Steve Reed

Steve Reed

Labour (Co-op) — Streatham and Croydon North

Speaking in the House of Commons on 23 April 2025

Debate

Sewage

Contribution

With the greatest respect, the hon. Lady’s party had 14 years to take action, and did nothing. Although I am grateful to the Liberal Democrats for calling this debate, and I think there are many points of similarity between our approaches, I must gently point to some of the opportunities they missed to take action when they were in government. For instance, the Environment Agency had its funding cut by more than half between 2010 and 2019, leading to a fall in prosecutions against water companies and other polluters, and there were Liberal Democrats in the coalition Cabinet that started those cuts. The coalition Government published a report in 2011 that wrongly and, in my view, bizarrely concluded that water regulation “works and is not fundamentally flawed”. Of course, under that coalition Government, a Liberal Democrat Minister was responsible for the water sector between 2013 and 2015, and disappointingly they kept in place the very system of regulation that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale quite rightly just criticised.

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