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 made a recent assessment of the potential impact of water sanitation on antibiotic resistance.

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency (EA) have been working with the water industry to research the occurrence and transport of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics through wastewater treatment works as part of the industry funded Chemical Investigations Programme. The results were recently published by UK Water Industry Research (The National Chemical Investigations Programme 2020-2022 Volume 1 - Investigations into changes to Antimicrobial Resistance through wastewater and sludge treatment processes (ukwir.org)) and next steps are being considered.