"Status Quo Not An Option": Defra Secretary Hints At Action On Thames Water
Andy Burnham is rumoured to make an announcement on Thames Water in his speech to Labour's party conference (Alamy)
4 min read
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Angela Eagle has hinted that government action on Thames Water is coming, telling PoliticsHome that "the status quo is not an option".
Speaking to PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown at Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sunday, Eagle said the privatised system currently in place is not "working" and that she is "examining a whole range of potential options”.
Andy Burnham is facing calls to bring Thames Water into public ownership amid MP and public anger with the water company over its significant debts, rising customer bills and sewage leaks. The firm supplies 16m customers across southern England.
The Prime Minister is set to address the issue of private water companies in his first conference speech as PM on Tuesday afternoon, with a preview making the case for "more control of the basics so that we can make it more functional again".
Eagle told the podcast that "legal certain obligations" meant there were limits on what she could say about Thames Water, but stressed that something has to change.
Asked whether the Thames Water situation would be allowed to stretch out into next year or beyond, Eagle said: “The Thames issue will be dealt with when it's dealt with.
“We have to be absolutely certain that we do these things properly because there's potential litigiousness if not done properly.”
The Environment Secretary held her first meeting with the leaders of the company earlier this month, insisting she was “polite”, but asked if she was angry about its conduct, she said: “My predecessor Emma Reynolds wrote to the regulator after Thames made its final offer on restructuring, saying that the offer as it was did not meet the environmental interests, or the interests of the customers.
“That’s where we are. There's been a lot of stuff in the newspapers about how Thames are going to make a different offer that hasn't materialised in fact yet.
“So I will wait and see what they come up with. But what's absolutely certain is the status quo is not an option.”
Angela Eagle met with Thames Water's management earlier this month (Alamy)
The Labour MP for Wallasey continued: “We have had 40 years of a privatised water system that has not delivered the benefits that those that privatised it said it would.
“It was privatised without debt, so debt-free. It's now £85bn in debt, and we have collapsing infrastructure in many places, high levels of water bills and sewage in our rivers and sea.
“That is not a system that's working. And the Prime Minister has asked me to look to see what we can do to improve that, and that is what I'm doing.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Eagle, who is one of the longest-serving MPs in the House of Commons, said it feels easier to get things done in the Burnham government than it did in the Keir Starmer administration, explaining that, in her view, the civil service had become "very encrusted in process" in recent years.
She said there's a “more coherent direction” at the centre of government thanks to Burnham's vision: “We know what his basic parameters are and what he wants to achieve.”
Eagle, who revealed this was her 46th Labour conference, said Whitehall was much less "process" focused when Labour was last in power than it is now.
Reflecting on her time as an environment minister in the Tony Blair government, she told the podcast: “It was very, very different the second time around than the first. The first time was much faster decisions, much less process to get through.”
The cabinet minister told PoliticsHome there are too many consultations in the civil service, “consultations just coming out of every pore for no obvious reason," joking: “You have to have a government write-round about whether you can breathe in.”
Eagle said much of it is because departments are worried about leaving themselves open to judicial review, where their decisions are taken to court and potentially overturned.
But she added: “We just have to get the boat out of the harbour, turn it over, get all the barnacles off it, and see if we can actually get faster processes.”
The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced and edited by Lulu Goad and Ewan Cameron for Podot
- Click here to listen to the full conversation with Angela Eagle on the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for 'PoliticsHome' wherever you get your podcasts.
