Water Companies: Sewage Discharge

Roger Gale Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)]

This year, Southern Water was fined £90 million for pumping raw sewage into the sea. To take the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), that was not a quick prosecution; it covered 2010 to 2015. This summer, there was raw sewage on the beaches of east Kent—devastating for holidaymakers and dreadful for the tourism industry. Inland, I have no doubt that sewage was going into our chalk streams also. That has to stop.

It will come as no surprise that I have been in regular contact with Southern Water about the issue. Indeed, I met the chief executive, Ian McAulay, and his engineer only last week to discuss possible ways forward. Notwithstanding the motion before the House this evening, it is clear that there is not a quick fix, and nobody should try to pretend that there is.

Certainly, there have been years of lack of investment in the infrastructure, and it will take a lot of money and engineering to get this right. More importantly, it will take a great deal of co-operation—a point that has been made to me that we all have to understand. This is not just the responsibility of the water companies. It is the responsibility of Highways England, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Environment Agency, Natural England and Ofwat. Unless and until all these bodies start working together, we will not solve the problem.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) made the point that we are building houses and connecting them to sewage. The volume of water coming off the roofs of housing, going down drainpipes, then into gullies and the sewers, is monumental. We are building more and more houses without the sewage and water infrastructure to handle what we are putting into the system. We have to separate out rainwater from sewage; we can do that.

I do not know of a single house being built with a grey water tank, for example. We are throwing all that water away. Very few houses have water butts. There is barely a yard of tarmac on the road that is porous, if there is any at all. In other countries, roads are porous. Why are they not porous in the United Kingdom? I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that, yes, we have to hold the water companies to account, but we also have to ensure that the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government play their part, as well as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if we are to pull all the strands together and have a co-ordinated approach that looks to the future, and if we are to build us the houses, roads and drainage systems that we need for tomorrow, not for Victorian England.