Water Sector: Public Ownership

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I am grateful to the 208,000 people who signed the petition. For many of my constituents, this debate could hardly be more timely. Last month, a burst water main on Bramley Road left thousands of households across Enfield North without water, or experiencing low pressure for many days. Around 4,500 properties were affected. Thames Water’s own planning identified almost 3,000 priority services register customers in affected areas, and 24 tankers were deployed.

However, those figures alone cannot describe the complete misery caused for my constituents. One told me:

“I’ve been a resident in Lavender Hill for 27 years and I’ve never had to endure the incident that I am currently facing. I live in flats and have had NO water for over 3 days.”

Many others described the distressing impact on the most basic aspects of everyday life, including cooking, drinking, washing and sanitation. In response, I managed to persuade the local Morrisons store to make its industrial washing machines and dryers available free of charge, and I am really grateful to it for that.

Let us be clear: this was not just an inconvenience; for many, it was a crisis. The disruption even reached Chase Farm hospital, where operating theatres lost their water supply, forcing operations to be cancelled for two days while emergency tankers were brought in.

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

Is the situation my hon. Friend describes—Thames Water not being there when crises happen, while at the same time hugely increasing customers’ bills and failing to invest in infrastructure—not exactly why we cannot have a sweetheart deal with its creditors and shareholders? They must be held to account; they cannot continue with their record of failure on the backs of hard-working Londoners.

[Feryal Clark]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. When a failure in water infrastructure can disrupt NHS treatment, we are no longer talking simply about poor customer service; we are talking about critical national infrastructure.

What made this incident particularly unacceptable was not simply the fact that a pipe burst—we all know that infrastructure can fail—but what happened afterwards. My constituents faced conflicting information about whether their water would return, and they struggled to contact Thames Water. Bottled water stations were located in places that were extremely difficult for elderly and disabled residents to reach without a car. When I raised that issue with Thames Water, this was its extraordinary response:

“It’s not uncommon for us to set up bottled water stations in the London area without considering residents without a vehicle.”

Think about that: an essential utility provider responding to an emergency affecting thousands of people admits that it does not routinely consider whether vulnerable customers can actually reach the emergency water it provides. If an essential service fails, surely the absolute minimum people should expect is to be told what has happened, what they should do, where they can get help and when the service should be fixed.

This experience inevitably raises a much bigger question: who is our water industry ultimately being run for? I welcome the Government’s determination to strengthen regulation, but we should also ask whether regulation alone can solve the problem.

Oral Answers to Questions

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Dairy businesses such as the one she refers to in her constituency are embracing technology and innovation, and we want to support them to go further. Over the last three years, we have provided around £75 million to farmers to help them purchase new and innovative technology. From autumn this year, the new farming investment fund will help farmers, including those in the dairy sector, to build on the progress already made by offering them grants. We will also be launching a new approach, with research and development syndicates to support individual farm businesses with research and development of technology.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

What steps his Department is taking to ensure that untreated sewage is not discharged into rivers and other inland waters.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)]

Water companies are committed over the next five years to a £1.1 billion programme to improve the monitoring and management of sewage discharges. However, I have made it clear to water companies that more action is needed. That is why we have established the storm overflows taskforce, which has agreed to set a long-term goal to eliminate harm from storm overflows and is working on plans to start progress towards that goal.

[Feryal Clark [V]]

The River Lea, which runs through my constituency, is well used for water sports by many clubs and schools, and it is much loved. Sadly, it is also one of the most polluted waterways in the UK; in 2019 alone, Thames Water spent over 1,100 hours discharging raw sewage into the River Lea. When will the Government finally hold water companies to account to protect our waterways properly?

[Rebecca Pow]

The hon. Lady raises a very serious issue, and indeed the Department is taking it very seriously. In fairness, as I said, water companies already spend £1.1 billion to improve their monitoring and discharging, but we have set up the taskforce to hold their feet to the fire to come up with some measures for how we can set this long-term goal of getting rid of these sewage outlets once and for all. They will be doing more real-time data checking, so we will have the relevant data that we need soon, and they will be installing more monitoring devices, but the taskforce will report back in the spring on further actions that we may be able to work on.

Environment Bill

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con) [V]]

I speak as chairman of the all-party group on the packaging manufacturing industry, an important part of the UK economy with sales of £11 billion and 85,000 employees, representing 3% of the workforce, and I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Packaging performs an important function. It is part of the delivery system within complex logistics to enable products to get safely and efficiently from the point of production to the consumer for use or consumption, and it has an important role in preventing damage in transit and extending the life of food products by keeping them fresher for longer. The industry is keen to ensure that the environmental impact of its product is minimised through, first, more recycling of all the materials used in packaging, and that should be carried out within the UK; and, secondly, reductions in the amount of packaging ending its life in the wrong place, which we know as litter, whether that is in the UK or in our oceans. For these reasons, I welcome the provisions in the resources and waste chapter of the Bill, but with so many of them contained in secondary legislation, I wonder whether I can ask for clarity from the Minister on a number of measures.

Will there be continued consultation with the industry on these measures, and will the Minister ensure that the UK industry can continue to remain competitive? There is no merit in simply transferring packaging manufacture overseas. On extensions to producer responsibility, we know that retailers and manufacturers will pay a bigger proportion—in fact, many times more—of the cost of recycling and disposing of packaging, a cost that previously fell on local councils. It is argued that that moves the burden from the taxpayer to the polluter, but it is not the packaging manufacturer that is the polluter—people are—and I hope that improved education and awareness of the local environment will accompany these measures.

We welcome the introduction of a deposit return scheme, but will the Minister confirm that this will be a UK-wide scheme, including Scotland, so that manufacturers do not have to carry two separate sets of stock? Will she advise whether there will be a single deposit, regardless of container size? Can she ensure that we will not simply divert recycling that currently takes place on the kerbside to the DRS? Will she ensure that we include consistent household recycling, including plastic films and flexibles? We know that different local authorities collecting different things has led to very substantial confusion, with only 14% of councils currently collecting flexible materials.

I look forward to the Minister’s clarification on many of these items in her winding-up speech at the end of the debate.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab) [V]]

I support all the amendments put forward by my hon. Friends the Members for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) and for Newport West (Ruth Jones) on air quality. The World Health Organisation has clearly stated that 40 of our towns are breaking the WHO limit for air pollution. We also know that 60% of people in England are living in areas where levels of toxic air pollution exceeded legal limits last year. We know that severe air pollution costs lives, with over 40,000 deaths a year being linked to air pollution.

The impacts of air pollution are not evenly distributed, either, with a disproportionate impact on deprived areas. Research has shown that those living in deprived areas are exposed to higher concentrations of air pollution, often because their homes are situated next to roads with higher concentrations of emissions. The Marmot report also highlighted that individuals in deprived areas suffer more adverse health impacts than those from less deprived areas, because of higher prevalence of underlying cardio, respiratory and other diseases. In my constituency of Enfield North we see the direct effect of poor air quality. In the Borough of Enfield, 6.6% of deaths are attributed to exposure to particulate matter 2.5 pollution. That means that 178 deaths per year in Enfield are linked to long-term exposure to toxic air pollution.

Despite the work of proactive local authorities, pioneering new initiatives like school streets, parklets, low-traffic neighbourhoods or the 60-acre Enfield Chase woodland created by the Labour-run Enfield Council planting almost 200,000 trees, and the work of Mayor of London in introducing the ultra low emission zone, action cannot just take place at a local level; it needs to be backed by national and international legislation. It is too important not to be.

These amendments on air pollution, which I am urging the Government to support today, do not represent a radical step but the bare minimum that we must do as a country. The impact of the amendments would be to establish the WHO legal standard. In the fight against coronavirus, we have shown that working in partnership with international colleagues is vital. Addressing air quality and protecting the environment is no different. We have the opportunity to set the country forward on a course that will protect lives and advocate stronger environmental protections. This is not just an issue about public health; it is something that impacts our daily lives. We must vote in support of these amendments to ensure that we lead the way, instead of hiding away.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Ah— Jerome Mayhew. I had just been informed that he did not want to take part in the debate, but I see that he is there.