Labour’s Steve Reed urges Government to ‘steal’ its policy on rogue water firm bosses

LABOUR’S Shadow Environment Secretary has urged the Government to “steal” its policy to ban the payment of bonuses to bosses of water companies that pollute rivers and beaches with sewage.

Steve Reed told GB News: “Labour’s come up with a very common-sense proposal, frankly, to give the regulator the powers they need to ban the payment of multi-million pound bonuses to water bosses for overseeing this kind of failure.

“Now, we could wait until the next General Election, whenever it comes later this year, and the Labour government will implement this.

“But if [Environment Secretary] Steve Barclay wants to steal this policy from me and put it through the House of Commons, he will have my 100% support because I’d much rather we dealt with this problem today than wait until a General Election.”

In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he continued: “Feargal Sharkey has done an amazing job highlighting this problem, but the longer we wait, the worse it gets, and we can’t clean up our water until we first clean up the water industry.

“I’d love to see Steve Barclay take Labour’s policy, put it through the House of Commons, and you’ll get cross party support for that.”

He added: “The levels of sewage that we’re seeing in our rivers and our lakes, washing up on our beaches, it’s unacceptable.

“Down in Kent, they’ve even got this phenomenon called sewage tomatoes, and that’s where people have eaten tomatoes, the seeds go through the sewage system, they wash up on the beaches and the tomato plants grow. That is just telling you how bad the system has got.

“We have to get the Government to clean this up and that means focusing on the decisions the water bosses are taking.”