Dr Ellie Chowns

We need to bring water companies into public ownership, because only by running water for public good will we tackle the scandal that has been caused by privatisation in recent decades. Some 82% of the British public want water to be in public ownership. That is more than the percentage who want the railways to be in public ownership, so why are the Government so opposed to it? They are very fond of citing completely imaginary figures about the supposed cost of doing so, but Thames Water, for example, apparently has a market value of £4 billion, judging by the last market offer, and faces a repair bill of £23 billion, so in effect its value is nil. We could take it into public ownership at zero cost and run water for public benefit. The second lacuna in the work of the Independent Water Commission and the water White Paper is agriculture. Why did the Government prevent the Independent Water Commission from looking at agricultural pollution? We know that diffuse agricultural pollution is half the problem, so we cannot ignore it. It is another elephant in the room, and we have to focus on addressing it, together with farmers, who are crying out for support to do that. To give the Independent Water Commission some credit, it did actually look at the issue and mentioned it in its conclusions. It says on page 20 of the final report that “agriculture has the most significant environmental impact on water bodies in England and Wales.” In fact, almost the very next sentence cited the River Wye in my North Herefordshire constituency, where problems relating to diffuse agricultural pollution have led to huge economic, social and environmental problems. A few pages later, the Independent Water Commission said that the Government’s water strategy “should be cross-sectoral, setting out in one place the requirements on all the sectors impacting on or interacting with the water environment…including agriculture”. Yet on only one of its 50 pages did the Government’s White Paper talk about agriculture. That is not a comprehensive, joined-up strategy. As the Independent Water Commission pointed out, “achieving a future environmental target for water…will depend more and more upon reducing the contribution of agricultural pollution.” We must work with our farmers—the stewards of our land—to tackle this problem. It is more than half the issue, and the Government can no longer ignore it. I beg the Minister to please give it the same attention that we rightly give to the water and sewage companies. Without a comprehensive approach, we will simply fail to clean up our rivers, lakes and seas.