Rosie Duffield

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. It is no surprise at all that my constituency has the second highest number of signatures to the petition. For at least six years now, Whitstable in my constituency has been plagued by frequent releases of sewage pouring out into our sea. Combined sewage overflows are supposed to occur only in the event of extremely heavy rainfall or storms, yet every single time a drop or two of rain falls from the sky, we get alerts, and within minutes my inbox will start to ping. In 2021, I held my first public meeting at which residents were able to directly challenge the bosses of Southern Water. It was very similar to the public meetings shown in “Dirty Business”, Channel 4’s outstanding docudrama. The executives seemed taken aback by the frustration and anger and by the demand for answers; I suspect they really thought we might all be fobbed off by the kind of generic non-answers that I had been receiving as the local MP and as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Whitstable has been plagued by this for years, and by the smell of an unmanned treatment works. The smell was so bad that people could not hang out their washing or allow their children to play in the nearby play area. They had headaches, the visible sanitary products and human waste were revolting, and in the early hours of the morning they regularly heard alarms in the unmanned building—alarms to which nobody responded. SOS Whitstable met at that meeting and formed an extremely active campaigning group that went on to raise a petition on water privatisation, which we delivered to No. 10 in December 2022. It has now received more than 250,000 signatures, all to make the water companies public again. I held more public meetings over the next two summers, which were essentially for all those who were being so let down. Southern Water showed us a slideshow of excuses and investments that it had been making. But fast-forward through campaigns and debates in this place and endless private meetings, and all my constituents agree: we need public ownership now.