Bell Ribeiro-Addy

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies) for introducing the debate. My constituents are fed up of mismanagement, debt, and simultaneous price hikes and shareholder bonuses. They are also fed up of hosepipe bans, while water runs down our streets. Since April 2025, our bills have risen by 31%, and this year by an additional 3.4%. What do we get for that? Sewage dumps, burst pipes and drinking water that I advise all Members—if they do not know this—not to drink without boiling or filtering first. Thames Water is one of the worst polluters in England and, last year, got one star from the Environment Agency—I think that is only because it has not figured out how to colour in half a star or a quarter of it. Unfortunately, Thames Water is not just crap; it is also full of crap—9,189 sewage spills last year alone, and nearly 592 million litres of water lost to leaks every single day. The company then has the cheek to call a hosepipe ban. The Thames cannot be seen from my constituency, but anyone who wants a riverside experience can just walk down Brixton Hill, where water is usually gushing from some leak, causing havoc and gridlocked traffic on the main road or some of the residential roads—a reality TV version of “The Hunger Games”, with residents scrambling for bottles of water that have been left there during an outage. Keeping the company under private ownership just delays the inevitable Government bailout—essentially, us paying twice. I believe that the great privatisation experiment has failed in nearly every public service industry in which it has been tried. Some may call me ideological for this, but I point them to Thames Water as a case in point. We do not need a crystal ball, or even a referendum, to tell us that there would be overwhelming support for public ownership, so I ask the Minister: why has it not happened yet? Why has Thames Water not been put in special measures? Why will it not simply be brought under public ownership?