Cleaning up our rivers:
The Government’s Environment Bill will help to clean up our rivers and protect our environment. Despite this, the usual fake news and hysteria is doing the rounds on social media, with deliberately misleading headlines such as ‘Tory MPs voting to pour sewage in our rivers’.
Last week, MPs voted on the government’s Environment Bill, which is a brilliant piece of new legislation which strengthens many of our existing environmental laws and puts new duties on water companies to monitor water quality, to produce effective drainage and sewerage plans and to reduce impacts of discharges and storm overflows.
An amendment was sent back from the House of Lords suggesting changes to the Bill. Whilst well intentioned, the result of accepting this amendment would have been for households to pay thousands of pounds extra in water bills, so naturally I voted against it.
The amendment called for a complete ban on the use of storm overflows in sewage systems. In theory this is something most people would agree with, but in practice our sewage systems work by allowing discharges in extreme rainfall to prevent flooding. Bearing in mind what we have experienced in Worksop, I think we can all appreciate why we want to do our best to prevent flooding.
If we banned these storm overflows completely it would mean most of the sewage system in the country would have to be reinstalled. In some cases, the gradients involved mean it would not be possible to get a sewage system in place without a discharge release. In this instance a legal ban would mean sewage would be discharged onto pavements, fields, parks etc. instead!
The amendment has now been sent back to the Lords to see if it can be clarified and we will be voting on it again shortly. We often vote multiple times on an amendment as we are creating law, so our vote is not just our opinion on an issue but can also be whether the amendment would be open to legal challenge and can stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. Otherwise we just end up making bad laws.
If we accepted the amendment as currently written, nearly all existing sewage systems in place would be outlawed overnight. There’s also the small matter that it would cost between £150 billion and £660 billion to replace!
Bear in mind also that our sewage system has been in place since Victorian times, so a good couple of hundred years. This was a triumph of engineering at the time and still works very well to this day. From the news being spread on social media, anybody would think this is a new thing we have just decided to introduce. It’s a little bit like eating steak and chips, then telling somebody the next day that the government is planning on allowing farmers to kill cows to produce the meat, only for them to be horrified because they don’t know where meat comes from in the first place. If anything, what we are seeing is a lack of understanding as to how our sewage systems actually work – and have always worked.
I hope this information is useful and hopefully reassures you somewhat that clear and effective action is being taken to address storm overflows. It’s very disappointing that at a time we are all asking for politer political discourse, that again we are discussing misrepresentation and falsehoods.
