Barry Gardiner MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Sept 2026 · Water Sector: Public Ownership · Hansard source

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  I hope I do not shock my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies), who made an excellent speech in opening this debate, when I say that I do not want a referendum to bring the water industry back into public ownership. I just want Ministers to get on and do it. The Secretary of State has the power under the Water Industry Act 1991 to petition the High Court for any water company to lose its licence for either poor performance or insolvency. Poor performance? Discharging untreated sewage into our waterways across England and Wales 568,674 times in just one year—I call that poor performance. That is the reason that Ofwat and the Environment Agency have been imposing fines of more than £100 million a time on water companies. No river in England meets good chemical status, and only 14%—one in seven—achieve good ecological status overall. Section 94 of the Water Industry Act sets out that companies have a principal duty to provide sewerage systems. They also have a principal duty to comply with their statutory duties under regulation 4 of and schedule 2 to the Urban Waste Water Treatment (England and Wales) Regulations 1994. The Secretary of State can apply to put a company into a special administration regime if it has contravened, or is likely to contravene, any principal duty. They have; she should. On insolvency, let us turn to Thames Water’s disservice of my constituency of Brent West. Under section 24 of the Act, the company can be taken into an SAR if it “is or is likely to be unable to pay its debts”. Thames Water’s gearing is 88%. Major pension funds have written off their £956 million stake in the company, and it has failed its licence obligation to maintain investment-grade status.

• 14 Sept 2026 · Water Sector: Public Ownership · Hansard source

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  First, I reassure my hon. Friend that she is not an irritating Minister at all; I think she is generally held to be a very good Minister. Can I tempt her to enlarge slightly on what she said? When we talk about an SAR, people say, “Let’s start with Thames Water—it is the obvious one to start with.” Might the reason for the Minister’s hesitation to elaborate be that the Government are now looking much more holistically at what could be done with the whole water sector?

• 14 Sept 2026 · Water Sector: Public Ownership · Hansard source

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  No, I will not. The company’s credit rating is now junk status. The only way it claims it can pay its bills is if the regulator allows it not to do its job of meeting its environmental performance obligations. For goodness’ sake, we do not need a referendum. We need a Secretary of State who is prepared to use the legislation that was provided for the purpose of defending the public.

• 14 Sept 2026 · Water Sector: Public Ownership · Hansard source

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  I fully agree with all that the hon. Lady is saying. Does she find it strange that, although we talk about taking tough action against these companies —we talk about Thames Water’s £80 million rebate and the more than £100 million fine—it is not the investor who ends up paying that, but we the billpayers? Even then, it is not the companies’ investors who suffer; it is us.

• 3 Sept 2026 · Global Biodiversity and Ecosystems: National Security · Hansard source

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  Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not. It is a sober assessment of the risks that global biodiversity loss and the consequent ecosystem collapse pose to our human security. That is why we were never meant to see the report: the previous Administration considered that it was just too alarming. Economic insecurity will become more likely. Migration will rise as development gains reverse. Serious organised crime will look to exploit and gain control over scarce resources. Pandemic risks will increase. Conflict and military escalation will become more likely. The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public. They were even more wrong to fail to make the case by setting out to the public the incredibly good news about how we can avoid those risks and create a world that looks much better than the one we currently inhabit. The convention on biological diversity COP coming up in Yerevan will look at the 23 targets of the global biodiversity framework, which set out the pattern for what we can do to change all this. What happens if we actually achieve them? Our air is cleaner, our water is purer, our energy is cheaper, our health is better, our economy is richer and our world is safer. What’s not to like?

• 1 Sept 2026 · Science Facilities and Laboratories · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a superb case for the importance of funding for her deep earth facility. I had the privilege of going to the National Oceanography Centre’s deep oceans facility, and the innovative science there on carbon sequestration is superb. Does she agree that the sustainability of that world-leading science is dependent on long-term funding certainty? The chop and change that goes on is damaging not just to the world-class science that we do in this country, but to our economy and our skills base.

• 1 Sept 2026 · Science Facilities and Laboratories · Hansard source

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  The Minister will know that the grant structure on which UKRI is based gives out grants for a maximum of three to five years. Very few are for five years—most are for three years or under—yet the sort of long-term scientific development that my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) elaborated on depends on certainty into the future. Will the Minister and her colleagues give real consideration to changing UKRI’s structure so that there is long-term funding certainty for fundamental science in this country?

• 1 Sept 2026 · Direction of Government · Hansard source

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  The Prime Minister has spoken powerfully about the devolution of power and giving back control. Will he therefore ensure that the proposals for commonhold and leasehold reform, for which 5 million leaseholders in this country are waiting with bated breath, do give that power and control back to those people, through the right to enfranchise and the right to manage?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  We know how much land there is in the UK, and we know the extent of our inland waters and seas, so we can know how much we have to do to protect them, as we are required to do by target 3 of the global biodiversity framework. Target 2 of that framework requires us to restore 30% of degraded land, but the Government have not published the amount of degraded land or degraded ecosystems in inland waters and marine environments. How are we supposed to meet our global commitment when we do not know what we have to do?