Margaret Mullane, Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Dagenham and Rainham, has joined the campaign to clean up our rivers and end the Tory sewage scandal. Margaret added her name to the letter from Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary, Jim McMahon, and environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey to Conservative MPs, ramping up the pressure on them to vote for Labour’s Opposition Day motion.
The letter, critical of Conservatives who during the passage of the Environment Bill “walked through the voting lobbies [voting] to continue the Tory sewage scandal” by blocking Labour-backed amendments to end sewage dumping, accuses Tory MPs of showing disregard for the “environment, for public health and for businesses that rely on the beauty and nature of Britain to attract visitors and thrive.”
Labour’s plan to end the Tory sewage scandal by 2030, seeks to legally underpin four crucial reduction measures:
Setting a legal requirement for the monitoring of all sewage outlets and penalties for failures in adhering to monitoring requirements;
imposing automatic fines for sewage dumping;
implementing a legally binding target to reduce sewage dumping events;
and a requirement for the Secretary of State to publish a strategy for the reduction of sewage discharges and regular economic impact assessments.
Earlier this month Labour analysis of Environment Agency data revealed that since 2016, a new sewage dumping event has taken place an average of every two-and-a-half minutes, with rivers, lakes, seas, and beaches having faced a staggering 1,276 years’ worth of raw sewage over just a seven-year period.
Jim McMahon said: “It’s clear that we have a Tory government that has run out of road, only regurgitating old announcements that do nothing to end sewage dumping. That’s why Labour has brought forward legislation to clean up our water system. The onus is on Tory MPs to support Labour’s Bill which will put an end to sewage dumping once and for all or alternatively, once again vote to continue the Tory sewage scandal.”
Margaret Mullane added: “The next Labour Government will build a better Britain and end the Tory sewage scandal, delivering mandatory monitoring on all sewage outlets, introducing automatic fines for discharges, setting ambitious targets for stopping systematic sewage dumping and ensuring that water bosses are held to account for negligence.”
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