Today, MPs should be voting on Labour’s sewage bill – but the Tories shredded it

There isn’t a corner of the country free from the threat of raw human sewage being dumped in the places where people live, work and holiday. The places where people have invested everything they have are being treated with contempt at a rate of 1.5 million dumps a year – 800 every single day. Water companies are continuing to dump, with a complicit Tory government aiding and abetting them.

The fight began over a year ago, and it was borne from a rallying call to offer Britain a new path after more than a decade of decline. This is about the wild west of water regulation, but it’s much more than that. It’s about the pride and respect working people have for their community not being reciprocated by the government or the water companies.

The bonds we make, the relationships we hold dear and the memories which make life worth living – the environment and nature are central to this. The places we go to rest, recharge and relish moments together. The country parks we walk in, the beaches our children build sandcastles on, the rivers where anglers wait patiently for the catch of the day. Those moments, and that basic right we are due as working people, is being denied to millions, and Labour won’t stand for it. Worse still, hard-working people are already paying for the privilege of having sewage treated, only to find it dumped in their backyards.

The Tories have allowed villages, towns and cities across the country to be treated as open sewers, showing that they have no respect for places where people live, work and holiday. Our coastal communities, which rely so heavily on visitors, shouldn’t have to worry about encountering filthy raw sewage. But every single time I visit one of our great coastal communities, I hear of the damage being caused to local economies.

Today, parliament should have been sitting to pass Labour’s bill to end the Tory sewage scandal. The bill would have made water companies put monitors on every outlet, so we know exactly what is being dumped, how often and where. Crucially, financial penalties would be paid the second a dump happens, with the payment meter ticking over every second until it stops. Bill payers would have been protected in law from picking up the bill, forcing the powerful water company owners to finally act in the national interest.

All this ends the Tory business-as-usual approach of long, expensive investigations and toothless fines that don’t change behaviours and see sewage dumping continue to at least 2050. Another lost chance to improve the lives of a generation of working people.

Last Tuesday, in response to the Conservatives’ refusal to provide parliamentary time to change the law to end the Tory sewage scandal, Labour stepped forward. We tabled a motion that would have given us the power to pass legislation today that would have made it a legal requirement for the Tories and water companies to clean up their act.

The Tories feared our bill so much they shredded it, moving a wrecking amendment to our motion, removing all the powers and legal teeth that we know are needed. Despite Labour’s best efforts to stop it, the Tories, for a second time, voted to keep dumping sewage every two and a half minutes in places where people live, work and holiday.

It’s the same old Tories, government by press release over principle, and the same old panicked regurgitated announcements, which continue the Tory sewage scandal for decades to come. Labour is ambitious for Britain and ambitious for working people. This is a fight for much more than just clean water. And we have no intention of letting it go.