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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she will take to ensure water companies provide adequate plant and technology to abstract polluting nitrates from watercourses.

The Government is taking action to ensure that the water industry tackles nitrogen pollution.

A large programme of monitoring has been undertaken to establish whether elevated nitrogen is giving rise to eutrophication in estuaries and coastal waters that exceed their numerical nitrogen standards. Where this is the case, water companies have been required to put in place more stringent nutrient removal treatment at wastewater treatment works. This can see the level of nitrate in wastewater effluent reduced by 70-80%.

This investment forms part of the total £2.5 billion that water companies are investing in measures to reduce nutrient pollution (nitrogen and phosphorus) from 2020 to 2025.

Beyond this, the Government has introduced new provisions to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill that will place a new statutory duty on water and sewerage companies in England to upgrade wastewater treatment works to the highest technically achievable limits by 2030 in areas currently under nutrient neutrality advice. This will see further investment at wastewater treatment works discharging to areas of the country particularly impacted by nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.