My Lords, the Minister made the point about the magnitude and gravity of the Bill and, in my view, that applies nowhere more specifically than to Part 5, dealing with water. It has become critical that the Environment Agency be given the funds and the freedom to protect our rivers—it needs to be shorn of government directions to put the economy before the environment, and it needs the funding to enforce existing legislation without fear or favour.
In its petition to Parliament to
“Give the Environment Agency the funds and freedom to protect English rivers”,
Salmon & Trout Conservation says:
“The Government must reverse years of cuts to Agency budgets, increase charges for polluters, and give the Agency freedom from overly business-friendly Government codes and guidance, so it can pursue and achieve its principal statutory objective to protect and enhance English rivers.”
I urge all noble Lords to sign that petition.
The big beasts in this tangled forest of contradiction, indecision and confusion are the privatised water companies long ago sold off to corporate investors who loaded their assets with huge debt, used to distribute as dividends to the shareholders, with not much more than a backward glance at the reinvestment in infrastructure of the industry.
Time moves on, and last week’s financial pages were full of rumours of another series of takeovers by the Pennon Group, owners of South West Water among other utilities. The comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, are valid here in regard to the rivers of southern England and, in particular, the chalk streams in Hampshire. Just days before this debate, a glossy leaflet dropped through my letterbox, supported by Southern Water, urging residents on the edge waters of the Test and the Itchen to save water to prevent overabstraction and save our chalk stream wildlife—undoubtedly a very worthy ambition, but with no mention of increasing efforts to reduce leakage in the water supply system or of replacing worn-out pipes and preventing water-main bursts. Yet as the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, pointed out, national statistics show that water companies apparently lose something like 3,000 million litres of water through leakages every day, and suffer 47,000 pipe bursts every year.
Southern Water alone apparently suffers a break in each and every mile of its pipe network each and every year.
The outcome of inadequate legislation, poor enforcement and minimal investment has been a relentless decline in the health of our chalk streams and rivers and their wildlife for decades. I have lived beside the headwaters of the River Itchen for over half a century and I can bear witness to this remorseless decline. Scientific evidence from the river bed in the form of kick samples of Gammarus, the shrimp-like invertebrate at the bottom of the food chain, shows their concentration to be between 200 and as low as 70 per sample by the Itchen Valley villages. A good but not unremarkable total would have been more than 4,000 per sample.
About 700 years ago, Bishop de Lucy had a weir constructed to carry the road to Basingstoke out of Alresford over the Alre and the Itchen headwaters. Behind the weir, the Alresford Pond grew to teem with fish and eels to the benefit of town and church. Today, the pond is an SSSI, but over the last 30 years the Environment Agency has allowed it to become polluted by uncontrolled industrial agricultural processing, oversilted and virtually dead.
The following actions should be taken. None of them is a new proposal and most have been urged on the Environment Agency, Ministers, Ofwat and others for decades. They are not comprehensive; they are just those needed urgently. To ensure the sustainable abstraction stressed by the Minister it should become unlawful to abstract water from the aquifer or the watercourse and return it in a poorer state than when it was abstracted—a clear and simply understood and publicly supported measure. Any business abstracting or discharging through septic tanks or otherwise should have to meet the cost of monitoring the water quality above their abstraction point and below the discharge point, strictly at no cost to the public purse.
The Environment Agency should be enabled to direct water companies to install mains drainage generally and particularly in headwater villages, where septic tank systems have been the norm. The ridiculous impasse between the Environment Agency and water companies caused by avoidance of responsibility to regulate new mains drainage must be removed. The current situation leads to villages such as Cheriton, of 1,000 inhabitants and a key headwater to the Itchen, relying solely on septic tanks yet being no more than a stone’s throw away from the Alresford sewage works, in operation since 1944. This situation applies to literally thousands of rural homes where there is as yet no mains drainage.
Manufacturers of domestic chemical cleaners, whether of chlorine or similar base, should be obliged to add conspicuous warning labels to their products against their use in houses with septic tanks because of the danger to the aquifer. All septic tank owners should be advised not to use and discharge harmful chemicals that would damage the aquifer. My final point, for the moment at least, is that water companies should be required to install phosphate strippers at sewage works handling discharges from far fewer than the current yardstick of 10,000 inhabitants. Many already do and, as a start, the figure for compulsory and immediate stripping could be reduced to 5,000 inhabitants.
Finally, I place on record my thanks to the many local residents, riparian owners, action groups and other NGOs that have briefed me with their concerns as the Bill comes through the House of Lords.
5.06 pm