose, and are empowered to hold water companies to account.