Our rivers are being poisoned by a broken system - it's time to bring water back into public hands - Anna Dixon
My Shipley constituency is fortunate to be home to two beautiful rivers, the Aire and the Wharfe. They should be places where people want to walk, exercise, enjoy nature and spend time with friends and family.
But instead, my local residents, from Bingley to Burley-in-Wharfedale, have become afraid to let their children paddle or swim because of the health risks created by horrific sewage dumping by the company that is supposed to steward our waterways.
Last week in Westminster Hall, I spoke in a debate responding to a petition signed by thousands of people from across the country, calling for a referendum on public ownership of water. I want to explain why I believe they are right.
You might expect a company like Yorkshire Water, under intense public pressure to clean up our rivers and lakes, to do everything within its power to improve. Instead, their own data shows that major pollution incidents in Yorkshire rose by a shocking 72 per cent last year, and the company is now about to be awarded the ignominy of a one-star rating by the Environment Agency - the lowest possible score. It is clear to all of us that this is not a company struggling to change; it is a company with no intention of changing at all.
All the while, at a time when households are already under huge cost-of-living pressures, Yorkshire Water has seen fit to raise bills by a jaw-dropping 29 per cent, costing the average household an extra £135 per year. You may think, though, that at least that extra money will be going towards fixing our crumbling infrastructure and improving services, right? Unfortunately, no. Right now, a quarter of every Yorkshire Water customer's bill is used simply to service the company’s spiralling debt.
This is the legacy of the disastrous decision taken by the then Conservative Government in 1989, when we did something no other country in the world has done: we handed the ownership of our most precious natural resource to private companies. At the time, we were promised investment, efficiency and innovation. Instead, all we have seen is rising debt, rising bills, and our rivers, once among the cleanest in the world, turned into an ecological catastrophe.
We are often told that public ownership of water would be prohibitively expensive, or simply too radical. None of these claims, however, hold up to any scrutiny. The £100bn price tag regularly quoted by members on the Conservative parliamentary benches relies on valuation methods that bear little relation to the real worth of financially distressed companies. This method puts Thames Water's value at over £20bn, yet when it was offered for sale last year at just £4bn, no buyer came forward.
It is also not true that public ownership can't deliver better results. In Paris, remunicipalisation of water services has brought improved service quality, improved water quality, and lower prices. Parisian households now also pay around a third less for their water than my constituents in Shipley.
I don't believe tighter regulation alone will fix this. The fact is that private companies exist to make a profit for their shareholders, and that will always come before their duty of stewardship over something as vital as our water.
That is why I urge the Government to bring Thames Water into special administration now, and to use the forthcoming Water Reform Bill to go further than the Cunliffe Commission recommends and set out a genuine legal framework for a new, publicly owned model of water. This is not about returning to the nationalised industries of the 1970s, but a modern model of stakeholder governance built to deliver clean rivers, resilient infrastructure and fair bills.
Anna Dixon is the Labour MP for Shipley.