§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Kenneth Carlisle.]
11.42 pm§ Mr. Tony Speller (Devon, North)It is with great pleasure that I see my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in his place for this debate, not least because it shows the gravity with which the Government view the whole position.
First, I should state what I am not seeking to do in this debate. I am not seeking some sort of anti-nuclear crusade, not least because I have a great respect for the CEGB, the quality of engineering and the ability of the nuclear inspectorate. Secondly, I am not seeking to attack Hinkley Point by some water-borne assault. It has existed for many years and has an excellent record. Thirdly, it is fair to say that my great interest in alternative energy is not intended to be anti-nuclear.
After all, provided that all goes right, nuclear energy is the cleanest non-pollutant energy source, outside the range of wind, wave and solar power. Nuclear energy causes no acid rain, does no damage to the ionosphere and does not push lead into the faces of small children on our streets from car exhausts. This debate comes about from the accident of a rural and tourism Member of Parliament deeply concerned simply about three beaches that do not meet EEC standards: no more and no less.
The Bristol channel runs from the River Severn to the Irish sea, with south Wales on its right, and Somerset, north Devon and north Cornwall on the left. Since obtaining this debate I have been overwhelmed by the instant response of others who, like me, are worried about the quality of the Bristol channel—or, rather, the water within it. Too many authorities control pollution and dumping. Although my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister says that the Department of the Environment co-ordinates all these works, I have not found that to be the case.
When I saw detailed answers about the type of pollution that was occurring, I asked the Prime Minister about co-ordination, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Welsh Office, for the Welsh side of the channel, and the Department of the Environment regarding sewage and other deposits, and of course the Department of Transport, in relation to the water-borne sewage coming from coastal vessels moving up and down our side of the channel.
Some of the answers conflict strongly, but I must thank all the Ministries concerned, especially the Ministry of Agriculture, for speedy and accurate answers. The only Department that has not answered my questions, despite the role allegedly placed upon it by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, is the Department of the Environment, which has had the co-ordinating job—in other words the co-ordinators unfortunately have lost their co-ordinants. Individual Departments can tell me what is happening, but not the co-ordinator. I am not filled with confidence in the Department.
The Bristol channel is seaside for those who live in north Devon; it is ever-present, as one crosses Exmoor, and as one comes into my constituency. There is the water, which we call the sea. I have known it well since I was a child. It is the place where one builds sandcastles. plays in 923 the water, and later swims, surfs and goes water-skiing. There is fishing and trawling of course; all are pleasures of clean water, or so we thought.
I sought simply to find out why the water is no longer what it has been and why we were not putting it to rights; I suspected that raw sewage outlets along the coastline were the cause. The results were as fascinating as they were unfortunate. I was astounded to find, from some very honest answers from MAFF, that we have a number of industrial sites, or sewage deposit sites. I had known, frankly, that the great and super city of Bristol, and the city of Cardiff, through their water authorities, dump their sewage sludge a mere 11 miles off the coast of Ilfracombe.
I knew through a councillor friend of mine, Councillor David Spears of Ilfracombe, who is a fisherman, that there was an application from Port Talbot to dump 7 million tonnes of what is nicely called "capital spoil", again 11 miles north east of Ilfracombe. On top of this, MAFF told me that there were two minor liquid low-level radioactive outlets, one from Hinkley Point and another from Amersham International off the River Taff. I do not believe for a second that any one of those sources causes total pollution.
Then the information grew worse. In seeking to find out just what goes into the Bristol channel, I asked that marvellously honest body, the Welsh Office. It answered simply that there are all the things that I knew about already, and by the way, there are 27 other outlets whereby low-level nuclear waste is indirectly dumped in the Bristol channel.
So I had information from the Ministry of Agriculture, and learned more about the two nuclear sources—Hinkley on the Devon side and Amersham on the Welsh side—and the 27 other outlets, as well as sewage dumping, from the Welsh and English sides. There are no heroes or villains in this, just people going about their work, quietly polluting the waterways on the doorstep of north Devon. There are the industries of Port Talbot, and so it goes on, and on.
Then I asked my friends in the coastguard service and the Royal Air Force about maritime pollution. The Ministry of Transport said with superb openness that it is quite legal to pump out the tanks of a ship in the channel, and that one may discharge gash, or rubbish, there. Rubbish from ships and cleanings from tanks—all goes into this narrow waterway that we in north Devon call the seaside. This grew from a simple problem of finding out how the water authorities work.
I owe every credit to the water authorities. The South-West water authority is spending much money and doing very well in cleaning up sewage. I am sure that the Welsh authority and Wessex Water are doing the same. It is not the individuals who are polluting our waterways; a major hole is being caused, not by any of the pinpricks, but by the totality of water authorities, the industrial, agricultural, and agrichemical concerns and all the rest of them.
We come to a very simple question: why do I find dead sea birds and plastic rubbish when I wander along the shores of my constituency? I find not the romantic things of the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, which could be looked at with excitement, but useless plastic rubbish. All of it is man-made and man-deposited because no one is obliged not to do it. That is the essence of my problem.
924 We are not much better on land. Dog owners—I am one—allow their dogs to foul the beach for children to sit in. Councils are getting better and beginning to enforce byelaws, but there is still pollution on the beaches. Our small local authorities still allow outfalls to be tucked away under the sands and to spill raw sewage into the sea for the pleasure of surface and submariners and all who enjoy fishing.
The beautiful island of Lundy, just off my constituency, is the site of a maritime nature reserve and I am proud to have been instrumental in making it so. It is surrounded not by lobsters, however, but by the debris of civilisation. No one is forbidden to put it there, which means that everyone is allowed to. I was surprised to find that ships are allowed to pollute the area, but not with oil. So they pollute with oil after dark. Oil slicks appear on the beaches in my area, and, I am sure, across the water in Wales. Irridescent pools of oily water appear from ships dumping in the channel.
So we have an incredible collection of debris all along our coastline. I do not seek to apportion blame to any authority or Ministry. This is not a case of villains; it is a case of everyone exercising rights given by statute or regulation, but the total result is that what should be a pleasant open stretch of beautiful water is polluted. As one approaches my part of the world, one comes across the top of Exmoor and sees the Bristol channel in the foreground and Wales in the background. It is a beautiful sight and equally beautiful from the other side. However, it is no longer a pleasure to walk or bathe there. I am a walker, bather and sailor in that area. The hulls of people's boats get coated with human excrement. Human debris, too, figures in the pollution of the coastal waters.
No one in particular is at fault; all of us are at fault. The Welsh Office told me all about its problems. I asked about the capital spoil from Port Talbot, but no one appeared to know about it. Officials said it was dredging from the harbour. That is fine; but Port Talbot has been a fine industrial area and I am not sure that the dredgings are as pure as one might expect sand to be. No one minds; one applies for a grant.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will not tell me that he has granted permission to dump 7 million tonnes in this narrow, shallow channel—a super-tanker carries 100,000 tonnes, by comparison. The material may not be dirty—I do not suggest that it is—but it seems odd. Why can they dump 11 miles off Ilfracombe? It is not a personal affront to me. That is the nearest point at which people can say that the dumped waste will go out to sea. But the Bristol channel does not work that way. Waste does not just all go out and come in—it swirls around. There are bays on the Welsh side, and on the Devon and Somerset side. What is put in the water does not exit on the tide. I wish it did. Some does, but some goes around and around. We are damaging the lives and pleasure of our people.
I am grateful for being granted this debate. I do not seek villains. I am only saying—perhaps tediously—that three of the beaches in my area do not meet EEC standards. We should be grateful to the EEC; we condemn it often, but it has given us standards that I want my beaches to meet. All the things I have mentioned, taken together, are causing the trouble and pollution. My right hon. Friend has told me in parliamentary answers that he would be happy to bathe in our waters. God bless him, and I hope he enjoys it. It is a beautiful place and I am sure he 925 will come to no harm. But, with all these different authorities allowing dumpings, it seems strange to assume that ultimately no harm will be done.
I suspect that I speak not just for my own area but for the whole country. For centuries we have used the sea as our cesspit on the assumption that the sea would clear it out. In our case it is no longer working. My right hon. Friend may say, as he has told me in answer to questions, that there is no apparent problem for fishing stocks. I must tell him there are problems. The fishing stocks have gone. The fishing stocks which were there in my youth are not there any more. My fishermen, not primed by me, say that they get boils from the water of the channel. The sub-aqua clubs tell me that there are problems when they are swimming; the surf clubs say the same thing. Everyone tells me that we are allowing our environment to be more and more polluted.
I have asked the questions of all the individual Departments. All I could find out was that no one was exceeding his authority or doing anything he should not do, but all of us in total are doing what we should not do—damaging the environment of our beautiful country. All of us are proud of our own areas. Whether from Devon, as I am, or from Wales or Scotland, we all love our country, but, through nobody's apparent fault, the environment is being destroyed. Yet industrial refuse, nuclear waste and sewage sludge must go somewhere. In the south-west they go from other people's doorsteps into my constituency. That is not fair. It is causing aggravation—which brings us to this debate.
I ask my right hon. Friend for simple assurances. I am told that the Department of the Environment co-ordinates. That amazes me because that is the one Department which has not the ability or the will to answer a priority written question. Every other Department does—Agriculture, the Welsh Office and Transport, but not Environment. How can I have faith in a Department which is said to co-ordinate, when it cannot answer simple questions such as how many sewage outlets or permits there are? I do not believe that the Department knows.
My right hon. Friend is not responsible for that Department. His Department is responsible for the cleanliness of water and the agriculture side of things. I pay the Department credit for the work it does, but it seems wrong that all this waste is deposited in the Bristol channel. I will list it all for the last time—sewage sludge from the big cities of Wales and the west country, capital spoil, tippings and dredgings from the great industrial ports, nuclear waste from Hinkley Point, nuclear waste from Amersham International up the River Taff—it must be fun being a swan on the river—and 27 other indirect nuclear waste deposits on the Welsh side alone.
I have had no answer, alas, for the English side of the water. The Department of the Environment is to write to me as soon as possible. That will be as soon as possible after the debate is over and is in Hansard, one suspects. When the battle is over, the gentlemen of England, now abed, may think themselves accursed they were not here, but they are wise not to say their piece because they would damn themselves out of their parliamentary questions and answers.
On the agricultural side I say very little, but we know that agrichemicals leach into our waters. Some of it is the fault of the agricultural system and some is the fault of the water authorities being underfunded in the past. But all in all, from the shipping on the top of the water to the sewage 926 at the bottom, we are doing great damage to the nation. We must get together and say that what we did in the 19th century out of ignorance we may not continue at the end of the 20th century out of knowledge, nor in the 21st century when, I trust, the environment will be at the top of our agenda.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. John Selwyn Glimmer)First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, North (Mr. Speller) for raising the subject which, as he rightly says, is not only of interest to him and to his constituency but to any of us who represent coastal areas. My constituency has 54 miles of coast., the nuclear power station at Sizewell A, a new one to come at Sizewell Band the proposal to build anotherat SizewellC, so I hope he will accept that, apart from my ministerial responsibility, I have a personal, local responsibility which makes me sympathetic to the issues that he has raised.
I should like to begin where my hon. Friend ended by saying that in the 20th century we must not do out of knowledge what in the 19th century we did out of ignorance. I am happy to say that we have learnt and that what we now allow to be dumped in the sea is different from what would have been dumped in the 19th century.
I recognise my hon. Friend's desire to tread the narrow path between worrying people unnecessarily and making sure that the programme arid policy of the Government are sufficiently structured to protect people. That is a difficult path for an hon. Member to tread because he must not make people feel that something is wrong with the beaches while at the same' time he must protect the beaches. I see the balance that my hon. Friend has to maintain, and he maintained it admirably in his speech.
My hon. Friend spoke about co-ordination. He should draw some confidence from the fact that it is largely the scientists in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food who provide the basis for the work that is done. The scientific staff in my Ministry assess the potential effect of pipeline discharges, for example, on the marine environment. My hon. Friend mentioned dumping in the sea from Wales. The Welsh Office is deeply involved in trying to solve such problems and my Ministry is its agent in this work, thus ensuring that the effects of dumping from Wales are taken into the equation.
My hon. Friend made an important point when he spoke about the equation. We must ask ourselves whether, when we add together all the things that happen, we get an unacceptable result, even though the individual things being done are acceptable. When the adding together takes place, it is the scientists in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food who play the vital role.
In the Bristol channel area, there is a specific way of doing this because, as my hon. Friend rightly says, this area is of considerable concern as it is bordered by the great industrial areas of Wales. It is an important tourist interest and an historic waterway. For those reasons we have a special group of interested authorities which co-ordinate the assessment work in this area—the Severn estuary technical working group—and it includes representatives of MAFF, the water authorities, the Water Research Centre and Plymouth marine laboratory. These bodies each present the results of their monitoring work to the group which thus ensures that a detailed picture of 'the quality of the estuary and Bristol channel is available.
927 My hon. Friend need not worry about the co-ordination aspect. It is co-ordinated overall at ministerial level by the Department of the Environment. In the specific area that he spoke about, we have gone to particular trouble to cover this in the special working group. That group is of a technical kind and it covers precisely the problems that my hon. Friend rightly adumbrated. As he said, the problems that we have here are affected not only by the quality and type of waste that is put into the sea, but by the movement, the ebb and flow, of the sea. In this area the ebb and flow is much more complex than in other areas. That must be considered as well, and my hon. Friend was right to draw that to our attention.
The reason for choosing a dumping site 11 miles off Ilfracombe, to which my hon. Friend refers, was not intended as a personal insult to my hon. Friend; nor was it chosen because it was the nearest place at which we could get away with such dumping, which perhaps my hon. Friend implied. The site was carefully chosen because we know the way in which the sea operates in that area. Its mechanism does what we intend it to do: it satisfactorily cleanses the area.
I want to face head on the problem that my hon. Friend has placed before us. In this world we ask for all the benefits and advantages of a modern society, such as being able to turn on energy at the flick of a switch, of being able to drive to the lovely holiday beaches in his constituency and of being able to be warm in winter and cool in summer. We cannot expect to have all those things and the jobs in the industries that sustain them unless we accept that they produce waste that has to be dealt with somehow.
I think that my hon. Friend would be the first to recognise that we must make sure that the waste that we produce does not pollute the environment. However, he is wrong to suggest that the sea has no part to play in the removal of waste. We must ensure that we do not put in the sea waste that cannot be purified or disposed of. If we treated the sea as our communal cesspool, we would do great damage to the environment and to future generations. We take considerable care about those decisions.
Let me give my hon. Friend two examples of the care that we take. First, when I receive a new application, I consider it carefully, but, even in circumstances in which I believe that it is right to grant it, I seek to find an alternative way of reducing other inputs to the sea. I try to strike a balance to ensure that the total is, if anything, less than it was before. I always try to use it as the pressure point for reducing the use of the sea for the removal of waste, and I have found that approach very satisfactory.
Secondly, I draw my hon. Friend's attention to the decision of the North sea conference, which was a great success and in which Britain took a major part. My hon. Friend referred to throwing things off a ship and getting rid of oil in the sea. We must draw a distinction here. People do things illegally and we then have to deal with the question of enforcement. They do other things legally, but we nevertheless have to deal with the problem of stopping them doing those things. I hope that our enforcement policy will increasingly enable us to ensure that ships do not do what they have done in the past—flush out their oil 928 tanks illegally, late at night, when no one is around. The evidence shows that that is a decreasing activity and that our policing has helped in that direction.
However, we must improve as well as enforce the rules. I took a small part in ensuring that the British Government joined others in agreeing to much tougher rules about the use of the sea as a garbage pail for ships, whose crews appeared to think that they had a right to throw into it anything that they liked because it was waste produced on the ship. That is unacceptable and we have done a great deal to change that. The countries of northern Europe will now stop that and regulations are being prepared, as my hon. Friend knows from the reply that he received from the Department of Transport. That is a major improvement which will depend on the efficacy of the regulations and on the way in which we impose them.
§ Mr. SpellerThe answer that I have received from the Department of Transport simply says that it is not in itself an offence for ships to clean their tanks in the Bristol channel or, at present, to discharge ship's garbage into the sea, although regulations are being prepared. Can my hon. Friend tell me when those regulations will be in force and who will enforce them?
§ Mr. GummerMy hon. Friend must understand that those regulations will be in force as rapidly as possible because we gave an undertaking at the London conference. I cannot tell him exactly when they will be laid, but it will be as soon as possible. The responsibility for enforcement of the regulations will be spread between Departments, although the Department of Transport will have the primary responsibility. However, as other Departments have opportunities to watch out for these things, we all try to work together.
I am sure that my hon. Friend will accept that, although it is not as unitary a system as he would wish, our fisheries patrol vessels, coastguards and local sea fisheries committees play their part in notifying the tell-tale signs that those incidents have occurred. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that we catch people not simply in flagrante delicto, but also after the incident, when we can see what has happened. There are various ways of going about that, and I assure him that we are most concerned that the system works effectively. I have not yet considered or given a ruling on the question of the dumping of material from Port Talbot. We are discussing that issue, and I give an undertaking that I will look at the matter extremely carefully.
The two licences currently issued for sewage sludge—one each to the Wessex and Welsh water authorities—apply to material that is already carefully refined. That is why it is put in the sea, and 96 per cent. of it is water. That would not have happened in the 19th century. I hope that my hon. Friend will remind his constituents of the enormous advances that have been made since then. In the 19th century, raw sewage was dumped into the sea, but we purify it seriously now. My hon. Friend should be happy that we monitor very carefully what enters the water. He should also be pleased that 70 per cent. of the sludge from Wessex is spread on land and does not enter the water. We are constantly trying to find alternatives where they are available.
I want to refer briefly to the apparent inconsistency to which my hon. Friend referred. I am sure that he will not mind if I say that if he asks a slightly different question of 929 two people he may get a slightly different answer. When he asked the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what we gave licences for, we told him; and I hope he will be kind enough to acknowledge that we were very honest in our reply. We gave him full details. However, if he asked the Welsh Office what it granted licences for, he must accept that the Welsh Office would include licences for extremely small amounts of waste such as radioactive material from hospitals. Such licences are not granted by my Ministry. Therefore, the figures tie up as long as my hon. Friend remembers what the question is in the first 930 place. Nothing was hidden in either case, and full details were given to my hon. Friend. I hope that he will acquit us of not co-ordinating this properly.
We have very tough controls on what is put into the sea. More important than that, it is our intention and the fact—
§ The Motion having been made after Ten o'clock on Tuesday evening and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
§ Adjourned at eleven minutes past Twelve o'clock.