Jess Brown-Fuller

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart, as much as it was 15 minutes ago. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham for securing this important debate. The south-east, where my constituency is, has been designated as water stressed since 2021. As reflected in many of the contributions, that sometimes feels quite hard to believe in such a wet country. Much of my constituency is a low-lying coastal plain, and weather volatility is causing severe conditions on both ends of the scale. Droughts and floods are a commonplace occurrence, whereas before they were less likely. I would like briefly to talk about chalk streams. I am very lucky to represent two of England’s 200 chalk streams, and over-abstraction on the River Ems over many years means that the point of constant flow has moved two kilometres downstream since the 1960s. That means that a large proportion of the river is drying up every summer when it never used to. Constituents have told me harrowing accounts of trying to rescue the salmon that migrate down the River Ems, and it feels like a total catastrophe when people are trying to save those fish. The Test and the Itchen, just outside my constituency, are also rare habitats and important chalk streams. They, too, are really impacted by over-abstraction. To address that, Portsmouth Water is building the first new reservoir in more than 30 years, the Havant Thicket reservoir, just on the border of my constituency. That was largely favoured by the local community, because it would create a new space and an exciting environment for people to visit and walk around. Then Southern Water got involved. It saw this brilliant idea that was popular among the population, and it put forward a proposal to invest in Havant Thicket with Portsmouth Water by introducing an effluent recycling scheme, the first of its kind in this country to supplement our drinking water supply. By investing in that technology, Southern Water can use clever accounting tricks to maintain its bottom line by describing the technology as an asset rather than investing in fixing its existing infrastructure, which is much less appealing to its shareholders. The cost of the scheme to introduce effluent recycling into the drinking water supply at the Havant Thicket reservoir is estimated to be £1.2 billion, but the costs are spiralling every year. There is also no lasting legacy to this project. The plant will become redundant in 60 years, but customers will be paying for it in their bills for far longer. It is also hugely energy intensive. At the same time, as many hon. Members have mentioned, Southern Water wastes 100 million litres of water every day from leaky pipes that it has failed to maintain.