It has been brought to my attention that Extinction Rebellion have displayed signs around the Forest of Dean claiming that I “voted to block a law requiring water companies to dump less sewage in our water and seas.”
This is simply untrue.
In fact, I voted for new laws that will protect our waterways and have campaigned to make sure it is water companies who have to clean up their own mess, not my constituents.
Some may have reached a genuine misunderstanding about an October 2021 vote in the House of Commons after reading misinformation online, while others, including those who put misleading signs up around the constituency, have wilfully misrepresented what happened because of a particular political view they have.
Nonetheless, I will now bust some myths about what the Environment Act is all about.
The amendment we voted against, and that has been referenced in social media posts circulated locally, would have brought in a system without a detailed plan or impact assessment and that was estimated to cost consumers between £150 billion and £600 billion, with no cost to the water companies at all. If you pay a water bill and you’re reading this, that’s money out of your pocket.
To put those figures in perspective, £150 billion is more than the entire schools, policing and defence budgets put together, and £600 billion is well above what was spent combatting the Coronavirus pandemic.
I voted against this amendment because it would have been irresponsible to write a blank cheque for the water companies on behalf of billpayers.
Further, the measures that I did vote for in the Environment Act make real, tangible strides towards eradicating pollution from our rivers and waterways:
- A new duty on Government to produce a statutory plan to reduce discharges from overflows and the harm this causes, and report to Parliament on progress.
- A new duty on Government to produce a report setting out the actions that would be needed to eliminate storm overflow in England and the costs and benefits of those actions.
- A new duty on water companies to produce comprehensive statutory Drainage and Sewerage Management Plans setting out how the company will manage and develop its networks, and how storm overflows will be addressed.
- A new duty on water companies and the Environment Agency to publish data on storm overflow operation on an annual basis.
- A new duty on water companies to publish near real time information (within 1 hour) of the commencement of an overflow, its location and when it ceases.
- A new duty on water companies to continuously monitor the water quality upstream and downstream of a storm overflow and of sewage disposal works.
I also think it is important that water companies are made to pay to clean up their own mess. That’s why, along with my fellow Wye MPs, I wrote to the Treasury to suggest cleaning up the Wye using fines handed out to water companies for unpermitted pollution discharges, rather than funding it out of your pockets. You can see the letter attached to this post.
I am pleased that the Treasury has since followed our recommendation. Fines on water companies will now be ringfenced and invested directly back into environmental and water quality improvement projects. To support this, the Government has given the Environment Agency an extra £2.2 million to spend on enforcement activity and the fines that can be handed out are being increased 1,000 fold – from £250,000 to £250 million.
And finally, going further still, last year the Government announced that water companies must now conform to new strict targets on sewage pollution and will be required to deliver the largest environmental infrastructure programme in their history to tackle storm sewage discharges – £56 billion over 25 years, including £3.1 billion to deliver 800 storm overflow improvements across England by 2025.
These are concrete, costed and deliverable plans that will tackle pollution in our waterways.
