My Lords, this is one of the groups of amendments which really ought to be just swallowed wholesale by the Government. It has some excellent amendments in it.
I have signed Amendment 161, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, because it is a really good amendment with some very practical solutions for cleaning up our rivers. The way that we as an industrial society treat our rivers is one of the grossest examples of the way we trash our planet. We see rivers as little more than a dumping ground we can use to dispose of our rubbish when we cannot be bothered to sort out our waste disposal systems. It is time to stop that.
In particular, Amendment 161 emphasises the importance of nature-based solutions and other ways of separating our sewage from the clean water that falls on the surface as rain. It is absolutely absurd that we mix these two things together, instantly turning clean rainwater into raw sewage that, as far as we are concerned, is good for nothing. There are a great many nature-based solutions for treating sewage water. In the US, more than half of sewage is treated to become organic fertiliser, although some recent studies show that this can be contaminated by the inclusion of industrial waste. As long as we remove or cut out this waste, there is no reason why the UK cannot develop a well-regulated, safe industry to turn our domestic wastewater into useful resources like that. Alternatively, there are fascinating natural wastewater systems such as constructed wetlands, which use a combination of natural processes to create safe water, with the excellent secondary benefit of creating central wetland habitats.
I know that the Minister is keen on nature-based solutions, so I hope that he can expand on the Government’s plans for using nature to clean up our water and reach zero river sewage. Quite honestly, if I had to pick one amendment as the most crucial, it
would have to be Amendment 166 tabled by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, which sets the essential target of zero discharges of untreated sewage into rivers. This is the level of ambition that we should be working towards as a matter of urgency.