Tim Farron

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. All this afternoon’s interventions have been good and on the money. Talking about money, this is money leaking out of the industry and not being invested in it. Bonuses and dividends should reward success; clearly, Yorkshire Water and others have failed in their basic task, which is to provide clean water for their communities. To focus on the scale of the problem, since privatisation the water companies have amassed £70 billion of debt. Adjusted for inflation, they have paid out £83 billion in dividends. That means that on average 30p out of every pound that people pay on their water bills is to service the debt of the water companies, which was racked up to pay dividends. That is a moral outrage. The main drivers of this impending crisis are clear: climate change; population growth; increased housing demand; business expansion; the demands, which have been mentioned, for huge additional energy and water usage given the growth in AI; pressures on the natural environment; and the growing need to prepare for drought. Those drivers are compounded by historical underinvestment in infrastructure and insufficient demand management. Successive Governments have comprehensively failed to take climate adaptation measures seriously, guaranteeing misery for communities affected by flooding, wildfires and heat stress. If we are to build new infrastructure, including new homes and data centres—and we must—we must also ensure that water infrastructure keeps pace. That means sustainable drainage, new supply capacity and integration of water resilience into planning from the start. For instance, we should ensure that data centres are built predominantly at coastal locations and that desalination plants are an integral part of their design and key to their gaining of planning consent. Otherwise, we simply will not have the capacity to both provide clean water for our people and be the AI superpower that we desire to be. The Liberal Democrats have long backed an infrastructure-first approach to development. We cannot allow water infrastructure to remain an afterthought. It is not right that water companies that have failed to invest in adequate sewerage, drainage and water supply infrastructure are able to get away with telling the local planning authority that there is no need for further investment and, at the same time, gain the financial benefit of the extra water bills from new households, while not laying out the extra investment needed to provide for them.