A Cross-party Commitment

With just a few days to go until the General election, we look back at the Cross Party Panel at the UK River Summit last month. We will be publishing sections of the panel discussions each day this week.

The UK River Summit took place at Morden Hall on May 21st. Unbeknown to us at the time, it was the day before the general election was announced. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that no one from the Conservative party was able to join us although the invitations were sent in the preceding months so we suspect it was just one contributing factor….

In the spirit of collaboration, we invited representatives from the major political parties. We had Tim Farron, the environmental spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, Toby Perkins, MP for Chesterfield and Shadow Secretary for Nature and Rural Affairs and Kat Foxhall,  Green Party District Councilor, with the panel chair being the CEO of River Action, James Wallace. A special guest had agreed to join a little later as well. Please see below the first 20 minutes of the panel discussion, some of the politician’s pledges, and what they see as their key focuses in relation to water.

James Wallace opens the panel:
”We are going to run out of water in this country and dare I say it we are woefully prepared. That is a great concern to us as citizens and as voters as well. So having had a panel where we were lucky enough to hear from a water company boss, leading activists, journalists and a regulator and so on and also a representative of the industry, we're now going to hear from three politicians and we have a special guest who's going to join us as well part way through. And what we're hoping in this exercise is to try and understand a bit of analysis on the past, you know, what could we have done better and differently, but also what would they like to do if they were given the opportunity to effectively run DEFRA and to be responsible for the Treasury. And we'll talk about things like regulatory reform and so on. So get ready for your questions. We will make sure there's some time towards the end for that. So to introduce our panelists, would you mind standing up, the three of you, so everyone can see who you are, thank you…

We have Toby Perkins, who's made a long journey down from Chesterfield, MP for Chesterfield and also the Shadow Minister for Nature and Rural Affairs. We have Kat Foxhall, who's actually just over the hill from me in Wiltshire, but we didn't know each other until the other day, Green Party District Councillor and Nature Recovery Champion and you work across the Vale of the White Horse, so if anyone knows the Bronze Age track known as the Ridgeway, it's that sort of area. And then Tim Farron, you've made a long journey as well from Westmoreland and Longsdale, MP and also ex-leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, as I'm sure you all know, and current environmental spokesman for the party. So thank you, all three of you.”

Lucy Young Photos

“So what we're going to do to start off, and I'm going to sit down now as well, is to hear a little bit about the past. I'd like you all to introduce yourselves, a little bit about your particular interest in this subject of water scarcity. I'm going to ask you two questions at once.

-One is where have things gone wrong from your point of view? We're talking politically here, so we're thinking about things like regulation, finance and so on. So a brief summary please.

-Two, just briefly, to just paint a bit of a picture for the floor, what is it that you would like to see change so that you could tackle the freshwater emergency?

I'll start with you, Toby…”

Toby Perkins:

“Okay, so basically 100 years of failure in 30 seconds, I think you wanted there. The reality is we've had 100 years of failure. The failure in investment in our water industry is a very long-standing one and firstly, the big element of the failure has been the water companies and that's why we need to absolutely put the water industry on special measures as the Labour Party has said. We need to have much stronger fines for the water companies. They need to be instant and they need to be severe enough that the water companies take action. We need to make sure that water company bosses aren't able to pollute our rivers at the same time that they're getting these massive bonuses. So we'll take serious action to block water company bonuses and actually six of the nine water companies would have had their bonuses blocked under the proposals that we've brought forward. We need criminal liability for water company bosses that have failed and that's the proposal - the package that the Labour Party are putting together because fundamentally the water companies are at the heart of the issue. There's a number of other aspects and we'll talk about those over the course of this, the lack of the investment both when it was under the government and in the privatized era, an agricultural dimension too, there's other elements there, but tackling the water companies is the very starting point of tackling the problems in our water industry and making sure we rebuild confidence in water companies. That's true in the water sector, but both transparency and a change in people's experience will bring about that change. So fundamentally, sort out the water companies, that's the first part. And then alongside that, there's a big piece around investment, around consumer behaviour, around some of the issues that we were hearing previously about leakage. But the starting point of all this: sort the water companies out.”

James Wallace: “Thank you very much. Kat, next.”

Kat Foxhall:

“Thank you very much and thank you for a fascinating day. It's been really great to be here. So I'm a district councillor in the Vale of Whitehorse, which has got chalk streams of the ridgeway at the south, we're bounded by the River Thames on the north, and we have the Abingdon Reservoir proposals slap in the middle, and the rest of the Vale is a kind of sewage-y swamp. So I got into politics primarily because of families and because of water and sewage.

So this is an issue I think about all the time. And now the Green Party's, how would we fix this problem? The Green Party's position is fundamentally that water should be in community ownership. The fundamental problem is that for a long time, understandably, we've treated water itself as if it has no inherent value. So the whole structure of the water companies is about extracting profit from something we have assumed will always be there and will always be free, and we can just take, take, take. So what we need to do is fundamentally rethink what we understand water to mean financially, in terms of governance and culturally and socially too. So when we were talking this morning about catchment-based approaches, I think that's what the Green Party would advocate. We would bring the water companies back into public ownership, we would trigger the special administration that can be done in order to prevent the profits. I've been amazed how few times we've actually mentioned the word profit and dividends today.

So, we would stop that process and then we would completely reconfigure our entire water system to bring NGOs, charities, anglers, ordinary people back into the governance structure of water on a regional basis. Involve breaking up a region such as Thames water into three or four different catchments, each of which as a region has responsibility for their own water governance. And as part of that, the philosophy of the Green Party is also that you cannot have environmental justice and climate justice without social justice. And so a really important aspect of that would be ensuring that everybody has access to fair water and fair water pricing. So I think pricing water on a tiered scale so that everybody has access. If you look at somewhere like Durban in South Africa, low income households their required water, their necessary water for their daily lives actually comes free for the lowest households. When you have swimming pools, you have a fleet of Range Rovers, you start to pay more. That becomes really tricky when you're talking about agriculture which uses up such a massive proportion of our water.

However, it's really again about treating farmers as the guardians of the landscape and understanding water as part of a holistic system where we're not just polluting the riverways that we're then expecting the next community down the river to take their fresh drinking water from. But fundamentally it's about completely reforming the governance so that water itself is valued as something inherently valuable.”

James Wallace: “Thank you Kat. And Tim, so where's it gone wrong and what would the Lib Dems like to do about it?”

Tim Farron:

“Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I agree with a lot of what has already been said. I am privileged to be the Member of Parliament for the wettest bit of England and the boundary change is going to make it wetter. In fact, it's going to bring in a place called Wet Sleddle and Wet Sleddle matters. Any fans of Withnail and I? I get the Withnail and I farm in the boundary change, which is awesome. But yes, we are the wettest place in England, and yet we still have water shortages, which is madness.

So what's the problem? Churchill said lots of things, one of which was that democracy is a terrible system, it's just better than all the alternatives. And I suspect what he meant by that is that it obviously is better than all the alternatives. And the problem with it is that it breeds short-term thinking. That people think about the next election.

And I'm afraid Churchill wasn't aware of the internet. And the fact that everyone's attention span is now nanoseconds. And so the real problem with water, actually, with everything else, is an almost total absence of any long-term thinking and long-term planning. The idea that what happens to the generations after me matters. It does matter. It really matters. And so water is just one of the areas where we've made that mistake. If you want to ask me what specifically has gone wrong with water? It's ownership and its regulation. And there's no doubt that the privatisation of the water industry was lunacy. I mean the whole movement at the time, I'm going to do politics for a second, the whole idea at the time that Britain was going to become a shareholder democracy, full of Terry and June’s owning their little bits of the then formerly public sector, and all being small shareholders.

Yeah, that was the case for ten minutes, and then they inevitably sold it on, and finance houses owning the former public utilities that used to belong to all of us leaked out of the system. It's leaked out in terms of dividends, it's leaked out in terms of bonuses and all of the rest of it you know all of that. But let's not pretend the water system was in a great situation pre the privatisation. So you could sort the ownership out without the right regulation you won't take it any further. So my view is simply, the Liberal Democrats view is that we should turn the water companies into public benefit corporations. That would mean that environmental and social considerations would take primacy over profit. Profit would need to be reinvested into the network. And we'd also, I mean the situation is also alluded to by others, that the governance of those water companies, those bodies, would be radically different.

Also, you need to have environmental activists and others, householders and others, who would be formally equal members of those boards, but without a regulator there to do its job, the problem will remain. My sense is you've got Ofwat which feels like it's not an effective regulator and the Environment Agency full of good people, I say full, it has good people, there's not enough of those people and their ability to hold water companies and others to account, to focus on more than one thing at a time in a given area is massively limited because of resource.

We might also just touch on farming. It was good to listen to the back end of the previous panel discussion. The role of Natural England or any successor it might have is key in holding the hands of farmers as they move into nature-friendly forms of farming, and that includes making sure we protect our waterways and ensure we protect our water supplies, that's critical.

So, if we don't get the system right, the outcome will be pear-shaped as well. In the end, we need long-term thinking and we all need to borrow off one another. I always think, (final word from me) it occurred to me on the way here, I spent half my life talking to experts about things in which they are expert in when I'm not an expert. One of the first things you need to remember as a politician is that, as my grandmother told me, Timothy, you've got two ears and one gob, you should use them in those proportions. And our ability surely, that's what our policy is, public benefit corporations, get rid of Ofwat and turn it into the Coastal Rivers Lakes Authority and much more strengthened forms of regulation. But in the end, I want to make sure that what we do next is for the long term. And if we've not got it quite right, I'm all ears, to we make sure that we do.”

James Wallace:

“Thanks Tim, and all three of you. I would just like to point out there is an empty chair. I wonder if anyone in the room could guess why it's empty. That is the Conservative representative for Rivers. I would like you to know that we tried really, really hard to make sure a Conservative representative was here today and we're very sad and disappointed, frankly, that no one could make themselves available but I just want to assure you we did try and get all four main political parties present. I'm now going to sit down again. I'd like you to each of you please tell us a little bit about your manifesto commitments. Now of course it's not yet time, we haven't had an election declared, but I hope at least this subject would have been discussed. Now just a reminder, we're not talking about sewage, we're not talking about agricultural pollution, we're talking about not enough water. So could you just give a bit of a flavour, and we'll start with you this time Kat, on what you think the Greens might be willing to commit to, to make sure we don't run out of water and that our economy isn't entirely ruined?”

Manifesto Commitments

Katherine Foxhall, Green Party

“I think the key Green Party point is to bring water back into public ownership and to public responsibility for the water. That whatever system replaces it is fair, particularly to lowest incomes, families and households, and to all of the people who need to use water. Bringing water back into public ownership is the key Green Party position. But we also recognise that that's only the start, that we then need to go much further. It's really easy to sit here and say, you know, re-nationalize the water companies because we know that's what people want to hear, but that is not going to bring all the money back that's gone out to the investors. So this question of how do you reform the water is, as Tim says, a huge long-term commitment. And I think the Greens' job is to push Liberal Democrats and Labour harder. And that's why we're working so hard to get more Green MPs, so that we can, particularly in the expectation that Labour will possibly form the next government, push them harder to make genuine commitments to the climate and to the environment, not to roll back on their £28 billion pledges. And that's what we see as our job.”

Tim Farron, Liberal Democrat Party

“I think you can't divorce the leakage of money from the leakage of water. They are completely intrinsically connected. And so, my sense and our party's position on this is that re-nationalisation might be, as far as I can see myself, a way of spending an awful lot of money and not achieving anything. And so my sense is I wish privatisation never happened. I'm not convinced spending billions of pounds on buying those companies back and that money going into shareholders' pockets is the best use of public money. Far better to transform the structure of those companies so they become public benefit effectively, not-for-profit companies. And therefore you're still able to raise the money, and any public money that there is, you spend on sorting the problem out. I'm open to alternative suggestions if people think it could be done, re-nationalised in a way which wouldn't mean a vast amount of public money not going on solving the problem. But the point is, if you're able to therefore prevent money leaking out, so is it £67 billion in dividends has leaked out of the water industry since privatisation. That money could have been spent on our network. Now we are where we are, we're not in 1989, but if we were in that period of time, that's the amount of money that is missing from the system. Which is why it's right for politicians to be honest and say, we'll not fix it overnight. But you start overnight, and you start by changing the structure of the companies so the money doesn't leak out of the system and changing and strengthening the regulator. It feels like too cosy a relationship. You look about, for example, bonuses are not the be all and end all. I've never worked in a business where anybody got paid bonuses, but my understanding is bonuses is a thing that you get for doing a good job. Ofwat for example are still consulting, thinking and stroking their chins about whether we're going to do anything to regulate bonuses. Well, I want a regulator that is far more incisive and more immediate and able to take tough action than that. So, yeah, changing the structure of companies and changing and strengthening the regulation then gives us the ability to invest in sorting out the infrastructure. We've got, what, 400 million litres of water being leaked just out of the nation's bathrooms every year. Things like that, the retrofitting that could solve that problem, doing an awful lot of investment in the existing networks, bearing in mind there's a big body of work to be done over even knowing where the pipes are in the first place. So many regions, we haven't got accurate maps at all, we certainly don't up in the Lake District. I can't tell you where the lakes are, I can't tell you where the pipes are, and so being able to get to grips with the beginning of the problem gives you the ability to maybe solve it.”

Toby Perkins, Labour Party

“Well, I think the first thing to say, and I think it's worth saying this, is that it's not by any means a crazy idea, it's just that the government could run water happens in many countries, and that's why the Labour Party opposed privatisation in the first place, and why I think it was a huge mistake. But in terms of bringing it back into public ownership, it's not true to say it just could be done by some sort of special administration and therefore there wouldn't be a cost. It would cost billions and billions of pounds that would be stuffed into the pockets of those who own the water companies at a time when we've got a massive underspending in our National Health Service, we've got massive infrastructure challenges facing us. The IMF today announced that the government's got a £30 billion a year black hole in its future plans. So to tackle water in that way, in a way that doesn't bring any extra money into the sector, is not in itself a policy for addressing these challenges. It's not a crazy policy to nationalise water, but it is not straight to suggest that this doesn't come at huge public cost. And I agree that that isn't the priority. What is the priority is to firstly strengthen regulation so that we hold the water companies to account both legally and financially in terms of the standards that must be demanded.

It's to strengthen Ofwat, to make sure that their remit, working alongside the Environment Agency, holds water companies' feet to the fire. It's to ensure that the polluter pays, whether that be the water company or anyone else, whether that be through industry or agriculture. It's also to make sure that the environment and land management scheme, which was a really important, quite brave initiative of the government in theory, actually works to support farmers to reduce the agricultural run-off, which is another part of the whole pollution. And pollution and fundamentally to make sure that we tackle the under-investment in infrastructure that has been in the water industry and that has been in a whole raft of industries over the course particularly of the last 14 years and arguably over a much longer period than that.”

James Wallace, “Toby just to follow on then, do you see any hope that we might from a Labour government or coalition or whatever we're going to see that there might be some sort of expedition or speeding up of for example investment in reservoirs and pressuring water companies to fix the leakage. You mentioned 3 billion litres a day, that is a frightening amount isn't it? Is Labour willing to make commitments like that?”

Toby Perkins, “Yes, we absolutely will be holding the water companies to account far more strongly than has happened so far. PR24 is going to take place, first announcement on that is going by probably the time of the general election, the forward plan for the next five years in terms of that investment will have been put in place. It's important that there is an investment, but it's also important that the water companies are held to account to actually deliver on the scale of investment that is there. But then there's also in terms of the scarcity, the warnings that we've had this week of potentially running out by 2032 are huge. There's a massive need to build more housing and that can only be done with infrastructure alongside that housing in the way that the Labour Party has been talking about. Today we've got a housing crisis in this country and addressing that is going to be fundamental too. So there is going to be a real need for a Labour party to work across the sector with all aspects to make sure we address these issues because fundamentally without the infrastructure in place we'll carry on with the failure we've seen.”