Sewage emissions into our rivers and chalk streams are unacceptable. Last year, there were 219 instances of pollution across 15 sites in my constituency alone. This week the Newbury Weekly News has carried a number of examples, and in the last few months I have reported two to the Environment Agency.
There are currently 250,000 km of sewers running throughout England, of which approximately 100,000 km are combined – meaning that they hold a combination of surface water (rain) and waste water from toilets in the same pipes. When it rains heavily, the option is for it to come back up the toilet or to emit into water bodies via Combined Storm Overflow pipes. There are 15,000 such pipes in England and all are between 150 and 60 years old.
Every sewer system in the world has CSOs. Across Europe there are 330,000. The reason why this issue has become so significant in the last few years is down to the work of my predecessor Richard Benyon who realised in 2014 that very little data was held about the quality of our waterways when he was a DEFRA minister. He launched a new initiative to obtain a full data set by 2023 so that Government policy could be designed to best protect rivers. When he started the exercise in 2016, data was held for just 5% of public waterways. Today it is almost 100%. Data published by Thames Water shows a 70% reduction in discharges in the Newbury constituency between 2021 and 2022: not good enough, but progress.
It is false to say that Conservative MPs voted to allow sewage into our rivers. The independent fact-checking website Full Fact makes this clear: www.fullfact.org/environment/murky-claims-about-sewage-bill-fact-checked/.
What is true is that this the Environment Act 2021 created a new legal duty on water companies to reduce sewage discharges with an obligation to invest £56 billion on resolving the problem by sewerage upgrades. In the coming weeks, Thames Water will be publishing their final Waste Water Management Plan and have given me a cast-iron assurance that this will reduce discharges into chalk streams including the Kennet, the Pang and the Lambourn by 80% by the year 2030.
The Government has announced it will hold their feet to the fire on this: increasing the maximum fines for illegal sewage spills from £250,000 to £250 million. But I am of the view that there is room to go further on this. The Water Services Regulation Authority, or Ofwat, has recently conducted a consultation on financial resilience, which includes linking dividend payments to environmental performance. I have written to the Chief Executive of Ofwat, David Black, to suggest that he goes further and ties bonus payments as well as dividend payments to environmental performance. Resolving this problem depends on the efforts of water companies, and I believe that there must be full accountability should they fail to deliver.
