Gideon Amos

Seeing the quality of the river water is key, and that is one thing that bathing water status allows us to do. In tackling the need for improvement, many local groups face an uphill battle. Sewage pollution is a national disgrace. Time and again we see reports of raw sewage being discharged into our rivers, lakes and seas, turning what should be places of recreation into sites of contamination. In my constituency, further downstream on the Tone, examples of recent discharges of untreated effluent are commonplace. At Hook stream, which could otherwise be a charming stretch of the River Tone, there have been over 188 hours of discharge in the first eight weeks of 2025 alone. Residents are rightly appalled by the sewage releases; no one should have to fear that going too close to their local river could make them ill, especially as, all the while, water companies have paid out millions of pounds in dividends and bonuses. We need flow-rate monitoring, extra stormwater storage and resources for the Environment Agency to increase enforcement, but bathing water regulations are a key tool in reducing pollution. That brings me to the main topic of the debate. There are elements of the consultation that I welcome. Removing the automatic five-year de-designation rule for bathing waters is a positive suggestion. It would simply be unfair for communities to lose the protections that come with designation just because a site has remained polluted for five years. The reality is that people will continue to swim in those waters, as they have done at French Weir for hundreds of years, regardless of whether they are officially designated. Having a high number of bathers is what allows sites to be designated, and that should continue to be the main criterion. Removing monitoring, which is what happens with de-designation, would just put rivers and their users at further risk. It would not stop people using the rivers. Water companies and regulators frequently take longer than five years to clean up sites, and people should not be punished by losing their designation because that has not happened fast enough. Let us not forget that improving water quality in bathing areas has wider benefits throughout the whole of the river’s catchment area. Improving infrastructure in bathing areas that are susceptible to flooding benefits communities along the whole length of the watercourse. Part of the problem is misalignment between the four-year rolling cycle of bathing designations and Ofwat’s five-year price review for water companies, which sets out its investment plans for the period. A newly designated bathing water often has to wait years for the price review to receive the investment required. Designation of a bathing water should be aligned with those improvements in investment. Has the Minister taken any steps to resolve that discrepancy? The health and wellbeing of those who use the water should also be a primary concern of regulation, which is why I am concerned about core reform 2 in the consultation, which proposes the introduction of feasibility tests for bathing sites. That would mean that if it is deemed too difficult or expensive to improve water quality, a site could be denied designation altogether. Who would really benefit from that approach? Certainly not the swimmers, rowers, kayakers or residents. The only people who stand to gain would be the very polluters responsible for the problem in the first place. We must not give water companies a loophole to argue that it is too costly to clean up a bathing site that people are regularly using for swimming and other recreation. Designation should be based on where people actually use the water, so will the Minister please reconsider that aspect of a perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately damaging proposal? Core reform 3 of the consultation proposes the removal of fixed bathing season dates and moving them into guidance. I welcome greater flexibility, but the now well accepted 15 May to 30 September bathing season should remain the irreducible minimum that everybody understands and knows about. This should not be a cover for reducing bathing seasons to such a short window that they become meaningless. We should be going further: year-round testing should be standard, in my opinion. We also need better quality testing, and for better integration with other monitoring systems we should be monitoring sewage volume from spills, not just hours. We should also consider testing for a wider range of bacteria than just E. coli and enterococci, especially considering other harmful pathogens such as salmonella and leptospirosis have, since 2010, contributed to a 60% rise in hospital admissions for waterborne diseases. There should be greater funding for the EA to monitor run-off into rivers as well. Only by understanding the scale of the problem will we be able to start to tackle it. This will not be prohibitively expensive. Research by Surfers Against Sewage, which I thank for all its great work on this issue, suggests the additional cost of year-round monitoring per site would be roughly £775. Across the UK, that amounts to £350,000—less than 4% of the bonuses paid to water company execs last year. That is surely an investment worth making. Will the Minister publish a review into the potential cost of year-round water testing? The reality is that our inland bathing waters are already in a dire state. While 92% of the 450 bathing waters in England meet minimum standards, that figure drops to only 53% of inland bathing waters. In contrast, Germany has almost 2,300 bathing sites, the vast majority inland. The fact that 98% of them meet minimum standards shows us what is possible. Instead of looking for ways to limit new designations, we should expand them so that more communities benefit from cleaner, safer waters. Had a feasibility requirement existed previously, we would never have seen so many bathing waters granted in the first place; perhaps there would be no more inland water bathing designations in the country. We also need urgent action to hold polluters accountable. Water companies operate on five-year investment cycles, meaning that improvements to polluted waters often get kicked down the road for years. We cannot afford to wait. We need a tougher regulator than Ofwat, one with proper powers to hold these companies to account. We also need more immediate funding to improve water quality at newly designated sites, rather than forcing them to wait for the next investment cycle, as I said. Ultimately, this debate is about a simple principle: everyone should have the right to access sites with unpolluted water. The Government must not allow water companies to dictate which sites are worthy of protection and which are not. Let us take this opportunity to strengthen, not weaken, our protection of bathing waters. It is time to expand, not limit, the sites that benefit from designation. Above all, it is time to ensure that polluters are held accountable so that future generations can enjoy bathing waters like those at French Weir, as well as our rivers, lakes and seas, without fear of pollution.