With just months remaining of this Parliament, government needs to get on with the regulation and legislation critical to cleaning up waterways, writes CEN's Kitty Thompson
The speed with which we all want to see water quality improved in English waterways requires sensible, pragmatic policy, not more populist campaigns peddling false solutions that are too good to be true. While a ban on plastic wet wipes is certainly welcome news to many, if we are to actually solve this problem, we need to turn our attention to the slightly tedious but vital technicalities of regulation and legislation.
English rivers are not in a good way with just 15 per cent currently categorised as being in good ecological condition. Thanks to a sewage system design precedent set by the Victorians, an ever growing population, climate change, ageing infrastructure, the rise of single-use goods, and urbanisation, our collective reliance on storm overflows - the automatic relief valve for the sewerage system when it becomes overwhelmed - has increased.
Our dependence on these automatic outlets is certainly problematic. It is, however, far from the only problem water faces. To name but one, the UK has not built a new reservoir since 1990, despite the National Infrastructure Commission predicting we are going to need 30 new ones to meet our increasing demand for water.
These undoubtedly serious sources of water pollution and stress require equally serious solutions. Although there are seemingly simple solutions out there, like a ban of plastic containing wet wipes to reduce the pressure consumers put on water pipes, unfortunately, there are no quick fixes for the problem as a whole.
This does not lend itself to simple messaging to communicate to the general public. It does, unfortunately, create many opportunities to sell their snake oil solutions to unsuspecting voters, like halting an automatic storm overflow for a bank holiday weekend, without mentioning that, even if possible, could lead to sewage backing up into people's homes and streets.
Passion for the water quality issue is incredibly high among voters, but the necessary solutions are too technical and uninteresting to go mainstream, as is often the case in policy making. The government needs to ignore the noise being blared out by bad faith actors and just get on with the boring bits.
This is not to say that they have not already been doing this. The government's Storm Overflow Discharge Reduction Plan published in 2022 is the sort of technical and unglamorous document it should be publishing and delivering to actually solve the problem, rather than seeking to score electoral brownie points. But, with the issue of water quality far from over, there is more that can be done.
The best place to start is with the 2024 price review. Water companies all submitted their business plans last autumn to Ofwat, the regulator, for approval. This five yearly process saw a record £96 billion of spending proposed across the sector between 2025 and 2030.
This is no small sum of money. It would deliver 30,000 new jobs, cut leakages, develop 10 new reservoirs, and build 28 new wetlands, and triple the current rate of investment in storm overflow reductions.
Ofwat has until the end of the year to approve the plans, but having taken pride in ensuring a decade of below-inflation water bill increases for consumers, adoption of these business plans in full is far from guaranteed. Directly accountable to Parliament, politicians have a window of opportunity to show their support for the levels of investment and ambition outlined in the business plans.
Even when PR24 has come and gone, the government has more to be getting on with. The long awaited implementation of Schedule 3 of the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act would end the automatic legal right of developers to connect the surface water drainage of their developments to nearby sewage infrastructure. Instead, it would mandate the use of sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS). On the ground, this would mean less rainwater inundating sewage systems and therefore less storm overflow usage.
In a similar fashion, updating the 2013 Specified Infrastructure Project regulations can help to cheaply finance more of the large-scale infrastructure projects the water sector needs, like reservoirs, sharing the risk with the government and the cost among different generations set to benefit from it. These regulations were written with the Tideway Tunnel in mind - London's incoming super sewer - but need not be limited to this project only. A few tweaks to the regulation will make their use more universal, but it won't make the front page splash of any newspapers.
Business plans are not especially interesting, nor is talk of "price reviews" and industry regulators. But this is the sort of detail that makes a difference to the water quality that communities care about. While they lack the digestible quality and simple charm of a product ban, ultimately the regulation and legislation outlined above are far more important mechanisms for cleaning up our waterways. With only a few months left of this Parliament, the government should avoid distractions and instead dive into the details.
First published by BusinessGreen. Kitty Thompson is the Conservative Environment Network's Senior Nature Programme Manager.