Coffey swipes at cost and practicality of other parties’ sewage plans

Environment secretary, Therese Coffey, last week told the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester that Labour’s plan to clean up sewage discharges would cost households an extra £1,000 a year.

Her speech, which dealt mostly with farming, also concluded that Labour “looked the other way” in government regarding sewage pollution, presiding over “minimal monitoring” of overflows.

Meanwhile Coffey called the Liberal Democrat’s sewage plan “nothing but a gimmick,” arguing: “Switching off storm overflows, great, that would lead sewage to back up into your homes.”

The Liberal Democrats set out in a report, Tacking the nature crisis, published at their autumn conference in Bournemouth, the following water policy agenda:

• no storm discharges to sensitive areas by 2030, with stringent targets and deadlines beyond that;

• nature-based solutions to be prioritised above engineered solutions;

• a sewage tax on water company profits to fund the cleanup of waterways;

• abolish Ofwat and replace it with a new regulator with “significantly strengthened powers to hold the companies accountable for discharging raw sewage, fixing leaks and restricting dividends and bonuses for water companies that fail to clean up our rivers”;

• every water and sewerage company to immediately publish details of its discharge permits and real time data on spill duration, volume and water quality;

• a new scale of daily fines for sewage overflow incidents;

• proper enforcement of the farming rules for water;

• a requirment on new developments to meet strict water management standards before they can link to the sewer system; and

• transform water companies into public benefit companies, “so that economic and environmental policy objectives must be considered explicitly in the running of the companies and add local environmental groups onto water companies’ boards”.

The Labour Party Conference is underway now in Liverpool.