Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-13
Topic: Environment
Anthony Gueterbock (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, Amendment 75 is part of the relevant activities in this section but it is very specific to the Isles of Scilly, which, as the Minister will know, is where I live. In fact I was late this morning because the transport there did not work, but there we are The amendment relates to the drainage and water supply of the island. As noble Lords will know, there is one big island, St Mary’s, and four inhabited islands. A couple of years ago, after the Isles of Scilly (Application of Water Legislation) Order came into force, the water supply was taken over by South West Water as the nominated undertaker, and that has all been working fine. The sewage on most of Saint Mary’s and Tresco has also been taken over by South West Water, but on the other three islands it has not I am raising this issue today because this is very opportune. I heard about this only a couple of weeks ago, when the farmer next door to where I live, in Bryher, who in his spare time empties septic tanks and soakaways if they overflow, received a letter from the Environment Agency saying that, from 1 October, some very high charges would be imposed, plus fines, if he did not comply with the Water Resources Act 1991 as it is now applied to Scilly. That came into effect about 18 months ago, but, frankly, no one seems to have done much about it. Worse still, what do you do about it? You cannot suddenly put in a main drainage system or deal with septic tanks just like that, as we all know. At present, the system seems to work all right in the off-islands; if your tank needs emptying, the farmer empties it and deals with it in a reasonably environmentally friendly way. It does not get into the water supply or the sea, but it gets dumped somewhere nobody knows. But of course this is not what the Water Resources Act wants and, reasonably, needs The real problem is that the Environment Agency says that everything should be screened, and anything caught in the screen should then get incinerated. That is fine, but the first job is to build an incinerator. On a small island, that is not particularly easy, even if you have the money—and I do not yet know where the money is going to come from. St. Mary’s is going to have one, and maybe that will mean transporting 10 tonnes of solids every week on the inter-island ferry —in watertight containers, presumably—to be incinerated there. Again, that is a perfectly good solution, except they have not started building an incinerator yet, so they cannot do that anyway With the amendment, I have tried to produce a way to persuade the Minister that these charges and potential fines should not be applied to those who are not connected to a statutory undertaker for sewage until or unless something is built that enables their sewage to be treated in a proper way. Whether much happened between March 2020 and recently, I do not know, but I have talked to the Environment Agency locally, and I am also grateful for the help that officials at Defra gave me last week when we had some very useful conversations. What I think will come out of this, if the Minister is prepared to give me some assurances, is that these new charges and/or fines will not come into effect until it is possible and, shall we say, cost-effective to implement and operate them. I hope the Minister can give me assurances such as that tonight In the last two or three weeks, there have been several meetings between the Duchy, the Council of the Isles of Scilly, the Environment Agency and South West Water, and I hope that that indicates some progress. I think we all want progress, including the Ministers and the Environment Agency, and it occurs to me that it might help that progress if it were possible for a Minister to go there and, shall we say, encourage the working group to get on and do it. First of all, you have to design a sewage system, but some islands are solid granite and, fairly obviously, it is not that easy to build septic tanks in granite. There are an awful lot of things going on and it would be easy for this issue to fall to the bottom of the list.