My Lords, it is a real honour to follow the powerful and authoritative speech of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I agree with every word he said.
I will first speak to Amendment 161, to which I would have put my name had there been more room or had I got there soon enough. Although most of the content of this amendment has now been superseded
by other amendments to this Bill, as a general approach to the appalling pollution of all our rivers it still holds good. However, we will cover CSOs, SuDS and water metering in this and future groupings, and we have already spoken about flushable products, so I will not touch on those aspects at this time. But there is one area in this amendment—I am sure there are others—which is not really covered by other amendments and which caught my attention: the question of designated bathing spots.
8.45 pm
Anyone who watched the April “Panorama” programme on the state of our rivers would think twice now about bathing in them, and yet there is an unprecedented demand for outdoor or wild swimming. In the latest data I can find, we know that 1.2 million people swam outdoors in 2018—not just paddled, but swam. I am sure that the next Active Lives survey data will show that this figure has risen exponentially, if other river activities during Covid are anything to go by. For instance, canoeing has gone up by 176%, paddleboarding by 173% and angling by 230%. Yet in our 1,500 rivers in England, we have only one designated bathing area, compared to 570 in France and 75 in the small country of Belgium. Poland, for example, designated 101 inland bathing sites in 2019 alone, but we still have only one. As I said at Second Reading, we have once again become the dirty man of Europe.
I will come on to my plea for more oomph—a good parliamentary expression—to be given to our catchment-based partnerships. I am certain that, to put pressure on water companies and the Environment Agency on this matter of designated bathing areas, these partnerships must at least partly provide a solution.
Meanwhile, moving on to my Amendments 172A and 172B, I first thank the Minister for putting down his Amendment 165 on storm overflows, which is gratefully received but I fear needs a little tightening. As I have said, I also totally support the amendments in the names of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates. The noble Duke spoke so strongly on these amendments that I will leave them to support theirs and focus on my own amendment in this group, because I believe that the clarification in my Amendments 172A and 172B is one worth making.
The main purpose of a CSO is, as everybody knows, to allow water companies to dump raw sewage into rivers during “storm conditions”, when not to do so might involve the sewage backing up in the pipes and spilling into people’s homes. However, one of the main problems with the current system is that there is no definition of “storm conditions”, and, as we know, water companies have been taking advantage of this lacuna in the legislation blatantly to usurp their privilege by dumping raw sewage into our rivers, for days and sometimes months on end. However, when talking to officials and hydrologists about this, they tell me that to define storm conditions on a national basis would be an impossible task, and therefore this can be done only by catchment or even on an individual CSO basis—although with some 15,000 CSOs that might take some time.
My amendments therefore seek to charge the water companies with setting strict criteria on local rainfall and its duration before they are allowed to start discharging from any local CSO and, probably more important, on when they have to stop. That has been the problem in the past—they have not stopped. These amendments also involve using the Environment Agency as an auditor of the water companies’ performance, both during the setting of the criteria and in the monitoring of the on-the-ground performance afterwards.
I come on to my Amendments 188D and 170A, which are slightly different. They are designed to ensure that local catchment-based partnerships have the right clout and means to act as genuine local watchdogs and enthusiasts for their rivers, so they can ensure that their river remains clean and managed to the highest standards.
I doubt that being emotionally attached to one’s local river is a uniquely British characteristic; in fact, it is probably even stronger in drier countries where running water really is the source of all life. But there is no doubt that our quietly flowing and often meandering rivers, all with their unique characteristics, engender a great deal of local love and enthusiasm. From the great rivers of the Thames, the Tyne and the Severn and so on, to the small streams, becks and brooks that feed them, there is something in these waters that inspires us all. So, let us harness that inspiration and enthusiasm to bring our waters back into good heart.
I know that catchment-based partnerships have been piloted, expanded and found to be successful in recent years and I am not suggesting that very much changes, but I would like to see more made of them. I hope that putting them on the face of the Bill and ensuring that they have the proper resources to operate will show their memberships how important they are in the overall scheme of things.
For a start, I believe we now have just over 100 partnerships, but we have 1,500 rivers in England and, while I am not suggesting 1,500 separate partnerships are needed, we do need many more. Nor am I suggesting that these partnerships do the work of the Environment Agency in physically testing the quality of the rivers. That is technically quite a tricky job which is best left to scientists.
On that point, I want to say something about the greater use of continuous monitoring of our waters through telemetry. I know these pieces of equipment are currently expensive but, like solar panels, I believe that greater use will dramatically bring their price down. I have heard the worry expressed that this equipment will drown us in a flood of data and unwanted superfluous information, which would not be helpful. That is not the case. It actually remains dormant until, say, a phosphate intensity level is breached. Only then does it wake up and send analysis of a whole range of chemicals back to the lab at regular intervals. A witness to the Environmental Audit Committee this April said:
“you can find out more from continuous monitoring in two weeks than you would probably find in many, many years of random sampling. You can then investigate problems, sort things out and move on … It is certainly not expensive in the terms of cost-benefit”.
Defra and the Environment Agency should work together to use this equipment to help sort out the pollution in our rivers.
I apologise for that little diversion and will go back to my catchment-based partnerships. Even without the technical and scientific knowledge, it will be obvious to the local partners when something is really going wrong in their river. Whether they are swimmers, canoeists, anglers, members of a local authority or an NGO, or even of the water company itself, they will know. When they are alerted, they will be able to prod, poke or shout to make certain that action is taken. They can watch over the CSOs, check on the quantity of water coming out of local springs and aquafers and use their local knowledge to make suggestions to avoid the worst flood risks. They can help designate more bathing sites, as I have already said, and, being good citizen scientists with good phone apps, they can help monitor the wildlife that we desperately need to encourage in, on and around our rivers.
I see their very local input as being a great force for good. Every catchment is different and has different problems, all of which need different and almost certainly local solutions, so we need to ensure that these catchment-based partnerships are encouraged, multiplied and properly resourced.