It will come as no surprise to Members in the Chamber that I rise to support the Labour Front-Bench motion, because I support the Bill tabled by the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon).
The River Tame, which runs through my constituency, has the unfortunate honour of being one of the most polluted waterways in the UK. In detailed, peer-reviewed research, Professor Jamie Woodward and his team from the University of Manchester found that the Tame, which is one of two tributaries forming the River Mersey at Stockport, is heavily contaminated with microplastics, because untreated waste water and sewage are routinely discharged into the river when it is at low flow. Professor Woodward found concentrations of 130,000 microplastic particles per sediment on the riverbed around Denton. This is one of the few accessible green spaces in my constituency, and it is absolutely disgraceful.
In 2022, there were 11,000 hours of sewage discharge into the River Tame and the local environment by United Utilities. That pollution, and also the pollution from industrial processes along the river, is having a disastrous impact on the local environment. In a recent interview with Paul Whitehouse on the BBC, Chris Clarke, an angler who works closely with the Friends of the Tame Valley, told of his devastation as he watched raw sewage—not from a UU plant, but from a misconnection into Johnson brook—being pumped into the waterway on the same day that the Environment Agency was replenishing fish stocks.
Local people across my constituency are doing their very best to solve this problem. Groups such as the Friends of the Tame Valley, which I am incredibly proud to be a part of, often organise community riverbank cleans, but all too often it feels as though they are fighting an uphill battle. There has also been the formation of the River Tame working group. Spearheaded by the Mersey Rivers Trust, this brings together various community and corporate stakeholders, including United Utilities, to resolve the local operational issues and to help shape local catchment actions plans. In the interest of balance, I should say that UU is investing £100 million to immediately commence a further programme of works to reduce spill frequency at eight prioritised storm overflows, there are four river rangers and we are training a generation of river guardians.
In closing, in 2010 the Tory Prime Minister said that we are “all in it together”. I am sure he did not think that, 13 years later, that would mean the sewage in our rivers.
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