Contribution
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point that I totally agree with.
This is not private enterprise riding to the rescue; it is customers being made to pay yet again for the consequences of corporate failure, and we cannot take our business elsewhere. If I do not like my supermarket, bank or mobile phone provider, I can take my custom elsewhere, but I cannot change from one water company to another unless I physically move house. We are captive customers of a monopoly, which gives water companies an extraordinary responsibility, but they are not living up to it. Too often, we see risks pushed onto customers while the rewards go to investors.
Going back to Fairford, we can see exactly how that plays out in the real world. Fairford sewage treatment works was among the approximately 120 deferred Thames Water investment schemes. Thames Water’s former chair told the EFRA Committee that more than £1 billion was removed from its capital programme to preserve liquidity. In other words, the investment that was needed to protect communities, rivers and nature was postponed because the company needed to shore up its financial position. Now my constituents are living with the consequences.
The analysis of Professor Peter Hammond at WASP records that, at Fairford alone, more than 8,100 hours of sewage spills have flowed into the River Coln since the beginning of 2024. Under the Environment Agency’s “heavy rainfall” methodology, only 347 of those hours—just 4.3%—were assessed as compliant. That means that more than 95% of that outflow was not compliant. This is not an occasional emergency measure; it is sustained pollution on an industrial scale.
It is not only an assault on people: rivers are living ecosystems that sustain fish, birds, insects and plants. Pollution strips oxygen from the water and destroys habitats, but nature has no seat in the boardroom and no voice with the regulator. Nature depends on us to speak for it today, and I am doing what I can, as many colleagues have, to speak up on behalf of our waterways. I feel like I have spoken time and time again in this House about sewage, failing infrastructure and Thames Water, yet the sewage keeps flowing, the debts keep mounting and customers keep being asked to pay more. Frankly, they have had enough, and so have I.
I share the petitioners’ diagnosis that the present model has failed, but the Lib Dems differ from others on what we believe should happen next. We do not believe, as a number of colleagues have mentioned, that we need to spend a long time waiting for a national referendum to tell us something we already know. The Liberal Democrat answer is mutually owned public benefit water companies that are professionally managed but owned by and accountable to the customers who depend on them, with profits reinvested into the water system rather than extracted for shareholders. For Thames Water in particular, that journey should begin with special administration now. Take on the creditors, restructure the company and bring it out the other side under a fundamentally different ownership model.
Ownership change alone is not enough. The new Clean Water Authority must have the teeth that Ofwat so conspicuously lacked. It must inspect assets, publish open data and require companies to measure what they actually put into our rivers—not just the duration, but the volume and toxicity. I want to see citizen scientists and environmental experts formally represented in water company governance so that somebody is at the table to speak for the river itself.
I would like to ask the Minister for three further commitments: ban bonuses until spills end and leaks are fixed; introduce a three-year cooling-off period before the new regulator can employ people from the industry it regulates; and create a single social tariff so that nobody is priced out of the precious water that they cannot do without. The River Coln flows into the Thames, and the Thames flows past this Parliament. The evidence of the failure of privatisation is literally on our doorstep. The petitioners are right to demand fundamental change: the question at the heart of the debate is not simply whether ownership should be public or private, but who is the water system here to serve?
For too long, customers have paid the bills, carried the risk and lived with the pollution while money flowed elsewhere. Our water system should serve customers, communities and the environment, not shareholders, creditors and bottom lines. I do not want to have to come back to this Chamber to again state the obvious: we have to get upstream of the sewage crisis and change the ownership of the water companies, and change it now.