Rivers, Lakes and Seas: Water Quality

I beg to move,

That this House has considered water quality in rivers, lakes and seas.

Bore da—good morning. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I grew up in the countryside on a farm, and one of my favourite memories was having a friend round, going for a walk and sploshing through the streams at the bottom of the garden. We took it for granted that we could mess about in the Dorset chalk streams, and apart from annoying my mum when I came back inside sopping wet, making a terrible mess, there was never any fear that I would get sick or that I would be wading through sewage. What a change there has been, with parents now too scared to let their children run helter-skelter into the local stream, river or lake, for fear that they will get an ear infection, an eye infection or a stomach infection, or encounter a wet wipe or something much worse.

I moved to Monmouthshire 25 years ago, and it was fantastic to raise my children there, with its fantastic rivers including the Wye, the Usk, the Monnow and lots of smaller rivers criss-crossing the constituency. I have spent so many happy hours, as I am sure other Members have in their local rivers, swimming in the Usk, walking by the Wye and kayaking down it. I have seen kingfishers and heron there and introduced my kids to the amazing wildlife we have, and I have spent some of our happiest days there as a family.

Sadly, the health of our two major rivers, the Wye and the Usk, is in serious decline, and they are really good examples of what is happening elsewhere in the UK. In February 2022, Natural Resources Wales research showed that the Usk had the highest incidence of phosphate pollution of the nine Welsh special areas of conservation, or SACs, designated for rivers. In Glascoed near Usk, there was an average 85% failure rate against phosphate targets between January 2023 and June 2024.

The Wye is being impacted by high levels of phosphates, which are causing a decline in water quality and algal blooms that then starve the fish, plants and invertebrates of oxygen. That leads to biodiversity loss and the collapse of the whole web of life in the river. These algal blooms are growing larger and becoming more frequent. In 2020, a thick algal bloom extended for more than 140 miles of the river. Recovery will take decades.

Natural England’s condition assessment for the Wye SAC in 2023 was “unfavourable-declining”, which was based on declines in Atlantic salmon, water quality and white-clawed crayfish in the Lugg, and aquatic plants, Atlantic salmon and white-clawed crayfish in the Wye.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate on an immensely important topic, and I am grateful to you, Mr Dowd, for allowing a quick intervention from a shadow Front Bencher on a matter of great constituency interest. She will be aware that I and others have tried to fight this battle for at least four years. Will she support my request that the Government look again at the plan for the River Wye and, even if they do not adopt the detail of it, at least preserve the £35 million of funding pledged by the previous Government, or something close to it, to support the restoration of the river?

I salute some of the work that the right hon. Gentleman has tried to do locally on the Wye in Herefordshire, even though he is an Opposition Member, but with all due respect, the River Wye action plan was roundly discounted and felt to be not worth the paper it was written on by the non-governmental organisations in the area at the time. The Government failed to consult Wales, and the plan seemed to be rushed out before the general election. When the Minister looked at it, she found that that money was not allocated and available to push out and support the Wye. I am sure she will say later that we have had a meeting with the Wye Catchment Partnership, and that we are working in partnership with the Welsh Government to push forward a plan that has been developed by the Wye Catchment Partnership. I will give some more detail about that in a moment.

Unfortunately, after 14 years of Conservative failure, we have record levels of illegal sewage dumping in our rivers, lakes and seas. I will talk much more about rivers today, because that is what I have in my constituency, but our lakes, seas and coastal towns are also deeply affected.

Chronic ongoing diffuse pollution from agriculture also affects our water quality. In England, only 16% of all assessed surface waters achieved good ecological status, and less than 1% achieved high status. The decline in our water health is staggering, and we desperately need to take action to repair it. As I know hon. Members will agree, there are amazing NGOs, campaigning groups and citizen scientists in every one of our constituencies who have brought this matter to our attention and to the fore nationally. I pay tribute to all of them, especially those in Monmouthshire.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. She is talking about those who are contributing to the debate and trying to do their best, but does she agree that it should not be left to people such as one-time musical celebrity Feargal Sharkey, from my city of Londonderry, and many others to campaign on these issues? We need Government action rather than pressure groups and people trying to campaign for change.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I thank him for his intervention. That is exactly why the Government are taking action. I will come on to what the Labour Government are doing shortly. I was fortunate to meet Feargal Sharkey on the campaign trail. He endorsed my campaign, which means that I will be held to account. That is one of the reasons why this issue is so important to me and why I am pleased to have secured this debate.

I believe that the campaigning groups in Monmouthshire are some of the best in the UK. We have Save the River Usk, led by the inspiring Angela Jones, Friends of the River Wye, Save the Wye, the South East Wales Rivers Trust, the Wye & Usk Foundation and many more, and they continue to do excellent work to hold us to account.

We also have the Wye Catchment Partnership, which is a cross-border partnership of more than 70 members, including Natural Resources Wales and the Environment Agency and representatives of all the local authorities, the National Farmers Union and the environmental charities I have mentioned. It is a great partnership. As I have mentioned, the Minister recently had a meeting with the Wye Catchment Partnership to hear about the need for an action plan. I sincerely thank her for her engagement to get the Wye catchment plan phase 2 off the ground. That could be a brilliant pilot project, supported by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and consistent with the unfulfilled policy commitments of the previous Government’s plan for water. It shows how working with stakeholders across all counties and countries, and the regulators, could be a model for changing the face of our rivers. I hope the Government will support it.

Rivers know no boundaries. The Wye crosses four counties and two countries, so we need an integrated and coherent Wye catchment management plan that uses the best available evidence and a well-targeted programme of remedial measures to get our river cleaned up.

I am keen to make sure that the water commission can tackle some of the most egregious failures of the water industry. For example, yesterday Southern Water dumped sewage into the sea alongside Ramsgate. This issue is fundamental to the environment and the economy in a seaside community such as Thanet, and it needs to be part of our overall drive for growth. The new independent water commission needs to explore different governance models and introduce local accountability, or the water companies will continue to fail as they have done up until now.

I agree entirely. The Government’s mission is growth. We need to see the cleaning-up of our waterways as an integral part of our growth mission.

We know that tackling diffuse pollution from agriculture will be a hard nut to crack, with farmers already under pressure, but we have examples of good practice in the Wye. For example, Avara is already shipping out 75% of the chicken waste from its Herefordshire chicken farms along the Wye. That is to be welcomed, but it does not solve the long-term problems of too much phosphate in our rivers.

I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate. I represent Glastonbury and Somerton, and a large part of the Somerset levels and moors is in my constituency. Somerset is always at the forefront of flooding, and many of my farmers are always battling flooding. Grants such as the slurry infrastructure grant helped my livestock farmers ensure that nutrients such as phosphates do not enter the watercourses. That improves the viability of our farms, the health of our soil and the cleanliness of our rivers. Does the hon. Member agree that it was wrong for DEFRA to pause access to those grants?

Order. Lots of Members wish to speak today, so we could end up with a two-minute limit on speeches. I ask Members to keep their interventions very short, otherwise the limit will go down to one and a half minutes and then down to one minute.

Thank you, Mr Dowd. To continue with diffuse pollution, Lancaster University estimates that around 83% of phosphates in the Wye come from diffuse agricultural sources, and only 15% or so from Dŵr Cymru—Welsh Water—assets. Indeed, Dŵr Cymru’s £80 million investment in AMP 7—an AMP is an asset management period, or the investment round that is done in five-year cycles—and the planned £150 million investment in AMP 8 will eliminate 100% of its fair share of phosphates in the Wye catchment by 2032. By 2030, over 90% of the phosphate load will be from diffuse agricultural sources. It is not sewage that is our main problem here.

I know this will be a hard conversation with farmers, but we need to start having it. We need to incentivise the right fertiliser applications and the right stocking rates in our river catchments on both sides of the border in order to ensure we remove the annual accrual and legacy surplus of excess phosphates and restore our rivers back to full health. Business as usual will not work.

Also, we need better enforcement of existing regulations by both the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales. The RePhoKUs project—the role of phosphorus in the resilience and sustainability of the UK food system—at Lancaster University, which re-focuses phosphorus use in the UK food system, estimates that phosphorus leakage from land to water also causes widespread and costly pollution worth £39.5 billion to the UK economy—a huge external cost that we must try to avoid.

In summary, we have been left a very difficult legacy due to inaction by the Tories. It will take much work by the Government to clear up the mess and the water quality in our rivers, lakes and seas to fix this broken system. I am confident that, by working cross-border and in partnership with all those involved, as the current Government are doing, we can clean up our water once and for all, as the Wye catchment partnership aims to do.

Order. I remind hon. Members that they should bob if they wish to be called in the debate—although you can sit down for the minute. As I said earlier, because of the number of Members who have indicated that they wish to speak, I am imposing a two-and-a-half minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches, with the authority of the Chairman of Ways and Means, to take effect right away. Bear that in mind with interventions, as I am sure you all appreciate.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd.

I want to bring attention to Lough Neagh in the middle of Northern Ireland, which is the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, spanning approximately 149 square miles. It serves as a vital resource, supplying 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water, but in the last two summers of ’23 and ’24 Lough Neagh has experienced severe cyanobacteria blooms, which have been visible from space. Those blooms pose a risk to wildlife and human health, due to the toxins they produce.

The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland has instigated 20 key measures, but we must wait for the summer to see whether they will be enough. They include enhancing monitoring and research, and other agricultural interventions. As the hon. Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) said in respect of past processes, to tackle the challenges that agriculture faces with water quality, we need to work in partnership with farmers, and look to go back to allowing farmers to farm by the seasonal calendar, rather than a paper one that has seen farming practices put out of kilter with the seasons we now see.

The Northern Ireland water-quality framework is different from other parts of the UK. Northern Ireland is guided by national and European directives, including the water framework directive, which aims for all water bodies to achieve good ecological status, whatever the standards or the regulations. A 2024 report by the Northern Ireland Audit Office noted that the existing regulatory and policy frameworks have failed to adequately protect water quality in Lough Neagh.

Northern Ireland Water, the sole provider of water and sewerage services in the region, operates under the governance of the Department for Infrastructure and our Utility Regulator. That is why I asked, in a debate in the Chamber, that Northern Ireland Water be brought under the Government’s independent commission, which is being led by Sir Jon Cunliffe. I have been informed by the Government that that is currently restricted to England and Wales, but I think there would be a benefit if Northern Ireland was included.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) for bringing forward this important debate.

In December, the Environment Agency rehomed thousands of fish into the River Cut at Jock’s Lane in Bracknell. That stocking will provide an immediate boost to fish numbers, which will be multiplied many times when the arrivals settle into their new homes and begin to spawn. In recent years, Jock’s Lane has been better known as a sewage spot than an angler’s paradise, so this intervention is welcome. The question now is how best to protect these latest Bracknell residents from any further sewage leakage.

In 2023, Thames Water dumped more than 1,000 hours of raw and partially treated sewage into Bracknell and Sandhurst rivers. In Bracknell that was into the River Cut and in Sandhurst it was into the River Blackwater. It is not only deeply damaging to nature; it is frankly disgusting. A decade of under-investment by water companies and a lack of oversight from successive Tory Governments have led us to this.

In 2023, Chichester suffered 990 sewage spills in our rivers and harbour, lasting more than 17,000 hours. Does the hon. Member agree that, after a decade of Tory inaction, the Water (Special Measures) Bill is welcome, but it could go further on regulation, especially by giving Ofwat teeth?

I will come to just that point shortly.

The rain we saw earlier this month is another reminder of the problems we are facing. It led to another bout of sewage dumping in my constituency, including from the recently upgraded Ascot sewage works, which I visited back in December. Since 2020, executives of the water companies overseeing these incidents have been paid £41 million in bonuses and benefits, and it is reported that over the last two years water companies have paid out more than £2.5 billion in dividends. Meanwhile, the current maximum fixed penalty notice—the monetary penalty—that regulators can impose on water companies for the majority of water sector offences is £300. It is little surprise, then, that a recent survey by Ofwat showed that only a quarter of customers see companies as acting in the interests of the people and the environment.

During the general election, I campaigned on the promise that Labour would get tough on water companies and cut down on the horrific pollution they are causing. I promised that a Labour Government would put failing water companies under special measures, blocking bonuses for executives who pollute our waterways, bringing criminal charges against persistent lawbreakers, enabling automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing, and ensuring the monitoring of every sewage outlet. For that reason, I am delighted the Government have brought forward their Water (Special Measures) Bill, and I am proud to have supported it on Second Reading.

I used to be a teacher, so I know what marking your own homework looks like. The requirement for water companies to publish information on discharges from emergency overflows in near-real time will create unprecedented levels of transparency, giving regulators and the public regular insight into the around-the-clock operations of water companies. Meanwhile, making it a statutory requirement for water companies in England to publish annual pollution incident reduction plans will force water companies to set out clear, transparent actions. I would welcome clarity from the Minister on whether that monitoring will be truly independent. How much of a role will Ofwat or other relevant bodies have in producing, monitoring and assurance-testing the production of the data?