Dr Ellie Chowns

I thank the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) for bringing this important debate to the House. As the Secretary of State said, we are all in furious agreement that the condition of our rivers, lakes and seas is an absolute scandal. It would be remiss of me not to point out that the problem is not just due to sewage, as the Minister knows. As colleagues have mentioned, agricultural pollution is a key factor in the condition of our rivers, lakes and seas, and we cannot fix the problem without addressing both sewage and agricultural pollution together. However, today’s subject is sewage, so I will focus on that. Turning to the motion before us, I am not against introducing a blue flag system for rivers and streams, but that is just tinkering around the edges of a broken system. A shortage of flags and targets is not the problem. Last year, the Environment Agency gave the water companies a collective target of a 40% reduction in sewage incidents, but what did we have? A 30% increase. Monitoring and targets are not enough if there is no meaningful action or sanction. I understand that the water companies have well over 1,000 criminal convictions between them—some companies have over 100 convictions—but they are still getting away with it. At the same time, bills are going through the roof by an average of over 20% in a single year, and by even more for rural constituents, including mine. It is the bill payers, not the shareholders, who are paying the price. Customer bills provide an average of 35% of company revenue to pay the financial costs—the dividends to shareholders and the interest on loans—of the privatised water and sewerage companies in England and Wales. In the case of Scottish Water, a publicly owned company that may have other problems, those costs amounted to just 8% of revenue from consumer bills.