16:45 Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)

Thames Water bases its estimate of the extra 350 million litres a day on a population increase forecast of 2.1 million over the next 25 years, which translates into an extra 1.3 million houses, and on climate change projections—for the avoidance of doubt, I am not a climate change denier, and I accept that climate change will absolutely have an impact on water supply in the south-east. Thames Water forecasts that, by 2050, our summers may be an average of 3° hotter and 18% drier. The Environment Agency’s welcome tightening of regulatory oversight also makes it harder to extract water from rivers and underground sources.

To make a wider and less reservoir-focused point, there has not been investment in water storage for some 40 years. Increases in housing and population, climate change and tighter environmental regulation will result in average daily consumption per person rising from 1,300 litres to roughly 1,400 in the next few years. I should also say that one of the arguments that came up when a reservoir was debated almost 10 years ago was the desire to see Thames Water do more to tackle leakage. London suffers from having Victorian infrastructure; we lose an enormous amount of water through leakage. I am pleased to see that Thames Water wants to reduce leakage by 15% by 2025 and 50% by 2050, but that will still not be enough to supplant the increase in demand for water.

What concerns my constituents is not just the building disruption, but whether the case has genuinely been made. They have taken on some of Thames Water’s assumptions: they think that its population forecast and usage projections per person are unrealistically high and, although they are certainly not climate change deniers, they challenge its forecast of the impact of climate change on water availability. The data shows that water availability in London has increased over the past 70 years by about 200 litres a day. My constituents are not necessarily making the case that there should never be a reservoir, but they certainly do not believe that one is needed now; in fact, they argue that if there is ever a case for one, it will not be needed until at least 2100.

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17:20 Luke Pollard (Labour)

Climate change is real and happening to us here in Britain. No single measure can tackle it, but no single measure of water policy is mitigating it. That is why we need a number of separate buckets of action, including: action on leakage, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), to lower the amount of lost water, including the 30% lost on customers’ properties, not just on the public network; a focus on reducing per-person water usage from the national average of about 130 litres a day—some people use considerably more—and increasing grey water use, which was mentioned earlier and could contribute to that; building and supporting the construction of more water transfers; and the Severn option, which is important in this context. On that, we should focus on the use of canals as an option, instead of a big pipe, and the date that was mentioned, 2080, seems far too far away.

Other actions include a necessary look at how to build more water storage in areas of water stress. Although as a nation we have not built any new reservoirs, we have certainly provided additional water storage, sometimes using quarries and mines—nothing on the size and scale envisaged at Abingdon. Only then, at the very end of the scale, should we look at water desalinisation, which itself has a huge climate change effect.

With climate change, we have to recognise that we will not only have problems of water shortage at certain times of the year—we will also have problems with too much water at other times of the year. That issue was mentioned earlier in the debate.

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17:25 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)

Water is essential for everything we do. It is also essential for a healthy environment and a prosperous economy. A reliable water supply is taken for granted but, despite its reputation for rain, which has been mentioned many times, England risks water shortages, in particular in certain areas. Climate change and increasing population, especially in the drier south and east, as well as the need to protect the environment—including chalk streams—bring further challenges. A water company’s job is to take account of those factors and to provide a reliable supply of safe drinking water. The Government and the water regulator’s job is to check that they are doing that effectively.

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