It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Elliott. I am proud to represent the River Lea as part of my constituency, but in 2021 there were 27 instances of sewage discharge into the Lea—184 hours in total. That is not new: in 2019 overall the River Lea was classified as bad, failing on both chemical standards and ecological health. It is one of the most polluted rivers in the UK. Research from Thames21—an excellent charity that does work to keep our inland waterways clean—and University College London shows that the amount of faecal E. coli bacteria in the river regularly exceeds international standards. That is not a sentence that I ever thought I would have to read out, because it is shocking that that is the case. Hackney, my local council, has established the London Lea Catchment Partnership with other local councils and Thames21, to try to improve biodiversity, increase the cleanliness of the river and work to discourage swimming, Sadly, that has to be the case when we are still getting that level of discharge.
I have two key asks for the Minister. As other Members have highlighted, the sampling system has been unchanged for 25 years. It covers the May to September period. We need better and different sampling. Secondly, the Canal & River Trust does not get information or data in real time from the Environment Agency, so when it does monitor water quality there is a time lag and delay. If that could be done in real time, the Canal & River Trust and other partners such as Hackney Council could at least warn users not to use the river when it is dangerous. As other hon. Members have said, it is shocking that we have got to this stage, and we need real action now.
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