On 7th October Havant Borough councillors unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the local water company Southern Water. I spoke at their meeting to say: “I’ve come today because it’s an opportunity to actually highlight the problems there are with Southern Water. The water companies are acting illegally, because they are not doing the job that they were designed for, or the commitment that they’ve taken on. They’re dumping sewage and they are actually making life quite miserable for all sorts of people who would like to be able to paddle in streams, or let their dogs go into rivers, or want to swim off a seashore. I was at Langstone Quay today, and there were used cotton buds and used lavatory paper all over the quayside that clearly has been washed over from a high tide from sewage. That is just unacceptable. In some places where sewage is going into watercourses, ecosystems are being destroyed because they can’t cope with the level of pollution. It’s not only human faeces and so on, but also a lot of forever chemicals, and things like oestrogen, which are really messing up life cycles of various creatures.”
I congratulate Lord Hunt, on bringing this debate. I also want to apologise to him, because I am always surprised by how passionately he talks about climate change. That is on me. Sorry about that. It is wonderful to listen to.
I have met the new Prime Minister a few times and I have a lovely photograph on my phone of him and me at Glastonbury last year. I sort of thought we could work together, but the more I see what is happening and going through, the more I am beginning to think it will not be possible. It seems as if the slow-moving, stagnant mechanism of government has got its claws into him and he is not thinking very creatively any more. I hope I am wrong. We shall see over the next few weeks and months.
I want to mention three things that are crucial for the future of this Labour Government, which will all help society as well as the environment. We have to accept that climate chaos is the new normal. Thousands of people died this summer in the heat and that is going to keep happening if we are not very careful about adapting to it. People arriving at A&E with heat exhaustion and so on is also going to be the new normal. This Government must not make it worse by going ahead with the Jackdaw gas field and Rosebank oil field. That is folly. What they should be doing is what they have just scrapped—putting solar panels on every supermarket car park and every roof, everywhere they possibly can. That is the sort of thing they ought to be doing to be creative about combating climate change. We need to adapt to hot summers. A tiny measure would be to put shutters on all the windows, as in France. I have lots of ideas and I am quite happy to chat them through.
The second thing is to help save the NHS, not by privatising it but by remembering that prevention is better than cure. If you cut pollution, you cut the number of people going into hospital. You cut the number of children whose lungs are so stunted by pollution that they have lifelong problems with their breathing. Well done to Sadiq Khan here in London, where he has massively cut air pollution. We should have low emission zones across the whole country, as they do in mainland Europe.
Thirdly, one big way to reduce pollution would be to take the water companies into public ownership. The Prime Minister mentioned those words yesterday. I would like to think he means renationalisation, but I do not know any more, because he keeps changing his mind. I have stopped paying the sewage part of my bill. I asked Thames Water how much that part was. I was happy to pay for the water, obviously, but I was not prepared to pay for the sewage it was dumping in the Thames. It told me that it did not work out the bill like that, so at the moment I am not paying my bill. We will see if it takes me to court before it goes bankrupt. We stopped the poll tax with a campaign of non-payment. Civil disobedience is possibly the only way to fight companies such as the water companies which are operating in a way that is a disbenefit to the whole of society. I say to the Government that the Green Party always has loads of very practical ideas and I am very happy to share them.
Regulators such as Ofwat have been in bed with the water industry bosses, and the Environment Agency has lost staff and legitimacy. Labour are wedded to private ownership of water and refuse to consider public ownership, even though it would be the most popular legislation they could enact this Parliament.
These amendments take a direct route to stopping pollution by making this personal to the people at the top. If they do not spend the money to invest and reduce pollution, then that is a crime. They are taking the public’s money and failing to improve. Continue reading “Crime and Policing Bill Committee Stage Day 15”→
I intervened in this debate to say: Does the Minister understand the depth of disappointment that a lot of environmental campaigners have felt because the remit did not include taking water out of private hands? There is a general feeling of absolute anger that public ownership was not considered. Does the Minister accept that? I include Feargal Sharkey and myself among those environmental campaigners who are horribly disappointed. Continue reading “Independent Water Commission”→
I intervened in this Oral Question debate last week to say: We are seeing more erratic weather patterns and some increasingly severe floods. Is the plan for sustainable drainage systems speeding up? Will we see that in the water White Paper?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage replied for HMG:
The recent issues in Monmouthshire—we are terribly sorry for the people there; they have had a dreadful time over the past few days—make us even more determined to support the delivery of high-quality sustainable drainage systems to help us manage flood risk and adapt to the effects of climate change. National planning policy therefore makes it very clear that developments of all sizes are expected to make use of sustainable drainage techniques where the development could have drainage impacts. I have seen some fantastic examples of that when visiting housing sites around the country. Not only can it be done, but in a way that enhances the environment for local residents. We are considering what further changes need to be made to planning policy.
Water companies currently have 12,000 criminal convictions against them. Can the Minister tell me at what number he will consider these people criminals and not fit to have an operating licence to deliver our water? Continue reading “Water Companies: Private Ownership”→
It is very hard to convey the anger felt by not just hundreds of thousands but millions of people at the mess the water companies have made over the past 30 years. I say “mess”, because that is what the public have had had to deal with – this is about sewage-filled seawater, dirty beaches, polluted rivers, chalk stream ecosystems destroyed and sometimes even E. coli in our water supply – while water companies have been amazingly efficient at siphoning off money for shareholders and employees Continue reading “Water Companies: Fines”→
