Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to upgrade the sewage system and phase out combined sewers.

Sewerage undertakers have duties to provide, maintain and improve a public sewer system to effectually drain their area. The Government’s draft strategic policy statement to Ofwat makes it clear that we expect the regulator to challenge sewerage undertakers to improve planning and investment to meet the wastewater needs of current and future customers, while protecting the environment.

Sewerage undertakers must identify solutions that are most effective to carry out their duties. Replacing combined sewers can be part of the solution; elsewhere doing this would be prohibitively expensive. We continue to work with the industry to make sure that sewer overflows that remain an unavoidable part of such systems in extreme conditions are properly controlled. In particular:

• Mandating monitoring of the vast majority of overflows by 2020 so their performance is understood, allowing water users and customers to hold water companies to account.

• Introducing frequency triggers to permits for overflows associated with bathing and shellfish waters from 2017. This should ensure that, as pressures on sewer systems increase, their performance does not deteriorate.

• Working collaboratively with the industry group 21^st Century Drainage to develop tools to adequately address the highest spilling overflows.