South West Water

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord]

Liberal Democrat policy is to abolish Ofwat but very much to bolster the Environment Agency. We need to ensure that we have a regulator with teeth. As I have said to the hon. Member before, if the Environment Agency has teeth, they are in a glass of water by the side of the bed. He says he thinks that South West Water will hear his concerns, but I point out that the chief executive only forwent her bonus when it was plain that the level of outrage and campaigning in the west country was such that anything else would have been unacceptable. I should say that it is under pressure from parties like the Liberal Democrats that the Conservatives seem to have been talking in recent weeks about water companies and their executives not taking their bonuses when their performance is so poor.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

In clarifying Liberal Democrat policy and the actions they have taken, perhaps the hon. Gentleman could explain what his party’s leader, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), did to tackle this issue when he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change between 2012 and 2015.

[Richard Foord]

I would be very happy to. Of course, at that time the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change had different responsibilities.

Our policy now is very much about reforming water companies’ boards. They need to be transformed into public benefit companies. We need boards to have grassroots campaigners such as those I gathered together last night. We had Surfers Against Sewage and the Women’s Institute, which is pushing its “Water You Waiting For?” campaign. Fantastic campaigners such as these need a voice at the board level of these companies, otherwise we will face the catastrophe of our tourist hotspots being struck with the affliction that is water pollution. According to Blue Flag, four of the 10 beaches most affected by pollution last year were in Devon, including Sidmouth, which endured over 600 hours of sewage spills.

We heard earlier in the debate about the Environment Agency. In my view, we need to see the end of operator self-monitoring, which is where water companies get to gather their data themselves before passing it to the regulator. It means that they can potentially vary the data they are collecting. Water companies are essentially marking their own homework. This is having a devastating effect on some tourist areas such as the ones in Honiton.

I feel that there is a mismatch between the rhetoric we have heard this afternoon from some hon. Members and their voting records. I point them to 25 January 2023, when we voted on the draft Environmental Targets (Water) (England) Regulations 2022 and when I was very proud to insist that the Government should have more stringent targets for water pollution. I can see, Mr Henderson, that you are suggesting I have reached the end of my time, but I am grateful to have had the chance to make my remarks.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Simon Jupp) for securing today’s important debate.

I must declare an interest: I surf. I surfed on Sunday on a beach that South West Water’s website advised it was safe to surf on and had been for 24 hours. However, a well-known campaign group assured me that it had a sewage alert on it. This happens week after week. A campaign group has chosen to misrepresent the data it has, issuing sewage alerts when the combined storm overflows run and scaring people from entering our beautiful waters. Yes, we would all like the combined storm overflows to not run so often, but they are over 95% rainwater, and on most of North Devon’s stunning surf beaches they rush out into the Atlantic ocean. It does not take 48 hours for the tide to sort that out. The recommended gold standard for removing overflow waters is one tidal rotation, which is 12.5 hours.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank South West Water for the work it has done to date, which saw Croyde, one of the jewels of the surf crown, move from having “good” to “excellent” bathing water quality last year. I also thank the company for working with the event organisers—the ones who accepted—over the Christmas period to try to get our big Christmas swims out safely. Huge confusion is being caused on our beaches, with a Victorian bathing water season still in place, meaning that the most accurate data from the Environment Agency is not available from September through to May. We are a hardy bunch in North Devon. We are out all year round.

With that in mind, I want to focus on the serious problem that occurred in North Devon just three weeks ago, when there was a raw sewage spill from a sewage treatment works due to an electrical fault caused by a contractor on site. This resulted in six hours of raw sewage running into a large river that runs straight out to sea. Yes, there are questions for South West Water about the incident, but accidents do happen. South West Water reported it in line with all procedures.

The Environment Agency recommended closing four beaches and posted details of the sewage incident on its website. Unfortunately, it informed only one of the two councils that needed to be notified. No one told people on the beaches. The well-known campaign group, which we would think would rush to issue a sewage alert, did nothing of the sort. Its “sewage alert” has no definition; it literally means that the storm overflow had gone at some point in the previous 48 hours. The group chooses not to use the information that is available to it from the Environment Agency, which details when there is a real sewage pollution issue. In that respect, I have an issue with the South West Water website as well, which only includes data on its own storm overflows. However, it is at least clear that that is what the company is doing.

Most people do not use the Environment Agency website, which is not a fancy app that says when there is a problem. On that day, although we now know that sewage was being released, the campaign group that apparently prides itself on supporting surfers did not use the data available to it and surfing lessons went ahead.

Many people who regularly use the beaches in North Devon gave up on the campaign app some time ago. One surf school said, “We’d never go surfing if we listened to them.” I ask the Minister this question: what more can be done urgently to provide accurate information to those wishing to bathe or surf at this time of year? I urge the campaign group to think a bit harder about the information it is spreading—

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady, but she has mentioned many times this “campaign group”. I assume she means Surfers Against Sewage, but can she be clear for the record whom she is being critical of?

[Selaine Saxby]

I am happy to clarify, but by the same token the group does not actually like it when I mention it by name.

As I was saying, I urge the group to think a bit harder about the information it is spreading and at least try to issue a sewage alert when there actually is sewage. I say that because when the group set itself up 40 years ago, it ran a brilliant campaign and quite rightly so, as there was a lot of work to do. However, the group now privately states: “With regard to the beaches in your constituency, we totally agree that huge improvements have been made to water quality there and in many places around the country.” However, the group does not like me repeating that in public, as it undermines its very existence.

Yes, South West Water has more to do. I want to know how that incident at Ashford and two more incidents at Croyde over Christmas happened. Most of all, however, I want people to have easy access to accurate information about when it is safe to enter the water on some of the finest beaches in the world.