Josh Dean

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the chair this afternoon, Sir Jeremy. I want to speak this afternoon about the River Stort, one of the globally significant chalk streams that runs right through my constituency. It is a place where families walk, where anglers spend their weekends, and where countless residents connect with nature. It delivers enormous social, recreational and environmental benefits for our community, but at the start of the month, raw sewage was again discharged into the Stort navigation in a spill that lasted more than eight hours, leaving dead fish and visible pollution in its wake. I have been requesting a meeting with Thames Water to discuss protecting the Stort since the start of the year, following hundreds of hours of sewage discharges. It has repeatedly failed to engage with that process, only agreeing to meet with me this week after I said that I would effectively turn up at one of its sewage treatment sites to demand an explanation. That is not good enough. We know that, whatever Thames Water says when I meet it later this week, the truth is that the privatised water industry is failing in its duty of care to our environment, and that privatisation has been a failure. There is simply no other way to put it. We were told that private ownership would drive investment, efficiency and better outcomes, but too often, we have seen the opposite. As others have said, water is not a luxury; it is an essential public service. We therefore need a system that puts the public interest before shareholder returns, investment before extraction, and environmental protection before corporate profit. To my mind, the only credible path forward is to call time on a failed system and move to a model of public ownership of our water industry. We should start by bringing Thames Water into special administration now. The pollution of our rivers and waterways cannot continue. For the sake of the River Stort, for communities across the country and for future generations, we must take this opportunity to choose a different path. I am grateful to the Minister for taking the time to meet me earlier this year regarding Thames Water and the River Stort. As I said, I will be meeting Thames Water later this week, so I would be very grateful if she set out in her response what message she would deliver to Thames Water were she in my position, and whether she would consider meeting me again to discuss these repeated failures.