Abtisam Mohamed

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. Water is a basic natural resource, essential for public health and hygiene, but it is trapped in one of the largest ever private monopolies: we cannot choose water from a less polluted waterway or stop paying bills that rise faster than inflation, and we cannot even change suppliers. As others have said, under Thatcher, our water and sewerage system was sold off with a clean slate: £5 billion in debt was wiped and companies were given a cash boost to the tune of £1.5 billion. Yorkshire Water has paid shareholders £7.6 billion in dividends since 1989, and it has £6.2 billion in debt. That is unacceptable. Resident bill payers have paid the price. Every promise of a better system has completely collapsed under the weight of this monopoly. On Addy Street in Upperthorpe in my constituency, residents are no strangers to jets of water coming out of the ground. The most recent instance was not the first, second or even third time that they had seen a burst main, but the fourth. These are no longer unique occurrences; they are endemic to a system that is at breaking point. We have to be transparent: mounting corporate greed across England will not be wished away by making it easier to sack failing chief executives or imposing greater fines on companies. The personnel are not the problem. The problem is the system of deriving massive profit from life’s essential needs. Although I welcome the Government’s planned reforms, I urge them to go further than public control and regulation, and work to bring the system back in house. Four hundred and thirty-four of my constituents have signed the petition that we are discussing today, and 440 more in Walkley have signed local activist Hannah Cawley’s petition calling for water to be brought into public ownership. They are calling for an end to stakeholder payouts, and for cleaner rivers, lower bills and real accountability. That is the least that they deserve. Sheffield, like the rest of the country, has paid enough for this failure. It is time to bring water back into public ownership, and it is time to put the people who depend on it first.