Water (Special Measures) Bill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:45 pm on 9 January 2025.
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 9, in clause 2, page 5, line 10, at end insert—
“(2A) A pollution incident reduction plan must, in particular, state how the undertaker intends to reduce the occurrence of pollution incidents in national parks that are attributable to its system.”
Amendment 25, in clause 2, page 5, line 27, after “occurrence” insert “and impact”.
Amendment 24, in clause 2, page 5, line 29, at end insert—
“(ea) the use the undertaker plans to make of nature-based solutions for reducing the occurrence and impact of pollution incidents,”.
Amendment 6, in clause 2, page 7, line 14, at end insert—
“(5) An implementation report must be published on the relevant undertaker’s website in a form which is publicly accessible.”
Clause stand part.
I will speak to amendments 23 and 25 first, as they are connected, then amendment 24, and then amendments 9 and 6, which were tabled by those on the Conservative Front Bench. I think amendments 9 and 6 are both fine and helpful, and we would be supportive of them.
In amendments 23 and 25, tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Witney, we are referring to impact. There is reference in the Bill to an incident reduction plan, to reduce occurrences and to have reports about occurrences. Our concern is about much more than occurrences; it is about impacts. We know, for example, that a spillage into the River Kent, River Eden, Windermere or Coniston may last a certain amount of time, but we do not know about the volume. We may have a trickle over a day or a deluge over a half-hour period.
It is important to understand the impact not only on marine life, fish stocks and biodiversity, but on things such as leisure activities. As an occasional wild swimmer myself, and as somebody who knows a lot of anglers, canoeists and sailors in my constituency, it seems wrong that we should not put front and centre, not just a greater awareness of and action on incidents, but a look at the impact—the measured impacts on biodiversity, wildlife, livestock, farmers and the tourism economy in places like the Lakes, which is the biggest visitor destination in the country after London. I would be very grateful if amendments 23 and 25 were taken on board by the Government.
Amendment 24 relates to nature-based solutions and looks at incident reduction plans. As the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management put it:
“Nature-based solutions…can help address many of the water sector’s challenges while also providing significant benefits for people and planet, such as water quality improvement, flood risk reduction, carbon sequestration, climate resilience, nutrient neutrality, biodiversity enhancement, community engagement, and public health and wellbeing.”
Indeed, nature-based solutions are also a vital source of funding and income for farmers. Examples include natural flood management techniques, such as wetland restoration, tree planting across catchments of areas of unproductive land—not of productive agricultural land, I hasten to add—and building resilience to flooding; the construction of treatment wetlands and reed beds to treat waste water and improve water quality; the creation and restoration of ponds and pondscapes; climate mitigation and adaptation; and the building of resilience to drought.
Finally, the multiple benefits delivered by working with nature also create opportunities for blended finance by drawing in private investors or gaining income from buyers and ecosystem services. That further increases taxpayer value for money at a time when the delivery burden on the water industry, and therefore customer bills, is at a record high. Investment in nature-based solutions will help to ensure that water industry spending supports the delivery of the maximum environmental and social benefits.
Amendments 23, 24 and 25 are about assessing the damaging impact of pollution incidents in our lakes, coastal areas and rivers in my communities and across the country. Through amendment 24, they also try to provide practical solutions that will help to address those issues. They are meant to be helpful amendments and I hope that the Government will take them on board.
I rise to speak about amendments 6 and 9, proposed by His Majesty’s Opposition. I hope that they are self-explanatory amendments that are quite simply about the core concept of accountability, which was at the heart of the previous Government’s mission to improve our water system. We must remember that at the heart of every failure that damages our waterways, it is the Great British public—those who rely on our waterways as consumers and as members of communities served by them—who are let down and denied the rights to pollution-free water systems to which they are entitled.
Amendment 6, which would require water companies to publish their implementation reports accessibly online, gives the public a tangible and visible sign by which water companies can be held to account for the promises they make and the actions they say they will take. It is a vital step in trying to restore the trust that water companies may be seen to have lost in recent years with the public through their inadequate actions to deal with this issue, as people have seen and as hon. Members have articulated today on both sides of the House. It is very much about having not just words and promises but explicit standards to judge water companies by, and it would form a kind of contract between the companies and their consumers, who would then know what to expect from their individual company.
His Majesty’s Opposition have no objections to the principle of clause 2 and its requirement that water companies publish an implementation report, nor in the specific details that companies would be expected to produce in proposed new section 205B of the Water Industry Act 1991. In fact, we welcome the Government’s willingness to listen to the concerns from Conservative peers, including Lord Roborough, and peers from other parties in the other place to strengthen clause 2, including the requirement for implementation reports to be drafted by water companies in the first place and ensuring that the requirements for pollution incident reduction plans also include water supply system-related incidents, not just sewage-related incidents.
However, we believe that amendment 6 would go even further to strengthen that proposal and advance the accountability that we all want water companies to have. Requiring implementation reports to be published online in an accessible way sets out an explicit and clear definition to water companies of how they are expected to publish any such plans, as the clause requires, and demonstrates how water companies must comply with the law in unequivocal terms.
In stressing accessibility, amendment 6 would end the ambiguity that can sometimes exist for the public, which means that it is often too easy for companies to hide away behind protocol and procedure. By making such information available to consumers, we would ensure that there could be no hiding in murky waters on this vital issue and the concrete commitments to improving our waterways.
Water companies can also benefit from the chance to make reflections on their progress available in full sight of the public. In all walks of life, sometimes people’s efforts to make good on promises cannot come to full fruition for reasons beyond their control. If genuine reasons arise for not meeting targets, there can be full transparency for the public as to why, so they can understand more about the nature of the industry and the issues involved in protecting the quality of our water system. In other words, full transparency is in everyone’s interests.
A 2023 review commissioned by Ofwat about the importance of open data was clear that open data provide great benefits in a range of areas when it comes to the water industry. In terms of the environment, it highlighted that open data from sewage overflow monitoring were beneficial to the creation of the predictive analytics tools used in Wessex Water’s intelligent sewers competition, which helped to identify sewage blockages much earlier than they otherwise would have been. That demonstrates an explicit link between the work of recent years to require data monitoring in the water industry, such as on storm overflows—I reiterate that 100% are monitored thanks to the work of the previous Conservative Government—and improvements in the water industry’s tackling of pollution. That is in addition to the improved accountability and the responsibility that data publication places on water companies to get the issue right.
The report highlighted, however, that at the time there was a trend towards companies sharing data with their key partners, rather than making information completely and clearly available for unrestricted public access. The report therefore explicitly recommended that companies in the water sector should look at the data they had been sharing only with specific groups and partners, and take steps to make available those data where they can.
Amendment 6 would solve the problem of information reports before it could even arise—upstream—by unequivocally stating that water companies must publish implementation reports on their websites that would be accessible to all members of the public, not just those with the time and influence to ask for such data. We talked about citizen science: this will give those data to the people to analyse and hold water companies to account. The Conservatives will therefore be pressing amendment 6 to a Division.
I am conscious of time, Mr Vickers. Are you going to call stumps in about 20 seconds?
No. We can keep going until 1.30 pm.
On that note, I will move on to amendment 9, which would make it a requirement for pollution incident reduction plans to include how an undertaker intends to reduce the occurrence of pollution incidents in national parks attributable to their water system. The Opposition tabled the amendment to strengthen the existing plans that the Government have put forward, so that no stone is left unturned in ensuring environmental protections from our water companies. The amendment ensures that water companies make it clear how they will work to reduce pollution incidents in national parks in a system that a water company operates in.
National parks are an area that the previous Conservative Government took great efforts to protect in their legislative programme on protected landscapes. We worked to encourage water companies to invest in peat restoration, and allowed teams at national parks to bid for investment that improved their water environments. The history of recent work on national parks goes beyond just the most recent Government, with the Glover review being published in July 2019. In a response to that review, the Conservatives highlighted their commitment to national parks and water quality, such as through developing the natural capital and ecosystem assessment, which combined data science, citizen science and earth observation technology to inform water quality improvements as a priority target; and ensured that capital and natural capital reporting were embedded into the management plans of protected landscapes.
Despite the effort and progress made by the previous Government, the new Government still need to make a concerted and ongoing effort to ensure that our rivers and waterways are truly as pristine in their content as they look from the outside. Studies have found chemicals and pollutants in waterways in national parks that simply should not be there. Of course, that is not just about environmental beauty or water quality; it affects our wildlife standards, animal health and welfare, and biodiversity. The creatures of the natural world that rely on those waterways are put at risk if the pollution from our national parks is not reduced. That is true not only of the animals that live in and around waterways, but of any animals that rely on them in their food chain for survival.
We Conservatives have taken great pains to improve the consideration of nature-based solutions. I take on board the comments of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale about nature-based solutions. We all agree that it is important to use nature-based restorative functions for things such as flood mitigation, through planting trees in the right place, re-wriggling rivers and so on. It is important that we work collectively to do that, and the introduction of the environmental land management schemes in the previous Parliament was very much part of that.
With this amendment, we are trying to ensure that the water company pollution reduction plans, as required by the Bill, have the maximum effect, so I hope that the Government will consider accepting it. As I said to the Government on Second Reading, we want to ensure that the Bill is the best that it can be to deliver for the constituents of all Committee members and Members right across the House of Commons and the other place. We tabled it and other amendments in exactly that spirit: not as a hindrance or for the sake of party politics, but to make this Bill even better for the country that we serve. We will therefore be pressing amendments 6 and 9 to a vote.
I will speak primarily in support of amendment 6. I pay tribute to the former Member for Ludlow, the right hon. Philip Dunne, who throughout the previous Parliament was the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sat. The EAC’s work on water quality and the seminal report that we produced started this huge public interest in water quality and led to the legislative changes in the Environment Act 2021, among other things.
One of the key lessons we learned from the work that we did on the EAC was the need for transparency of data and information, which can unlock the power of citizen science. We visited the citizen scientists working on the River Windrush, who had difficulty analysing the data that was then publicly available but very hard to find to work out whether storm overflows were being used in the way the water companies were describing. Their very detailed, hard-to-do work exposed the shocking misuse of storm overflows.
As those citizen scientists understood, an event duration monitor is a very simple piece of equipment: it is either on or off. It is set on the outflow of the storm overflow tank. When it detects flow on that channel, it turns on, and when that flow ceases, it turns off. What it does not do, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale rightly pointed out, is measure volume. It also does not measure what is passing. It says that something is passing or not passing, but it does not measure volume or quality. That leads me to support amendment 6, tabled by the loyal Opposition, and to question not the intention behind the Liberal Democrat amendments—amendments 24 and 25 and those to clause 3, which I suspect we will talk a bit more about—but the effectiveness of having new machines that measure volume, in addition to whether it is on and off, but not quality.
A better solution may be the one that the Environmental Audit Committee recommended all those years ago—I stand to be corrected, but I think we wrote that report in 2021. It called for the upstream and downstream monitoring of water quality, typically in the outflow river, so that in addition to a signal that there has been an event, there is close to real-time reporting of the comparative water quality upstream and downstream of a discharge outlet. That would simplify the technical requirements of having to install a whole load of new equipment, which other amendments from the Liberal Democrats anticipate, at an unknown cost and implementation speed. Instead, it would look at the actual real-time impact on a particular water body.
Amendment 6 would require the publishing of the information on the undertaker’s website. I am surprised that that was not part of the Bill in the first place and, given that it was not, that the Government have not adopted the amendment. All it does is to apply consistency to the legislative programme. Section 81(2) and (3) of the Environment Act 2021—I know the Minister is familiar with it, but just in case she is not—require the publishing of event duration monitor data within an hour and in a format that is readily accessible by the general public. The loyal Opposition’s amendment is simply trying to ensure consistency between what we already require for EDMs on undertakers’ websites and this area.