State of Climate and Nature

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I was discussing that very issue with Natural England this morning. Land covering about 32% of England is already likely to, or has the potential to, contribute to the 30 by 30 target, including through our landscape recovery projects, and local nature reserves and national nature reserves. We are creating 3,000 hectares a year of national nature reserves, which makes a very significant contribution to that. We have also set out the route to 30 by 30, talking about bronze, silver and gold land. I understand why the ENGOs want everything to be gold, but we must live in the real world and show what the pipeline towards gold looks like.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

Our best hope in the fight to restore our environment is this country’s nature-loving public, but many across the House will be aware of the recent example of the Environment Agency threatening to take people to court for trying to clean up their dying river. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that the Environment Agency is empowering the public rather than threatening to prosecute them for protecting nature?

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend is right: we have an army of citizen scientists and naturalists, and we are certainly looking forward to celebrating some of them tomorrow at RHS Garden Wisley for Bees’ Needs Week. We also have the pollinator count next week. However, anyone who wants to clean up their river needs a permit from the Environment Agency beforehand. as we have habitats and flood defences there. My hon. Friend is right that we should empower citizens to take action but they need to do so without there being unintended consequences.

Farming Road Map and Profitability Review

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for marking my homework, and I look forward to having it marked in even more detail when I appear before his Committee. There is a separate document in which we have published our response thematically to the 57 recommendations of Baroness Batters’ profitability review. We are already working closely with the sector to take forward those recommendations. In December, we accepted a number of her recommendations: first, the Farming and Food Partnership Board; secondly, the sector growth plans; and thirdly, the trade missions. I suspect that I will be able to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s questions in more detail when I come before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

For many years we have expected farmers to steward our environment and at the same time deliver food at rock-bottom prices to make up for the failure of politics to secure an affordable cost of living across the rest of society. That has made agricultural profitability increasingly difficult. Now, with the crisis posed by climate change to our national food security, we must pull every available lever to reverse that trend. At the general election, the Labour manifesto committed to a target of half of all food purchased across the public sector being locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards. Will the Secretary of State provide an update on progress towards that target?

[Emma Reynolds]

Farmers face lots of different challenges, one of which is volatile global commodity prices, along with some of things my hon. Friend mentioned. On public procurement, we are working to establish an accurate baseline of what percentage of the public sector gives contracts to our farmers. We are also looking at what more we can do to enable farming co-operatives to access those public contracts.

Thames Water

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

When I served as the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, I worked on our plan to double the number of mutuals across the economy. More broadly, not just with regard to Thames Water, I would be happy to see more mutual ownership of water companies, but the question is how we get there.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has made the right decision in seeking to protect billpayers and opposing giving Thames Water a free pass to continue polluting our rivers. The thousands of hours of sewage spills into chalk streams and their tributaries across North East Hertfordshire that Thames Water has continued to oversee are unforgiveable, if not technically illegal. Thames Water is failing in practically every possible way. The level of incompetence is staggering, given that it has 16 million captive customers. My constituents are not interested in Thames Water being given any more chances—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. What is the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) doing, on his feet while another Member is speaking? Come on, Chris, you should know better than anybody!

[Chris Hinchliff]

Will the Secretary of State put an end to this unholy mess and rid us of this frankly parasitic company once and for all?

[Emma Reynolds]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning chalk streams. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean), I have chalk streams in my constituency, and they are close to my heart. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) is right to say that Thames Water is the biggest water company in the country, with 16 million customers. The Government stand ready for all eventualities, including a special administration regime. The customers are at front and centre of my consideration of this issue.

Water Companies

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

We come to the Chamber almost weekly to highlight the failures of the water sector in our constituencies, but I want to highlight a wider point today. For years, economic policy in this country has been based on trying to achieve growth by unlocking private capital, often from abroad. In this essential sector, we are now seeing the end result: water bankruptcy, environmental devastation, non-existent infrastructure and the public left picking up the tab. What conversations is the Minister having with colleagues across Government, especially in the Treasury, about learning from this monumental failure?

[Emma Hardy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his passionate work on this issue. I know how much he cares about the damage that over-abstraction is doing to our environment and to nature. On the water delivery taskforce, we have Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Ministers and Treasury representatives all looking at how we can make the fastest and most effective change to our water system. They look particularly at water infrastructure because, as has been highlighted already, one of the problems is that we have been unable to build the infrastructure we need, which is resulting in damage to the environment now.

South East Water: Disruption of Supply

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

I thank the hon. Lady for her work on the EFRA Committee. She is entirely right: it is unacceptable. I feel that I am a fair-minded person. I know that water companies cannot control the weather, and I know that they cannot build a reservoir overnight. However, they certainly can contact their Members of Parliament, contact their councils, get in touch with their local resilience forums and make sure that they communicate with their customers, as an absolute bare minimum, and that is exactly the conversation that I will be having with each and every one of them.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

Alongside the failures in the south-east, during the recent heatwave there was a widespread disruption of water supply across swathes of my constituency, in Buntingford, Cottered, Ardeley and Throcking. In a country as wet as ours it should take a true organising genius to create disruptions in water supply, but we are on track for a water deficit of 6 billion litres in our country in the coming decades, and on top of that, AI data centres estimate that water consumption will reach up to half a trillion cubic metres every year. Does the Minister—whom I deeply respect—accept that if we are to prevent water supply disruptions from recurring year in year out, we cannot continue to have infinite increases in demand on our already vastly overstretched water resources?

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend is right. It is astonishing that although, owing to climate change, we will experience wetter and wetter winters and drier and drier summers, we have no capacity to store water in the winter and use it in the summer. That seems to me to be absolute nonsense.

As for the issue of data centres, there is one possibility that I am keen to look into, and I touched on it in an earlier answer. Under the current legislation, water that is supplied by a water company must be of drinking-water standard. It strikes me as logical and sensible to say, “If water is being used for cooling purposes rather than for drinking purposes in people’s homes, could it not be of a different standard? Why does it need to be of drinking-water quality?” Where, for instance, we want to use water for data centres, for growth, why do we not—in a closed-loop system—use waste water? We have some legislation that has been drafted for the right purposes and sounds great—of course, a water company must produce water of drinking-water standard—but does it need to be of drinking-water standard if it is being used to cool machinery?

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

There are widespread concerns that we are way off our national biodiversity targets. Does the Minister agree that there must be no further backward steps on environmental protections, and that we must set clear red lines for nature?

[Mary Creagh]

I agree that the environmental improvement plan that we inherited was not fit for purpose. We will oversee the largest ever investment in nature. We have banned bee-killing pesticides, licensed the first wild beaver release in England for 400 years, and announced the first new national forest for 30 years.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered environmental protections and biodiversity trends.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Roger. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this will be one of my longer speeches, so I had better not take too many interventions. Let me also say at the outset that this speech is intended first and foremost to support and encourage the Minister in the task ahead of her. She has one of the most important jobs for the whole Government and for the future of the country.

On that upbeat note, I turn to the litany of despair that constitutes a brief review of biodiversity trends in this country. Not a single one of England’s rivers is in good overall health. The same is true of our sea floor. Just 7% of our woodland is in good condition. Half of England’s hedgerows, which now should be bursting into bud and sprays of blossom, have been ripped up and grubbed out. Eighty-five per cent of our heathland is gone, as are 95% of our chalk downland meadows—the European equivalent of tropical rainforests. Our traditional orchards have declined by 81%, and 85% of England’s salt marshes have also been lost.

It is little wonder that one in six species in these islands is at risk of extinction. The scale of the wealth that we have squandered in pursuit of vapid notions of progress is staggering. It is more than just depressing; it is an existential threat to our way of life. The Government’s recent national security report on biodiversity loss confirmed that the collapse of nature is putting at risk the ecosystem services on which our society depends.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He is making it clear that biodiversity and our natural environment are in complete crisis. Given that, would he agree that the slogan “Back the builders, not the blockers” is one of the worst slogans that the Labour party has ever come up with? People do care about local democracy, biodiversity and nature, so that slogan should be put in the bin, where it belongs—the recycling bin, of course.

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. In the time available for this debate, that almost constitutes a speech. I had intended to say this after the hon. Gentleman moved the motion, but I had better say it now: please understand that any person who intervenes in this debate will be expected to stay until the end. It is not a case of speak and go.

[Chris Hinchliff]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. As I was saying, the ecosystem services—including water, food, clean air and critical resources—are all at risk. Even our soils, the very substance of growth, have lost around half their organic carbon, threatening the sustainability of our agriculture and our ability to keep our citizens fed.

More than that, however, the collapse of England’s biodiversity is a threat to our culture, national identity and one of the essential components of happiness. As iconic species continue to disappear from these islands, I wonder how many of us in this room will see a swallow or mayfly to herald summer this year?

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend hope, as I do, that the Minister will work with expert organisations such as Northumberland national park to determine how we can best protect ground-nesting birds such as the curlew, which is mainly resident in my constituency of Hexham?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of protecting our curlews, and the curlew action plan is a hugely important step, which the Government should be looking at. I also wonder how long it will be before the screaming sky falls silent, as each year, fewer swifts return to grace the air above our towns and villages.

Even our English language is losing its power, as the colours of the countryside are allowed to run dry. How could Brontë have conjured Heathcliff to love Cathy without the wild of the Yorkshire moors? How could Tolkien have fathered an entire fantasy genre without a shire worth fighting for? What hope is there for a future Vaughan Williams with so few larks left to ascend? Worse still, what stories will we have left to enchant the next generation of children with when the Hundred Acre Wood has been declared a blocker, Ratty and Mole have been evicted from their river home by decades of effluent, and—this is probably only a matter of time—someone tries to redefine Watership Down as grey belt?

All in all, the scale of the nature crisis is difficult to overstate, and any move to lower standards risks turning that crisis into a catastrophe. Yet, despite all this, we still get senior politicians declaring war on what little remains of our wildlife, with repeated suggestions that even this dire baseline is somehow too high. We continue to hear the unevidenced claim that Britain is held back not by a broken economic model but by bats and newts, and that profiteering developers would build genuinely affordable homes for all if only the last remnants of the natural world were less burdensome.

Liz Truss may be gone, but the spirit and lazy rhetoric of deregulatory Trussonomics bulldozers inexorably onwards with a planning and infrastructure Bill that sought to allow developers to pay cash to trash nature, despite having no meaningful evidence to substantiate the claim that environmental protections slow down infrastructure. Then, after we managed to head off the worst of that, we have had the wholesale rejection of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s recommendations on species protections, as well as a nuclear regulatory review based on fundamentally flawed evidence that inflates the costs of environmental protections and downplays ecological risks. I would welcome the Minister taking this opportunity to distance the Government from that particular exercise in scapegoating nature for developer incompetence.

Each additional deregulation and attack on environmental protections is a blow to the very root of what it means to be English. It is a truly bleak vision for our country to suggest that the only way to secure investment, build infrastructure or deliver homes is to rip up our environmental protections. Such measures are not only bad policy but directly contradictory to the manifesto we were elected on and deeply unpopular. Only 14% of British people think politicians are aligned with their values on nature, and three quarters of young people actually want more of the UK countryside protected.

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He may know that Sheffield is well known for being the outdoor city and is one of the few major cities in the UK that has a national park within its boundaries. I support him in his red lines for nature campaign. Does he agree that protecting nature is vital, not just to protect our green spaces, but to make sure that communities have access to the right types of space, so that they are happier and more fulfilled?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I thank my hon. Friend for her support for the red lines campaign. She is absolutely right about what makes life worth living. Investing in our country, strengthening standards and restoring our natural world will do far more to improve the lives of ordinary people than a short-sighted race to the bottom. That is the Labour tradition: action to correct market failure, not dogmatic deregulation.

There is a nature-loving majority in this country, including the millions of members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, wildlife trusts, national trusts and so many more. Our Labour Government should be working alongside those groups, not squaring up to them. At the end of the day, there is a lot more of them than there are developer lobbyists. Let us stop this endless cycle of skirmishes. It does not have to be like this. Enough is enough.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I am very sorry, but I had better make progress at this point.

Today, I am calling for clear red lines for nature: no further weakening of environmental protections, no funding cuts to environmental bodies and no more collapsing biodiversity but instead a fully funded nature recovery plan to meet our legally binding targets. There are no more branches left to prune without killing the tree. There can be no more backward steps. Hand wringing will not protect habitats. Lip service will not stop extinction. Let us have a little optimism and idealism instead.

We know from projects such as Knepp and trailblazers such as my constituents at Finches Farm in Benington that with decisive action our biodiversity can come booming back again. Across the country, we have a vast, untapped pool of potential crying out for employment and meaningful, healthy work. It is ready to contribute to leaving the world in a better state than we found it, and there is so much work to be done: restoring our meadows, orchards, coppices and temperate rainforests; relaying hedgerows; re-wetting the lost marshes; re-wriggling our rivers; bringing back the species that haunt our islands; saving the curlew and red squirrel; and monitoring, measuring and enforcing our essential environmental protections. There is enough skilled work to deliver a huge boost towards full employment across every region of the country. Like new Labour’s “New Deal for a Lost Generation”, we need a green job guarantee to deliver essential environmental restoration work now and brilliant careers for years to come.

Now is the time for the honesty to admit that, for generation after generation, we have spent down and frittered away the vast wealth that was the natural inheritance of these islands. The truth is that the reality of GDP growth has been little more than a heaping up of virtual wealth—a hoarding of digital zeros in the bank accounts of the wealthy, while the real world around all of us suffered. Any further weakening of environmental protections will only push us over the edge into total bankruptcy. We cannot retreat a single step further. We must defend these last red lines for nature for the sake of every generation to come. My plea to the Minister is simply this: defy the lobbyists, side with the public and the planet over profit, and give us our nature back.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Woodland Creation

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell.

The state of England’s woodland paints a clear picture of national decline. The elms are gone, the ash is dying and even the English oak is at risk from the existential threat of climate change. We have far less woodland cover than many of our European neighbours and what woodland we have is in poor condition: just 7% of it is in good health. Many of our oldest trees—living legends that have been part of our landscapes for generations and that can each be home to thousands of species—are still at risk. A lack of diversity in size and species, and a lack of open, sunlit glades for young trees to grow in, has left our ecosystems fragile and degraded. That does profound harm to the wildlife that our voters love. Iconic species such as hazel dormice and our beloved red squirrels are disappearing into the pages of the history books and the number of woodland birds has fallen by 37% over the past 50 years. It must be said that although the wealth generated from tearing down woodland for shipbuilding, agriculture and construction was tightly privatised by a small, wealthy few, the consequences of the nature crisis are and will be felt by all.

We are on track to miss nearly all our targets for nature recovery. We have already lost half our biodiversity and one in six species are teetering on the brink of extinction. Those are not abstract targets that we can shrug off but missed opportunities to save species whose haunting absence would impoverish the lives of every generation to come. Unchecked, such decline will have disastrous consequences. Nature is not only the essential foundation for our economy but a source of joy to millions of people, and an irreplaceable ingredient of our national identity and culture. The Joint Intelligence Committee has warned that nature decline creates “cascading risks” to our food security and national security. To be frank, wringing our hands about nature’s decline in these debates while signing up to an economic model that treats nature as something to exploit, or destroys if it is in the way, will no longer cut it. The depoliticised niceties and doublespeak have to go.

We need to have the honesty to call out leadership that treats nature as an obstacle to progress, rather than a measure of it. Every politician loves ancient woodland until it is home to one of the world’s rarest bat species and is threatened by the latest grandiose project dreamt up in Whitehall. At that point it immediately becomes a blocker and a convenient scapegoat for the insane cost overruns of our model of outsourced and subcontracted infrastructure delivery, which so often rips off the public purse. We would not destroy historic cathedrals or royal palaces in this way, but, only a few years ago, we proved once again that even one of the best-loved trees in the country—every bit a work of art in its own right—can be destroyed in the pursuit of higher GDP. If we fail to do better, the public will not forgive either this Government or our political class more widely.

There are two tasks ahead for reversing the national decline of our woodlands. First, we must take a bold approach to woodland creation—on which subject much has already been usefully said today. I pay tribute to the Woodland Trust for its leadership in driving the northern forest, which will reach across Hull into Liverpool and surge into our cities. That is how we grasp an opportunity not just to rescue ecosystems, but to enrich communities, foster happier, healthier lives and reconnect ordinary people with what is collectively our greatest national inheritance.

As the Labour Government rightly focuses on building an economy with secure, highly skilled and meaningful work for all, here is an enormous opportunity. Essential woodland management—coppicing, pollarding, thinning, restocking and the rest—will require a new generation of tree surgeons and forestry workers, potentially offering brilliant careers right across the country. However, even the Woodland Trust or my hon. Friend the Minister—talented though they are—cannot recreate ancient woodland, nor restore other irreplaceable habitats or species once they are lost to extinction. Therefore, as we pursue woodland creation, we must also defend the protections we already have. The Woodland Trust has long argued that loopholes in the national planning policy framework leave ancient woodland vulnerable to damage and deterioration from development.

We should be strengthening those protections alongside an ambitious programme of nature recovery. Instead, the nature sector has been left fighting endless battles with the Government simply to stop things getting worse. That is why I led more than 60 MPs and peers alongside major nature charities, including the Woodland Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Wildlife Trusts, in opposing proposals to weaken the habitat regulations recommended in the nuclear regulatory review. We must be clear: if someone cares about our woodlands and woodland creation, they cannot advocate for repealing our most important nature protections. Planting trees while weakening the habitats regulations is like planting flowers at one end of a field, while a bulldozer rips it up at the other. We need a joined-up approach that protects what we have and restores what we have lost. That is why I am calling for red lines for nature. I hope that colleagues will join me in supporting this campaign in the coming months.

River Habitats: Protection and Restoration

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) on his well-made speech opening the debate.

The state of our rivers is a near-perfect metaphor for how badly we have got our priorities wrong as a society. Through a combination of carelessness, greed and wilful neglect, we have managed to poison and exhaust one of the essential elements of life. Not a single one of England’s rivers, which quite literally shape our country, is in good overall health. All of them are polluted with toxic chemicals.

Clean waterways teeming with life—places that can refresh body, mind and soul—should be the absolute right of every English citizen. As it stands, we have squandered the vast natural wealth of our rivers and streams. In doing so, we have robbed the future generations of our nation of the best part of their inheritance. Restoring our rivers and streams is, above all, a question of changing what we mean by growth.

Experiencing the glories of nature is one of the joys that make life worth living. That is what we should be focusing our efforts on—not on abstract GDP figures that mean next to nothing to anyone outside the imagination of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Instead of more chemicals, more concrete, more consumption, we will do far more to improve the wellbeing of all of our citizens from every background by returning to them the burst of mayflies at the start of summer, the chance

“To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping”,

as Rupert Brooke once did, without worrying what filth we might be swallowing; or even just the chance to mess about in boats in the streams that once flowed fully, but now have been choked to a pitiful dribble. A more potent symbol of national decline would be hard to invent.

All the polling shows that the public are overwhelmingly in favour of decisive action to restore nature in this country. The inspirational efforts of groups across North East Hertfordshire such as RevIvel, the Friends of the Rib and Quin, and the River Beane Restoration Association prove the grassroots passion for seeing our rivers and especially our chalk streams restored.

My party, the Labour party, should know this deep in its heart. Since the first inception of our movement, the demand of politics by the people for the people has always been to protect the natural world and to open it up to all so that ordinary working-class citizens can enjoy it, too. When politicians constantly attack the very nature that our voters love and the Office for Environmental Protection has to investigate the Government for their utter failure to deliver the statutory targets for rivers to be in good condition by next year—set out in laws that we politicians passed—it is little surprise that faith in politics is so miserably low.

When we make promises to restore nature, we must never again fail to honour our words with action. If that means the Treasury has to adapt its plans, so be it. I will be explicit on this point. I know some people believe that putting more and more power in the hands of profiteering developers will somehow magically resolve stagnant productivity, but our model of speculative house building, combined with the legal obligation for water companies to supply water to new developments, is increasingly incompatible with healthy rivers in many parts of the country. There are environmental limits on the amount of water we can use without wrecking our freshwater systems, but currently we are just pretending that they do not exist. The over-abstraction from the aquifers that feed our precious chalk streams is a clear case in point.

In a country as wet as ours, it should take a true organising genius to produce water shortages, yet a combination of planning, deregulation and a profit-motivated private market has contrived to do just that. It is time for a “chalk streams first” approach that protects them from over-abstraction and for long overdue recognition that genuine, sustainable development means accepting that environmental boundaries cannot be compromised. The truth is, if we measure economic success by the genuine improvement of our constituents’ lives and by the provision of good, meaningful work for all, the restoration of our rivers is in fact a huge opportunity.

My plea to the Minister today is simple: go back to colleagues in the Treasury and tell them about the missing half of the clean jobs revolution. Tell them about the huge expansion in the number of ecologists and conservation experts we need to monitor the health of our rivers and advise our local authorities and hard-working farmers. Tell them about the thousands of skilled jobs needed to re-wiggle our rivers, and tell them to create and maintain riparian buffers such as carr woodland and floodplain meadows around all our waterways. Tell them about the jobs and vast increases in natural capital that could be created across every part of the country by restoring the small waters like ponds and headwater streams, and integrating those crucial areas at the top of river systems into the water framework directive. And tell them about the national mobilisation needed to prevent the next river pollution scandal from the highway run-off filling our rivers with a nightmarish cocktail of microplastics, heavy metals and herbicides.

There are thousands of unpermitted and in many cases barely monitored highway outfalls across the country that must be urgently investigated, maintained and upgraded if we are genuinely to improve the health of our rivers. Collectively, those are tasks that would not just upskill and employ thousands of people, but would immeasurably enrich our nation by restoring our streams and rivers as the crown jewels of England’s countryside that they always ought to have been.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Hardy]

I have seen the hon. Lady’s letter. I will get told off by officials for saying this, but I am basically looking at whether I can come back to the Wye and do something there with everybody. If not, we can do something in Parliament. I went to the Wye last year, and we announced our £1 million research fund to look at what is happening in the Wye. It would be quite nice to go back and see what has been happening. It is on my radar, and I will get her a proper answer in writing.

As Making Space for Water highlights, it is crucial to connect river habitats at the catchment scale. I emphasise the importance of catchment partnerships to improving water quality and restoring natural processes. The partnerships are well established and effective in co-ordinating local collaboration and delivering projects with multiple benefits. They include the Dorset Catchment Partnerships, which is leading work on the River Wey and other Dorset rivers to improve water quality, reduce run-off and restore natural flows.

This is why, earlier this month, we announced that we are investing £29 million from water company fines into local projects that clean up our environment, including doubling our funding for catchment partnerships, providing them with an extra £1.7 million per year over the next two years. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) said, it is essential that we support and pay tribute to the growing number of grassroots organisations and the work they do to protect our natural environment. Doubling funding for catchment partnerships should help them to continue to do that work.

That is part of the Government’s commitment to giving communities greater influence over water environment planning and decision making. Fundamentally, communities know their water areas the best. Through our increased funding, we expect to support more than 100 projects that will improve 450 km of rivers, restore 650 acres of natural habitats and plant 100,000 new trees. The additional funding is expected to attract at least a further £11 million from private sector investment, resulting in even greater benefit for local communities in all hon. Members’ constituencies.

Restoring chalk streams—another of my favourites—is a core ambition of our water reforms. We are home to 85% of the world’s chalk streams. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead, said, we are one of the only places that has so many of them. They are home to some of our rarest, and keystone, species, such as the Atlantic salmon. As the Making Space for Water campaign rightly highlights, protecting keystone species is key to healthy rivers and streams. I could say so much more, but I am conscious that I have been talking for 14 minutes, so I will move on.

[Chris Hinchliff]

I am afraid the Minister has slightly walked into this. Previously in this Chamber, I extended an invitation to her to come and visit RevIvel in my constituency. That is a campaign to restore the Ivel chalk stream. It has a pilot project looking at taking the Chalk Streams First approach, which would potentially restore that aquifer, and not just help the Ivel but see the return of chalk streams that have completely ceased to flow. It would be really exciting to talk to my hon. Friend about that and some of the challenges that people are experiencing with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs water restoration fund. I just put that back on her agenda.

[Emma Hardy]

I did walk into that, didn’t I? I thank my hon. Friend. If he wants to send that through to me, I will of course take a serious look at it. I am very keen to be getting out and about when it is a bit less wet—but rain should be what I am used to.

Restoring the health of our rivers is fundamental to safeguarding nature, supporting resilient communities and securing our water environment for generations to come. The Labour Government are committed to delivering the most comprehensive programme of reform ever undertaken. It involves strengthening regulation, boosting enforcement, investing in innovation, supporting local partnerships and empowering farmers, land managers and water companies to play their part. From national action on agricultural pollution and chalk stream protections, to ambitious local projects in South Dorset, we are driving real, long-term improvements. Together, those measures demonstrate our unwavering commitment to cleaner water, thriving habitats and a healthier natural environment across England.

Water Scarcity

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Stuart. I begin by recognising that the Minister takes these issues very seriously, and congratulating the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) on securing this important debate. I agree with him that one would think it would take true organising genius to arrange for water scarcity in a country as wet as ours. Yet water scarcity is not a future risk; it is a constant and present reality. Take chalk streams, which have already been referred to: they are the crown jewels in our natural heritage, but less than a fifth are in good ecological status, and that situation is largely driven by over-abstraction.

The River Ivel in my constituency is one of the most over-abstracted chalk streams in the country. Where once there were boats, watermills and watercress meadows, there is now often little more than a dribble. The nearby Cat Ditch chalk stream mostly no longer flows at all. If we are to deliver on our manifesto commitments to reverse England’s nature crisis, we must ensure that we have a chalk streams-first approach to water resource management, adopted in full.

The second point I will make is that reservoirs alone will not save us. The planned nine new reservoirs up to 2050 will provide around 670 million litres of water a day but, as has already been referred to, our projected deficit is more than 5 billion litres a day. The calculations for existing water resource management plans do not take into account the quenchless thirst of data centres, demanded not by our constituents, but by tech corporations.

The brings me to my third point: we must move towards an economic model and a planning system that respect environmental boundaries and stop acting as though they do not exist. Speculative applications from profiteering developers must be reined in and firmer restrictions put in place where new development would require abstraction at rates not compatible with the good ecological health of our rivers. We must also make more efficient use of grey water. Above all, we need a clear national assessment of the maximum population growth we can absorb in our country, for a future in which both our taps and our rivers still run.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Hardy]

At the moment, the chief executive needs to focus on getting the boil water notice removed and getting drinking water back into everybody’s house. Of course, the Drinking Water Inspectorate will be doing a full investigation into exactly what has caused the problem and why it has taken so long to resolve. South East Water is responsible for compensating customers. The changes that we introduced to the guaranteed standards scheme mean that for the first time compensation can be given to people who are under boil notices. Under the previous Government someone under a boil notice did not receive any compensation; we have introduced compensation. Customers will be compensated not only for not having water but for the duration of their boil water notice.

On water scarcity, I agree with many of the points that have been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) talked about the over-abstraction of chalk streams and he is absolutely right that that is crucial. Over-abstraction and pollution are the main causes of problems for our chalk streams. One of the reasons that we have such a demand for future water is because we are committed to reducing abstraction, particularly from our chalk streams. He is right to say that we cannot think just about having the reservoirs; we need more actions, including strong and stringent targets to reduce leakage, and we need to look at all our water needs going forward. He was right to highlight—although there seemed to be some amnesia in the Chamber—the years of under-investment in water and in infrastructure more widely. We are getting on with doing many things that should have been done in the last 14 years.

[Chris Hinchliff]

Briefly, may I encourage the Minister to come to my constituency and see the incredible work being done by the RevIvel campaign, which is trying to restore the Ivel chalk stream? It has a brilliant proposal for a chalk stream-first approach that would restore not just that chalk stream but the whole chalk aquifer and help the Cat Ditch flow again. It would be great to see her there.

[Emma Hardy]

I thank my hon. Friend for that lovely invite. Visiting a chalk stream sounds beautiful—perhaps in springtime, when it is looking particularly gorgeous, or in summer.

I agree with so many of the points made—even those made by the shadow Minister—about farming, what we can do to support farmers and how we can make it easier for them to store water on their land. At this moment, I cannot commit to saying exactly where my thinking is on this, but I can say I am looking at it extremely closely: how can we make it easier for farms to become more resilient and for farmers to store water when it rains, so that it is there when they need it? I have also been looking closely at the interestingly titled WAGs—I thought that meant something else entirely, but as we all know stands it for water abstraction groups. I have been looking at how they have been doing some of that work.