Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies

Baroness Hayman of Ullock Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for bringing this debate forward today and for her excellent, thorough introduction to this issue. As she said, we have had this discussion a number of times over the past 12 months or so.

Noble Lords have mentioned the data from the Environment Agency showing that only 14% of our rivers in England have a good ecological status, with no rivers in England having a good chemical status. The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee said this in its 2022 report, Water Quality in Rivers:

“Getting a complete overview of the health of our rivers and the pollution affecting them is hampered by outdated, underfunded and inadequate monitoring regimes”.


Monitoring has been mentioned a number of times by noble Lords. The report also suggested that the current range of pollutants being monitored is “too narrow”, focusing on nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and ammonia but not routinely monitoring other substances that contribute to poor water quality, such as metals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and plastics. Will the Government consider monitoring those other substances?

I thank the Rivers Trust for its excellent recent report, to which other noble Lords have referred. The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, hosted a meeting at which we spoke to the trust. It is an incredibly important report; I hope that the Minister will take account of what it says. It draws attention to the fact that, as noble Lords have said, sewage and urban pollution, agricultural pollution, industrial pollution and chemical pollution are all contributing to this problem. According to Defra, agriculture is the main cause of river pollution incidents in England with intensive livestock farming being the major reason for the complete collapse of the River Wye, as we have often heard about in this House. Untreated waste from chicken, pig and dairy units is routinely spread on land, adding to the problem. Such has been the growth in the intensive livestock industry in recent years that soils across England are receiving significantly more nitrogen and phosphate than they can cope with and absorb; that excess is contaminating our rivers and having an impact on our wildlife.

Looking at the River Wye, it is so concerning that the group River Action has brought a judicial review saying that a loophole in the law is allowing poultry waste from 25 million chickens intensively farmed in the catchment to poison the river, and that the Environment Agency and the UK Government have failed to protect it from catastrophic decline. We all await the outcome of that judicial review with great interest. In his speech to the recent NFU conference, Alan Lovell, chair of the Environment Agency, said that pollution from agriculture and rural land is “roughly equal” to that coming from the water industry. Farmers, who need to play a really important role if this is to be resolved, say that they need help with both expertise and financial support. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, in particular, talked about the help that farmers will need if they are to tackle this.

The outgoing president of the NFU, Minette Batters, has said that farmers need better access to funding through the environmental land management scheme, which the noble Duke mentioned, in order that they can create buffer strips along waterways. They also need much faster planning permission for slurry storage and incentives to grow the right crops in the right places. Will the Minister look at ELMS in light of these comments? Our transition out of the EU common agricultural policy into ELMS has been pretty challenging for farmers, with too much uncertainty. This has also added problems.

The complicated current system has made it difficult; it is not easy for farm businesses and land managers, who can feel lost in the system. It has also been harder for them to make long-term strategic plans. We need to look at cross-sector regulation; we cannot just regulate the water companies or the farmers. We need a fair and transparent system in which everybody understands what is happening and what role they have to play in reducing the pollution going into our rivers. We are still waiting to see the promised land use framework, to help balance all the demands on our land, and that includes land use to help with water quality and biodiversity targets. Does the Minister have any update, or is it still going to be published “shortly”?

Chemicals, of course, cause a lot of the problems around pollution in rivers; they can come from cleaning products, medicines and even the food we eat. Using chemicals clearly has a number of benefits, but we know they can cause some really appalling damage when they leak into the environment. We also know that they can persevere in the environment for weeks, months or even years, causing significant harm to wildlife, particularly in fresh water and the sea.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the Rivers Trust report. I pick out of it the work the Rivers Trust has done in collaboration with the Wildlife and Countryside Link chemicals task force. They have recently analysed Environment Agency data on levels of just one of the many toxic for ever chemicals: perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS. They looked at that within English fresh water fish, and their work revealed that the PFOS levels in English fresh water fish are on average 300 times higher than the levels considered safe by the European Union. Is the Minister aware of that? If not, this really needs to be picked up.

We have also heard that much pollution comes from urban environments, such as the amount of plastic that we throw away—you only have to look at your local river to see how much plastic can end up in it. We know that plastics break down into toxic chemicals and harmful microplastics, and then rivers become a major pathway for plastic reaching and polluting our coasts and oceans. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, talked about road run-off, which again is very problematic. You get oil, diesel and petrol spills, plus the particles from tyres and the roads wearing down, getting washed into our rivers and drains. This is a really important area that we need to deal with. We know that urban wetlands, reed beds and other nature-based solutions can help intercept this run-off and reduce the pollution, and it is really important that the Government properly invest in these mitigations. What investment are the Government making? Perhaps the Minister can give us a clue.

We have also heard an awful lot about the problems around regulation and enforcement. The poor quality of our regulation enforcement in recent times has compounded all the pollution that is coming from several different sectors, making things even worse. In her opening speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, talked a lot about England’s sewerage system being not fit for purpose, as did other noble Lords, particularly the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. We have heard again how, over the past few decades, Ofwat has simply failed to ensure that water companies have invested sufficiently to upgrade, or even just maintain, our water infrastructure. Delivering the necessary improvements to save our rivers now, at speed and at scale, has become a truly enormous task.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Sikka on his forensic analysis of the water companies’ finances. The work he did was very important, and I encourage the Minister to have a good look at Hansard, because I expect he may need to write to my noble friend at the end of this debate.

We need more enforcement from the Environment Agency, but we have heard that the Government have cut the protection budget hugely—in half—in the last 10 years. With the failure to monitor and investigate pollution incidents, and the failure to enforce the legislation and rules that are supposed to protect our water environment, it is particularly worrying that this has included instructing EA staff not to attend low-level pollution incidents, requiring water companies to self-monitor and self-report. This is simply not going to get the change that we need. We need a strategic direction for water regulation.

The Government’s Plan for Water was published with great fanfare in April last year. The plan included creating a new water restoration fund that would use money from water company fines and penalties taken from their profits—not from their customers—to support local groups and catchment projects such as re-meandering rivers and restoring habitats, which are really important. Nothing has appeared on this since. Can the Minister provide an update on when we are likely to see this? If the Government are to make great announcements and publish lovely plans, they are no good if what they say is going to happen does not then actually happen.