4. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline his plans for tackling river pollution? OQ60925

Thank you, Alun. The Welsh Government is taking an integrated catchment river approach to combat river pollution. It's focusing on co-operation and collaboration with all partners. We have an ongoing strong engagement, including Government, regulators and all relevant partners and sectors in Wales, working together through the river pollution summit process. The next summit will take place in July, and I will be chairing it.

I'm grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for that answer. I'd also like to join others in congratulating him on his appointment; I know his appointment has been warmly welcomed across not just this Chamber but across Wales as well. I'd like to add my words to that.

In many ways, the Cabinet Secretary has answered my questions in his first answer. I hope that we'll be able to—[Interruption.] Not quite. I hope that we'll be able to move forward, bringing people together, because I don't believe that we're able to simply lay the blame for river pollution on any one stakeholder or group of stakeholders. What we need is collaboration and co-operation amongst riparian owners, amongst industries, amongst local authorities, Government, regulators, as well as users of our waterways, to ensure that we have the co-operative management of watercourses that ensures that all sources of pollution are tackled, and tackled fairly and equally, and that we do have the sort of fresh, clean rivers that we would all wish to see.

Thank you for that supplementary. You are right. As you know, my politics are that I'm Labour and Co-operative—I stress that repeatedly. My approach to doing this stuff is that we all do it together or we don't do it at all, whether it's with farming, whether it's to do with challenges on transport, and particularly on challenges with water quality. I've never been a great one for monikers like the phrase 'team Wales', but the Welsh way of doing things, so actually working together, so we don’t point fingers and just yell at each other, but we say the regulator has a role to play, the water companies have a role to play, the anglers’ clubs on the river have a role to play, the farmers and the landowners have a role to play, the builders have a role to play—. And Government, by the way, and agencies like NRW—all of us in there together. And all of us in there together rather than pointing fingers, and actually saying, ‘What’s your contribution? What’s yours? How do we then lift it?’

The great thing is we’ve done this before. We’ve done it with things like bathing water quality. We’ve tackled major ecological and environmental issues and really done it together. Now, on that basis I’m really looking forward, and I thank my former First Minister and previous colleagues for the work that they did with the river summits. There was curiosity whether we would continue on that journey now with the reshuffle. We are definitely continuing on that journey, because we see them as an imperative to bring people together and say, ‘What can we all do to actually deliver the water quality that we want?'

Congratulations again for your portfolio. We do have high hopes for you, and what you've said so far does sound good. Just last year, though, we saw the rivers Usk and Wye named Wales's most polluted rivers. Six of the UK’s most polluted rivers are in Wales. Clearly, things are getting worse, not better, and clearly this Welsh Government to date have failed to get a grip of this issue, and instead chosen to ignore the seriousness of the situation facing our Welsh rivers. It pains me to see my local river, the Usk river, which I used to fish in with my father, green, and with no salmon jumping in it like they used to. I wanted to know today what you are going to do differently. You’ve already spoken to my colleague Sam Kurtz about it, and Alun Davies, but I want to know what steps you’re going to take now. What urgent steps can you do? It’s great that you want to work with stakeholders, great that we share the same aim, to get our rivers back to pristine status, but what urgent steps are you going to take before we get round the table? Thank you.

Well, the Wye and the Usk and the Severn, and some of our other major rivers flowing out of the north and the west, and some of the ones that cross borders, particularly, are some of our greatest challenges, and one of the things that I’m hoping to bring to this, building on the work of my predecessors, is actually to try and strengthen some of that cross-border co-operation as well as cross catchment, because some of these catchments involve two Governments, involve two water companies et cetera. So, I think there’s a real role there, and I want to approach this in a very sensible way of saying, ‘What can we combine?’ But where I would refute what you’re saying is that we’ve done nothing, because we actually have, and we can point to the evidence of where we’ve done it. But we’ve still got so much more to do because, as you say—. Look, I’m a keen walker, canoeist and so on—I know these rivers well, and it dismays me sometimes when you look at them, but then it raises the challenge of what can we actually do to turn it round. So, we have funded, for example, the Wye nutrient management board to development a nutrient management plan for that river. The plan is going to give us a better understanding of nutrient levels in the river and meet the conservation objectives of what is an SAC—it’s a special area of conservation. We’ve made £15 million capital funding available to NRW for wider water quality improvements. We have, as we’ve mentioned already, convened—and this is the way forward—four river pollution summits, which have provided an opportunity to learn from different stakeholders on these catchments about the different work being done, and it won’t be one silver bullet, it will be many issues we have to tackle to address it.

So, what I can guarantee to you is I’ll bring the same energy my predecessors have. It’s a real passion of mine. But I will need to work with all Members in this Chamber as well to ensure that everybody steps up to the mark and is willing to contribute.