Chris Hinchliff

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Stuart. I begin by recognising that the Minister takes these issues very seriously, and congratulating the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) on securing this important debate. I agree with him that one would think it would take true organising genius to arrange for water scarcity in a country as wet as ours. Yet water scarcity is not a future risk; it is a constant and present reality. Take chalk streams, which have already been referred to: they are the crown jewels in our natural heritage, but less than a fifth are in good ecological status, and that situation is largely driven by over-abstraction. The River Ivel in my constituency is one of the most over-abstracted chalk streams in the country. Where once there were boats, watermills and watercress meadows, there is now often little more than a dribble. The nearby Cat Ditch chalk stream mostly no longer flows at all. If we are to deliver on our manifesto commitments to reverse England’s nature crisis, we must ensure that we have a chalk streams-first approach to water resource management, adopted in full. The second point I will make is that reservoirs alone will not save us. The planned nine new reservoirs up to 2050 will provide around 670 million litres of water a day but, as has already been referred to, our projected deficit is more than 5 billion litres a day. The calculations for existing water resource management plans do not take into account the quenchless thirst of data centres, demanded not by our constituents, but by tech corporations. The brings me to my third point: we must move towards an economic model and a planning system that respect environmental boundaries and stop acting as though they do not exist. Speculative applications from profiteering developers must be reined in and firmer restrictions put in place where new development would require abstraction at rates not compatible with the good ecological health of our rivers. We must also make more efficient use of grey water. Above all, we need a clear national assessment of the maximum population growth we can absorb in our country, for a future in which both our taps and our rivers still run.