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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of requiring water companies to implement pollution incident reduction plans.

The Water (Special Measures) Bill will introduce a statutory duty for all water companies in England and Wales to publish annual Pollution Incident Reduction Plans. Water companies will be required to use these plans to set out the actions they intend to take to reduce the severity and frequency of pollution incidents.

The Government fully agrees that water companies must implement the actions it sets out in its plans. That is why we are we are requiring water companies to produce an annual implementation report alongside their plan, setting out where they have and have not implemented the measures they planned to implement in the preceding year, and what they plan to do to rectify any similar failures in future.

The Government is clear that failure to act is unacceptable. That is why if a company fails to publish a compliant plan and implementation report by the deadline each year, this will be considered an offence, enforced by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales. Chief Executives will be required to approve both the plan and the report and will be personally liable for their publication.

During the passage of the Water (Special Measures) Bill, it was debated whether to include a statutory duty to implement pollution incident reduction plans. The Government does not believe this is appropriate. Doing so could result in companies creating enforceable duties on themselves. This would create confusion for our regulators and could also result in an inadvertent reduction of companies’ ambition.