Tories duck environment activists' conference

Days before prime minister Rishi Sunak announced the date of the next General Election, the Conservative party failed to show for a panel of political parties convened to outline their plans for the water industry to an activists’ conference.

The Liberal Democrat, Green and Labour parties attended the event organised by the South East Rivers Trust last week, but the government was empty-chaired by the organisers who said: “We tried really, really hard to make sure there was a Conservative representative here today and we're very sad and disappointed, frankly, that no one can make themselves available.”

Shadow minister for nature and rural affairs, Toby Perkins; Lib Dem environment spokesman, Tim Farron; and the Green Party’s Katherine Foxhall presented their parties’ outlooks for the UK water industry to the UK River Summit of environmental activists and their supporters.

Perkins described Labour’s proposal package as “fundamentally, to sort out the water companies… to absolutely put the water industry on special measures.” He added: “We need to have much stronger fines for water pollution incidents 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 so we will take serious action to block water company bonuses.”

Fallon said the Lib Dems’ call was to turn the water companies into “public benefit corporations.” That, he said, would mean that “environmental and social considerations would take primacy, and profit would need to be reinvested into the network.” He went on: “The governance of those water companies would be radically different. You need to have environmental activists and householders and others who would be formally equal members of those boards.”

According to Foxhall, “The key Green point is to bring water back into public ownership and to ensure that whatever system replaces it is fair, particularly to those on the lowest incomes, and to all of the people who need to be supported. “We would bring NGOs, charities, anglers, ordinary people back into the governance structure of water on a regional basis.”

She said the Green Party wanted to see water priced “on a tiered scale,” and pointed to Durban, South Africa, where she said, for low-income households, “the necessary water for their daily lives actually comes free for the most part,” while wealthy users pay.