My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I speak at quite a lot of sewage rallies and in sewage debates and I always give him credit for leading the charge against the Government’s laissez-faire attitude to sewage. There is usually a slightly stunned silence that I am congratulating a Duke—but that is life.
We heard some very fine words in the opening statement about the environmental considerations not being affected and so on. I am really sorry, but it is nonsense. If you have growth, you are going to have environmental devastation. It is automatic; it happens everywhere. At the moment, we have torrents of sewage pouring into our rivers, on to our coastlines and into our chalk streams. But, instead of stopping it, this proposal aims to increase it; and instead of giving Ofwat tougher powers to regulate the water industry and turn off the tap of CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends, Ofwat is now being told that economic growth is more important than clean water.
Whenever this Government do anything, I always ask, “Who benefits?” Who benefits here, of course, are Conservative Party donors and the economic growth they are going to experience at our expense and, in this case, developers who provided almost one-third of Conservative Party funds for the previous decade. What the Government mean by “economic growth” is the ability of developers to build cheap, sell high and connect up a lot of new houses to sewerage systems that cannot even cope with existing demand without emptying the excess into our local rivers and streams.
The only way to ensure that new houses are connected to a modern, effective sewerage system is to have public ownership of water companies. The only way to ensure that our water bills are being used to build local sewers rather than offshore bank accounts is to have people in charge who work for the public good and not for private greed.
By asking Ofwat to consider economic growth, the Government are not asking it to make a judgment on whether that growth is desirable, yet a growth in pollution that requires millions to be spent on clearing it up is classed as economic growth. More money spent on medicines that fight off gastric diseases from polluted water is economic growth, as is money repeatedly spent on restocking the fish populations of rivers. Are we really saying to Ofwat that growth at any cost to the health of humans and nature is a desirable thing that it should promote?
Last year, this House defeated the Government’s attempt to allow developers to build new homes that would have added pollution to some of the most sensitive waterways in this country. From the Norfolk
Broads to Devon, the Government hoped to let developers pass on the clean-up costs for pollution to local people paying their water bills. We in your Lordships’ House stopped them. I would have liked us to do the same today, but clearly it is not going to happen.
I know that I will be on the Opposition Benches pestering the next Government to change these rules back. It will not take legislation; it is something a Minister can do and I will expect them to do it. Back in 2021, when the Government stripped out the last of our amendments on stopping sewage in the Environment Bill, without timetables and targets, I said, Cassandra-like:
“This will come to haunt MPs
”.—[Official Report, 9/11/21; col. 1161.]
As the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, mentioned earlier, this piece of legislation is a gift to the three opposition parties. At the rally I was at yesterday, all three opposition parties had a very sympathetic hearing, but, I am afraid, the Conservative MP had a very tough time, even though she was clearly very concerned about the issue. This Bill is a vote loser and the Government should remember that.