Chris Hinchliff

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. The case for public ownership of our water is unanswerable. We can all see the money being swindled out of the British public by the privatised system. We can all see the sewage pollution going on, even during a summer of drought. I beg the Minister, in her response, not to repeat the bogus figures that some use to argue that public ownership of one of our most essential national resources would be too expensive. Those claims have been so comprehensively debunked that using them now is just getting embarrassing. The truth is that the cost of the societal impacts of failing to take back control of our water resources would be far higher than that of taking action now, because— ludicrously for a country as wet as ours—we are on course for a water deficit of more than 6 billion litres of water every single day in the next 30 years. The truth is that there is currently no credible plan to avert that. All the reservoirs that currently we have planned will reduce that deficit only by a meagre 13%. There is no realistic prospect of water companies hitting the efficiency targets they have signed up for, either—and that is before the speculative proliferation of data centres claims its thirsty share of our dwindling resources. In all likelihood, we will face further and severe water shortfalls in the future. Fire services are already warning that water pressure in many areas is dangerously low for fighting the new wildfire season that we also face. Communities in my constituency have already seen the taps running dry. In the future, we will have to choose what we do and do not use water for. We cannot have a situation in which our democracy has to mediate the fundamental question of national security through the interests of private companies that have proven beyond all doubt that their overwhelming priority will always be profit. We cannot afford to leave our water in the hands of private vested interests. It must be brought back into public ownership.