Clive Lewis MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  When coming to a crunchy question or problem, I always think it is wise to take a step or two back and try to unpick some of the assumptions that underpin the issue—to see the bigger picture, if you like. Not everyone will agree with some of the conclusions that I come to, and that is fine—this is a debate, not an echo chamber, although some people may be surprised to hear that—but it is right that we robustly test the proposition before us, to try and understand the structural issues that underpin this Bill. Let us consider the key issue here: rising welfare costs could lead to the welfare budget becoming unsustainable. The assumption often made is that welfare costs rise because of individual failings, such as people being lazy, unwilling to work or even dishonest—workshy, in other words—but this assumption does not stand up to scrutiny. The welfare bill is not growing because people suddenly became lazy. It is rising because our economy and our society are fundamentally broken. They are broken because of 14 years of cuts and of dehumanised, punitive changes wrapped up as reform but little more than a brutal disciplining of the workforce, compliments of the Conservatives. That workforce are increasingly finding themselves trapped between insecure low pay and in-work poverty, or a humiliating workfare programme that has sucked the marrow out of millions, leaving them drained and burned out and leading to a soaring mental health crisis. What does explain our dilemma is the fact that work itself has fundamentally changed. Jobs are less secure and often poorly paid, and many who work full time still need benefits because wages do not meet the basic costs of housing, food, childcare and utilities. On top of this, the cost of living crisis is being driven by a toxic mix of structural failures. The climate crisis has increased volatility in the global supply chains of everything from microchips to semiconductors, pushing up food and energy costs. At the same time, companies operating under monopoly and oligopoly conditions, particularly in the energy, water and food sectors, have taken advantage of this disruption to engage in price gouging, driving profits sky high while families struggle to make ends meet. As has been repeatedly pointed out, the weakness of trade unions has limited workers’ ability to bargain for pay rises that reflect rising costs—costs that, by and large, Governments have failed to cap. Yes, caps on energy prices have been half-heartedly attempted, but what about a cap on rents and on greedy landlords? What about capping the large agri-corporations pushing up food prices or water companies extorting all of us? These are the underlying structural causes. Their collective outcome is a relentless squeeze on real incomes and an increased reliance on welfare simply to survive. In truth, our welfare system is increasingly the state subsidising employers who pay poverty wages, landlords charging unaffordable rents and corporations extracting vast profits, all at society’s expense. All the while our climate and ecology decline, adding to that instability. The Bill, which at its heart is about balancing the books by tightening welfare eligibility and gatekeeping access, will not address those root causes. It still punishes victims rather than tackling the structural failures, and I cannot support it. That is why I will support the reasoned amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell). The Labour Government have made a start on many of those structural issues—the trade union Bill, GB Energy and the leasehold Bill—but they must go further and faster if we are to make a real impact on who our economy works for and, ultimately, bring down the welfare bill. Welfare reform should deliver dignity and fairness, not austerity and exclusion. Until we face those deeper truths, we will continue to address the symptoms rather than the causes, perpetuating the very injustices we claim to want to solve and that so many of us came to this place to sort out.

• 3 Jun 2025 · Thames Water · Hansard source

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  Let me begin by drawing Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Let us be clear that the collapse of KKR’s rescue deal is not a blip; it is a reckoning—a moment that exposes the complete bankruptcy of the privatised water model. This morning’s interim Cunliffe review of the water sector confirms the scale of the crisis. It describes our water system—a regulated statutory monopoly—as being too risky for investors now. It did not seem to be too risky when shareholders were siphoning off billions in dividends while letting the pipes rot, the rivers choke and the debt pile up. The only people truly at risk now are bill payers, who face a 35% real-terms price hike in the next five years—and not just to fund clean water or climate resilience, because half of it is to boost investor return. So I ask my right hon. Friend again: when will the Government stop fiddling, put Thames Water into special administration, strip out the debt, and begin the job of returning our water system—not just Thames Water—to public ownership?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress and then give way, and I will also try to keep the volume down a little bit. This is about the maintenance of a political and economic model that was never built to serve the public—a model designed to shield the wealth of asset holders, landlords, shareholders, corporations and, yes, privatised water companies. But here is the great irony: the very greed, recklessness and contempt of the water industry—its excesses—have cracked open the door, and through that crack, we glimpse an opportunity. It is an opportunity to shatter the myth of privatisation’s inevitability, to break free from the narrow, self-imposed rules that have caged our Government’s economic choices, to expose its failures, to challenge its dominance and, above all, to show this country that there is an alternative—an alternative that is democratic, sustainable and run in the interests of the many, not the few. We can do it better.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  No, my hon. Friend has made his point.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I did hear the intervention, but I wanted to make some progress. Take this one example. Under this Bill, if a water company breaches the terms of its licence with a major sewage discharge, it can forget shareholder payout and piling on more debt. If it does it twice, it is in the last chance saloon. After three strikes, it is out—licence terminated and on its bike—and those price-gouging, asset-stripping, river-killing vulture capitalist outfits will be rolled into the sunset without a penny in compensation. What about those water infrastructure assets that they have been sweating for private gain? They go back into the public realm, thank you very much. If they start whining about debts, do not worry: we will do a full audit of what they invested, what they racked up in debt, what they paid out in dividends and what they stuffed into bloated executive pay packets. I will tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am yet to see a single privatised English water company walk away with anything other than a well-earned spanking and a sharp haircut for its creditors. Those assets will belong to the public once again, and we will not pay a penny more than they are worth. I can hear people thinking, “Where will the money come from? How will you invest in publicly owned water without the private sector?” I will tell them where it has not come from in these past 35 years—I am mind-reading again.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Around 50 years ago, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution tore up the rulebook on political and economic management. She rewrote it with a single unwavering principle: that the pursuit of profit would serve the public good, even when it came to vital public services—even when it came to water. We often say that society stands on the shoulders of giants, but giants cast long shadows, and Thatcherism’s shadow looms dark over our water system today. Whether we see ourselves standing on her shoulders or trapped in her shadow, one thing is undeniable: she proved that the world can be made differently. And if it can be made differently once, it can be made differently again. That, as the brilliant anthropologist David Graeber understood, is the hidden truth of the world. It is something we create and can choose to create anew. We can do it better. Today, I want to show this House and this country that water is the lens through which we can imagine something better—a better way of running our economy, a better way of safeguarding our environment and a better way of empowering the public, for whom democracy supposedly exists. But that requires something very difficult: it requires us to break free from the constraints of our imagination and to let go of the idea that this economic model is all there is or all there ever could be. It saddens me to say that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 perfectly exemplifies this failure of imagination. One of its leading proponents has a particular rhetorical flourish they love to use when dismissing calls for public ownership of water. They say, “I’m more interested in the purity of our water than the purity of our ideology.” I love that quote. I love it because it lays bare just how deeply the ideology of privatisation, and all that goes with it, has embedded itself. So entrenched is it within our collective consciousness that we no longer recognise it as an ideology. We no longer see it for what it is: a systemic exploitation of a common resource for private gain. Instead, it has simply become the natural order of things. But how much longer can this go on? Since the crash of 2008, this ideology has been faltering under the weight of its own contradictions, yet its grip on British politics remains vice-like. Austerity, exploitation and corporate price gouging are still treated not as choices but as inevitabilities. Why? Because too many politicians on both sides of the House refuse to contemplate alternatives. For those on the other side of the House—on the Opposition Benches—I get it: this is their ideology. They are defending their class, and I would imagine they would go further still if they could. But on this side of the House, we have no excuse. We should be standing up for our class: working-class people—the public. Instead, we wrap their ideology in the language of fiscal responsibility, economic prudence and stewardship of the economy. But it is not fiscal responsibility when we balance the books on broken backs. It is not stewardship when the ship has been sold off and the crew left to drown. It is not prudence. It is power maintenance.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  One second. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country, we must treat it as such: an existential conflict. In that context, the actions of these companies—selling off reservoirs, failing to invest, polluting our water—are not just negligent; they are acts that actively undermine our national water security. In any other existential crisis, we might call that what it is: sabotage. And in a time of national peril, sabotage has another name: treason. Let me explain why this matters to me personally. When I served on tour in Afghanistan back in 2009—not in a boy band—I experienced something utterly alien to me: the gnawing fear of thirst; not the mild irritation of forgetting a water bottle, but the deep physical worry that there may not be enough clean water to get through the day. In Britain, we have been blessed: water falls from the sky; it fills our rivers, it soaks our fields, and we joke about it—it is part of who we are. But in Afghanistan there was no humour; only heat, dust and desperation. There I saw children trekking miles through the desert, not for food, not for money, but to beg for clean bottled water. Once we have seen that, and once we have felt that fear, we can never take water for granted again. We never again believe it is something we can waste or pollute or privatise without consequence. That is why I have brought forward this Bill: because anger is not enough; outrage, no matter how justified, will not fix the pipes, stop the sewage or fill the reservoirs. We need a plan. We need a strategy. We need a future. We can do it better. My Water Bill delivers that. It sets out the high standards our country deserves and the democratic governance our water system desperately needs. First, it establishes clear, ambitious targets to stop the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches, to restore our water to high ecological and chemical standards, and to deliver universal, affordable access to water as a basic human right—a right we have never had before in this country. It demands a system designed not just to extract profit but to adapt, to build resilience in the face of climate change, and to harness nature-based solutions that work with the environment, not against it. Secondly, it transforms governance. The Bill introduces representation for workers and local communities on the boards of water companies. It gives voting rights to employees and customers, so that those who use and maintain a system have a real say in how it is run. Water is not a commodity but a common good, and those who depend on it and pay for it should help govern it. Thirdly, the Bill lays the foundations for a democratic future. It establishes a commission on water ownership to advise the Secretary of State on long-term strategy, looking at international best practice, especially in OECD countries, where public water ownership is the norm, not the exception. Crucially, it creates a citizens’ assembly on water ownership to bring the public into the process, to deliberate, debate and decide how we can govern this most precious of resources. The public care, but how do I know that? I know because a small fraction of them are in the Public Gallery today, having travelled here from all over the country; I know because of the thousands of emails that have been sent to MPs across the House; and I know because those people will never stop campaigning until this injustice is resolved. They know that we can protect something not by selling it off, but by standing up for it, involving people in its care and ensuring that it serves the public, today, tomorrow and for generations to come. My Bill offers a pathway out of crisis. It offers control, resilience and democracy. It is not just about cleaning up our rivers, but about cleaning up the system that allowed them to be polluted in the first place. Privatisation is not just a problem—it is the problem. We can do it better. I can hear some people on the Labour Benches thinking, “But we have just passed”—

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  For how long does my hon. Friend think we should polish the turd—we can probably find that floating in most of our rivers—of privatised English water?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  On the issue of water, yes, I would say they are, because whether I like it or not, Reform has a policy for water to be owned 50% by pension companies and 50% by the public. As much as it grieves me to say it, that is a policy of public ownership. They are populist; they are listening to a popular voice.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  People talk about whether something can be taken out of public control and put back into privatisation. Of course, Parliament is sovereign and that can always happen, but there is a point about giving control to the public. Let us take the NHS, which is a public service. Any Government in the post-war period could have taken the NHS back into privatisation. Why did they not do so? They would not have dared, because it would have been so publicly damaging and politically destructive. That is what would happen with our water. Does the hon. Member agree? [Interruption.]

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I will just make some progress, and then I will give way. I am on a roll. Let me tell the House where the money has not come from for these past 35 years. It has not come from private shareholders or long-term thinking, and it certainly has not come from some mythical well of benevolent capitalism. The private companies have put in less than nothing; in fact, they have racked up more than £60 billion in debt. Thames Water has paid more than £7.2 billion in dividends since privatisation, and is now £15.2 billion in debt and counting—work that out. Now, it is trying to plug the hole with a £3 billion emergency loan that will cost 10% in annual interest. That is more than half a billion pounds a year, just for interest payments, courtesy of our bills. That money will not build a reservoir, fix a pipe or clean a river, but it will keep a rotten system afloat for a little longer.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 could have instructed Ofwat to take a far more rigorous approach to the payment of bonuses? At the moment, bosses do not get their bonus if they have a one-star rating. In the last 15 years, every single water company, except one, has had more than a one-star rating, hence they have been able to pay bonuses. Does my hon. Friend think that could have been tightened up?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I can now—for my next trick, I can hear thinking! I can hear them thinking, “But we have just passed the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Clive, so what are you talking about?” Yes, we have, but I am afraid to say it has been watered down— [ Interruption. ] Sorry, I had to get that one in—it was all going so well. The Act does not live up to what was promised, it does not deliver what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. Do not get me wrong: it is a start.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I will be very brief. There is a crisis of democracy, and as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) has just mentioned, we are rejecting a citizens’ assembly. Such an assembly could have the technical support and technical capacity as well, but it would give a voice to the public. Instead, we have decided to give that voice to Sir Jon Cunliffe, a lifelong Treasury insider who works in the City of London and who will make a decision based on its interests. Can she not see the problem here, and the lack of confidence the public have in the democratic decisions that are being taken by people like that?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for making a powerful speech in this debate. There are a few things to say about the costs. First, we would control the assets. The assets would come off the balance sheet, which would be one mitigating factor. Secondly, throughout the post-war period, with British Leyland, Railtrack in 1945, coal, steel, gas, civil aviation and even the Bank of England, we paid less than the market value. As I explained at the beginning, this is about a mindset. We can do an audit of what the companies have taken out —what money they have extracted from our economy— and then we can pay them an appropriate rate and return. It may well be that they are paid nothing, but they may get something. Their creditors may take a haircut, but, frankly, that is better than our constituents taking a continuous haircut with their bills.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I agree with him wholeheartedly and I am just about to come to that point in relation to what the Water (Special Measures) Act does and does not do. It addresses some of those points, but as we have already discussed, privatisation is not just a problem, but the problem, and it is a big part of why so much has gone wrong. Unfortunately, the Water (Special Measures) Act does not live up to what was promised or what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. However, it is a start, and I praise my colleagues on the Front Bench, including the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), who has done so much work in this area. Unfortunately, the Act is not a solution. Remarkably, my Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act does not even define what clean water means. There are no standards or targets—just vague intentions handed over once again to a regulatory system that has already failed us and to the companies that caused the mess in the first place. It says nothing about better governance, and absolutely nothing about the big, fat, humongous elephant in the room: who owns our water? If we do not deal with ownership, we cannot deal with accountability. If we cannot deal with accountability, we can forget clean water. No—we must go further on clean water standards, corporate accountability and what happens when companies fail.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  May I make a more general point? If the Bill went into Committee, we would look at this in far more detail, but a big part of the Bill is about a mission and our direction of travel. It is about tackling the crisis in democracy, and trusting our fellow citizens to give a point of view, with guidance from experts, so that we can make a decision. When the founders of the renaissance or capitalism sat down, did they know that the renaissance would happen, or that capitalism would end up like this? No. This is about heading in a certain direction and having some imagination—

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; I should have said that my hon. Friend made his point. The clock is ticking. The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning. It is our lived reality. Rising droughts, creeping desertification, depleted aquifers, wildfires, systemic collapse—these are no longer projections; they are the forecast turned fact. Preparing for this future and adapting to what is now inevitable has never been more urgent. The evidence is sobering. The UK’s water resources are under mounting pressure and not just from the climate emergency, but from rising demand and population growth. Experts now project that England could face significant water supply deficits as early as 2034 unless we act decisively. That is not a distant horizon; it is a little over a decade away. But while the threat has grown, our resilience has shrunk, because while the climate crisis has intensified, our water infrastructure has stood still, or, worse, been sold off, hollowed out and left to rot. In the 35 years before privatisation almost 100 reservoirs were built; in the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. But it gets worse, because in that same period private water companies have sold off 25 reservoirs without replacing one. Instead of investing in resilience, they have extracted value: £72 billion paid out in dividends while pipes leak, rivers choke, and the public pays the price. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) asks how we can afford it; how can we not afford it? That is not mismanagement; it is a betrayal. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country—

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  No, I am going to carry on and make some progress. You made your point. Let the public—

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  Those are the reasons why I have brought forward this Bill. The Government’s Act does none of those things, but my Bill does. Take just one example—

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. and learned Member for his contribution to the debate. Private water companies have invested less than nothing of their private equity in our water system since privatisation—in fact, we have £60 billion-worth of debt. I reiterate that taxpayers’ and bill payers’ money has gone into the investments in the water system. The private sector has paid less than nothing, so how we can say that a privatised water system—a natural monopoly, for which there is no perfect competition, or no competition at all—is generating innovation or investment? I fail to see that.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  After 35 years of abject failure, it is too little, too late. My Bill would put the final nail in the coffin of this sorry chapter of our country’s water and water system.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I will obviously come to many of those points later in my speech, but let me make this point now: I do not believe in nationalisation, and this Bill has nothing to do with nationalisation. This is about giving the public a say over their water. It is about governance, standards and democracy.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for an excellent speech. I have learned so much history; it has been very interesting. He might be surprised to learn that I do not believe in state ownership of our water assets either. The Bill gives the public the final say on that, along with the Secretary of State and the commission. There are so many other models to consider: municipalised models, mutuals, handing the companies partly over to the strategic authorities and the Mayors that the Labour Government are setting up. There are myriad opportunities, options and routes to go down. People say that the change would not be cheaper. I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to research by Visiting Professor David Hall and Conor Gray at the University of Greenwich. They said that the savings from within the system on a transition to some form of public ownership would amount to between £3.2 billion and £5.8 billion annually for England and Wales—enough to deliver price cuts of between 22% and 34%—because there would be lower rates for the financing of future expenditure.