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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her department has set a date by which it aims to have ended operator self-monitoring in the water industry.

Government has committed to ending ‘operator self-monitoring’ so water companies will no longer mark their own homework on pollution incidents.

We will develop a new strengthened open monitoring approach for monitoring wastewater. This will be driven by greater digitisation and automation, making data accessible to the public in near-real time, and helping to restore public trust in the system.

Water companies are already required to publish data on some sewage spills within one hour. We will roll out real-time monitoring across the wastewater system, and all this data will be made publicly available online. That will ensure that the regulator and, importantly, the public have the power to hold water companies fully accountable.