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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the reporting of storm overflows in real time will be (a) consistent, (b) transparent, (c) accessible and (d) readily understood by the public.

The Environment Act places new monitoring duties on the water industry to significantly improve transparency. It requires companies to make discharge data available in near real time to the public and to monitor water quality upstream and downstream of their assets.