At Higham Point to Point on Good Friday we had a salutary lesson in what it means to be lucky with the weather. Rain leading up to the event, keeping the ground good for the horses, yet mercifully making way for strong spring sunshine on the day itself – we couldn’t have asked for more at a meeting that remains a major gathering for people across South Suffolk who support our rural way of life.
For me, the hope of more sustained good weather at some point – God willing – brings the enticing prospect of spending more time in our great outdoors. In that regard, I no doubt join many readers in looking forward particularly to picking up my paddle, inflating the kayak and heading out on our beautiful River Stour.
Now, it’s fair to say that as MPs we get our fair share of trolling on social media, but none compares to the tirade I have received for supposedly ‘voting to pump raw sewage’ into our waterways, replete with edited pictures of me, paddle in hand. It is hard to imagine any MP faced with a choice ‘to pump raw sewage or not pump raw sewage’ voting for the former, but in reality there has never been such a vote. As ever, things are a bit more complicated than that, even if pretending otherwise makes for a great chance of political point scoring at the lowest level.
When I met with the Environment Agency late last year, they confirmed that after extreme weather events such as prolonged heavy rain, they do allow water utilities to release treated sewage into rivers and streams. It is important to note that if storm overflows were not in place, the outcome would almost certainly be raw sewage backing up in streets and homes. This is the unavoidable logic of the position and, as the governing Party, when voting in the Commons we cannot simply back a well-meaning amendment or motion – for example, promising to stop such action on an undeliverable timescale - if it would be impracticable in the real world.
This is not to say that the existing position we find ourselves in is ideal – very obviously that is not the case, particularly with regards to certain water companies who are failing to deliver the standards of water management that bill payers rightly expect. As my constituency neighbour, Secretary of State for the Environment, Therese Coffey, recently wrote in an article for the conservativehome website: “the public is rightly disgusted by the water companies’ excessive use of overflows, which is a blight on our beautiful rivers and coastlines… clearly, our water companies have become over-reliant on them”.
This is why as a Government committed to addressing this issue, but in a way that is deliverable, we recently published our ‘Plan for Water’. The plan sets out a suite of new and meaningful policies to transform how we manage our water system in England. These measures include a new Water Restoration Fund where money from water company environmental fines and penalties - taken from company profits - will be spent directly on restoring the water environment under a catchment-based approach; changing the law to increase the amount that the Environment Agency can penalise water companies for damaging the environment - consulting on potentially unlimited penalties; and bringing forward proposals to ban the use of plastic in wet wipes.
In good news for South Suffolk farmers, the plan for water will more than double the funding under the Slurry Infrastructure Grant to £34 million to reduce farm nutrient pollution, in addition to supporting farmers with food production by enabling them to store more water on their land – launching the second round of £10m Water Management Grant to fund on-farm reservoirs and irrigation equipment.
But ultimately this will require very significant investment in new capacity for our water system, and as the Treasury Minister responsible for infrastructure, I was pleased to recently meet up with key stakeholders involved in the Thames Tideway tunnel, a circa £5bn 25km ‘super-sewer’ to reduce at a grand scale the very overflows that people are understandably so worried about.
Locally, Sudbury and Hadleigh have seen investment from Anglian Water to improve the river quality of our nearby waterways – this includes work upgrading the Sudbury and Hadleigh Water Recycling Centres (WRC), which will remove phosphorous from wastewater, thus improving river water quality nearby. Nationally and locally, we need to keep investing, and driving such change, if we are to protect our great waterways and ease peoples’ understandable concerns.
Published by the Suffolk Free Press.
