Anthony Browne is MP for South Cambridgeshire and Chair of the Conservative backbench Treasury Committee.
As a child, I played in the chalk streams in Cambridgeshire. I remember the water being so clear that the fish looked as though they were floating in mid-air. I had no idea that decades later, such streams would be a national political battleground.
The way that sewage discharges have sparked major campaigns across the country provides a fascinating case study for political students. Existing environment groups, new specialist campaign groups, and opposition political parties have all pushed hard to mobilise opinion.
It is a story not only of a genuine problem – and solution – but of half-truths and poor communication. It has been one of the most frustrating issues for the Government, because even though it has a genuinely good story to tell, it has struggled to make itself heard. Many people prefer outrage to understanding.
Ahead of last month’s local elections, we saw the sort of game-playing that gives politics a bad name. Labour laid legislation as a trap to generate media coverage, and Liberal Democrats across the country pushed vicious and untrue personalised social media attack ads against Conservative MPs.
The Channel 4 presenter was spot on when he declared: “Isn’t this political game playing pathetic!” Pathetic, and dangerous: police arrested one person after they were motivated by the Lib Dem attack ads to threaten violence against a Conservative MP and his family. With the four upcoming by-elections, be prepared for more of the same.
Under the political froth, what matters in all this is what is really happening to our water. We all agree that sewage discharges into rivers and the sea are disgusting, and have to be stopped. But what is the truth behind it all?
When I was the environment editor of The Times and the Observer, everyone knew that our rivers were getting steadily cleaner. Historically, they were literally open sewers. At one time the smell from the Thames was so bad MPs could not sit in Parliament, and houses built next to canals had no windows facing the water to keep the noxious odours out. All life died in many of our rivers. But reductions in pollution led to real improvements: I recently saw a dolphin bobbing in the Thames outside Parliament.
But clearly, there is still too much pollution. We have a long way to go to get rivers back to their natural state – which has to be our aim. As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Environment, I hosted a meeting of MPs to talk about water quality and was surprised when the chief executive of the Environment Agency said sewage is far from being the main source of river pollution – overwhelmingly the main cause is agriculture, in particular fertiliser and pesticide running off from fields, as well as slurry. We don’t hear much about that: sewage from privatised dividend-paying water companies provides a much more emotive target.
The Victorians lead the world in building underground sewerage networks (most famously Joseph Bazalgette and the Thames), so that eventually sewage no longer routinely flowed into our rivers and the sea. But our current problems stem from the fact the Victorians built a system where both rainwater and sewage went into the same pipes, leading to overflows during storms. The only alternative to such sewage discharges was to let sewage back up into the system, so it pours out of people’s toilets – clearly unacceptable.
Contrary to what opposition politicians claim, the discharges are virtually never raw sewage: you do not get toilet paper and tampons floating down the streams. There are many stages to sewage treatment, and it is normally only the very last stage that gets missed when discharges happen: it is slightly brown water. It is still disgusting and bad for humans and wildlife, but it is partially treated sewage rather than raw sewage.
The discharges were only meant to happen rarely in emergencies, but the problem got worse over the decades, as the population grew, producing more sewage, and more development meant more rainwater running into drains rather than soaking in the soil.
But there were no campaigns because no one knew how much discharges were happening, and because it was not raw sewage it was difficult to see. Over decades, successive Governments ignored the issue.
We didn’t know how bad things were until this government forced water companies to monitor the discharges. When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, only 7 per cent of sewage works monitored their discharges. The Government insisted on monitors being installed – it is now over 90 per cent and will be 100 per cent by the end of this year.
This flood of data has prompted a flood of outrage: it showed the shocking extent of the discharges, enabling sewage maps of the country and endless media coverage. It is a great example of the power of transparency: without this data, there would have been no sewage campaigns. There is also a lesson for Governments: if you shine a light on a problem, be prepared to deal with it.
Over the last few years, the Government has taken repeated action to tackle sewage discharges and improve water quality. It is simply not possible to instantly rebuild the country’s entire sewerage network. Apart from costing over £500bn, or over £20,000 per household, we simply don’t have enough construction workers, diggers, or concrete. We need an implementable plan to stop sewage discharges, tackling the worst harm first.
As part of the Environment Act, all water companies are now legally obliged to have and implement sewage discharge reduction plans. The Duke of Wellington famously tabled an amendment putting a legal obligation on the Government to stop sewage discharges, but I remember sitting with the then Environment Secretary as government lawyers explained that it was legally unimplementable, and so should not be passed.
So we rejected that amendment and instead voted for one (that in fact I proposed) that achieved the same objective in a legally robust way (and I ended up announcing it on the BBC’s PM programme). That is why opposition parties say Conservative MPs voted to dump sewage in rivers: but the truth is, we rejected an amendment that Government lawyers said was unenforceable and instead passed one that was. Lib Dems and Labour voted against this sewage reduction law: it is they who voted to allow water companies to keep dumping sewage.
We have now imposed statutory sewage reduction targets, backed up by fines that are now unlimited. All fines now pay for improvements to rivers rather than going to the Treasury. I campaigned to curb dividends to shareholders and bonuses to water company executives if they breach sewerage discharge limits, and that is now being brought in.
Overall, there is now a £56 billion investment programme to curb sewage, with discharges into bathing waters cut by 70 per cent by 2035. We have introduced many other measures to improve water, from banning wet wipes containing plastic, to funding the reduction of slurry discharge from farms. The water minister Rebecca Pow and Phillip Dunne, the chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, both Conservatives, deserve credit for being the driving forces of these reforms.
Whatever the political outrage and game-playing, the good news is that this genuine problem is being sorted. The bad news is that truth is the first casualty in political battles, and while there are votes to be made, the opportunistic mud-slinging will continue.