Gareth Snell

I rise to support the Bill because we basically live in a monopoly. We live in a situation where a group of companies control an incredibly essential part of everyday life—a part that we need. As a consumer, if I do not like the service I receive, I can go somewhere else; I cannot do that with water. If I want to shop around for a better deal, I can do that; I cannot do that with water. The water companies know that—they know that they hold a monopoly on the service they provide—so they think they can get away with raising bills, failing to invest, and ploughing money into shares and dividends. Their time has come, and the Bill is apt. The new Government is providing new opportunities to change the way in which we look at water and consider it as a fundamental part of everyday life. But as I have been listening to the debate this afternoon, I started to wonder whether the Bill is actually needed, because if we listen to the hon. Members for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) or for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed), apparently everything in the Bill has already been done, and we are fine. I struggled to reconcile what the right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) said in her opening speech—about this Government copying what the previous Government did in the Environment Act—with the rather gory descriptions of the effluence and other material found in waterways across the country. I represent Stoke-on-Trent—the clue is in the name; it is the river on which we sit—and I know thousands of hours of sewage have been discharged into that river. Equivalent amounts of sewage are also being pumped into places like the Fowlea brook and the Lyme brook by a water company that is seemingly more worried about protecting its dividends than the health of the people I have been sent here to represent. How did we get to this point, if everything the last Government did was apparently fine? The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) summed it up perfectly when he talked about the importance of regulation. Actually, we have gap when it comes to regulation—it is an enforcement gap. We have great regulation on paper that says, “You will do this, and this will happen” and “There will be penalties and fines”, but the previous Government systematically over time reduced the amount of funding available to the regulatory organisations, so that their enforcement became reactionary to events. According to the Conservatives, the reason why we have 100% monitoring of discharges is not because of some benevolent act by a party that cared about the environment; it is because the previous Government got bored and tired of the community groups around the country campaigning on the issue, and they thought, “We’ll do something about it.” I find it no coincidence that that happened this year—in an election year. I hope that the Minister will talk more about how regulatory enforcement will happen, and about how we will provide the powers and the money that are needed.