Charlie Maynard

I completely agree—well said. What is so depressing is that the Labour Government have embraced the Conservative’s mistakes over Thames Water, and our water sector more broadly, and then doubled down on them. The Government have been and continue to be hoodwinked by a bunch of hedge-funds whispering about financial Armageddon into ears of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs and Ofwat. They need to follow through on their regulatory obligations, because we need regulators that have teeth and backbone and will actually deliver. Instead, we have hedge-funds making vast fees with outrageous interest expenses, at the cost of us as consumers. It is not fair. It is a great shame, and it is also unnecessary, because the company’s financial and environmental positions are completely unsustainable. With every day that passes, this becomes more Labour’s problem. We now need to cut the rope and put the company into special administration, on account of its many breaches of its licence obligations, so that its debt can be written down to around three times cash flow and it can come out of the special administration regime mutually owned by 16 million customers, and run on behalf of them and the environment, and with Government-guaranteed funding mechanisms in place to fund the investment required over the next three, five and 15 years. Will the Government please answer my letter to the Minister responsible for sewage and flooding, sent at the start of October? I asked whether the Minister believes that Thames Water’s ad hoc group of class A creditors now exerts material influence over it, thereby meeting the “ultimate controller” criteria. I would really like an answer on that. Last February, a High Court judge found that they have material influence over the company, and it would be great to have a straight answer from the Secretary of State or the Minister on that point. I would not like the Government to give Thames Water, or any other water company, a free pass on paying environmental fines in full. When there are breaches, we need regulators that enforce the fines that are in place. Similarly, given the extreme precarity of the company’s finances, as my hon. Friends have mentioned, the Government should not entrust it with delivering a huge and costly infrastructure project in Oxfordshire in the form of the south-east strategic reservoir option, about which my hon. Friends the Members for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) and for Oxford West and Abingdon spoke in detail. Given all our constituents’ low level of faith in Thames Water, the future of which is precarious, to put it extremely mildly, it is no wonder that this is causing such alarm to residents in my constituency and those of my hon. Friends. Please do not be bamboozled by the hedge funds; instead, show some backbone—and do not own the Tories’ mistakes. That is the key thing, because this Government still have a chance to leave it with them. Please do so and put the company into a special administration regime.