Speeches by Dollimore.

“I thank the hon. Member for highlighting the importance of access to play. Something that many children and parents have raised with me in Hastings and Rye is how many playgrounds have closed or fallen into disrepair in my constituency. I have done an audit of all the playgrounds and found that eight have closed since …”

“Those of us in this House who sit on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and grilled the water bosses know all too well how broken this industry is, so I welcome the Government’s commitment to addressing the failures of the industry with these important reforms. As the Secretary of State knows, in Hasting…”

“Many of my constituents do not understand why we have an inefficient, duplicative, confusing system of two-tier councils at the moment. They are looking forward to this process going ahead and to having one council. As we await the process, it is really important that the councils we have remain responsive to our const…”

“The people I represent are fed up with Southern Water, when it comes to everything from sewage and broken pipes to water outages, even on Christmas day. In November, millions of plastic beads washed up on our beaches, and we discovered that they came from a Southern Water treatment plant. I am campaigning for water com…”

“The Minister will be aware that in a number of places in Sussex and Kent—including in your Sussex Weald constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker—people are still without water as a result of the power outages that occurred during the storm. The power supply to waterworks is interrupted briefly, but then the water supply goes…”

“My constituency was affected by the water outage over the Christmas period, and I thank the Minister for her support over that period—for keeping me updated, and for briefing the water company. I really feel for the people who are experiencing these outages. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has been tr…”

“When we are building the new homes that we desperately need, it is important that we think about playgrounds and access to play. I have just audited all the playgrounds in Hastings and Rye. I found that many parents and children have to walk for over 20 minutes to get to a playground, particularly in new build estates,…”

“I really welcome the return of Erasmus and the opportunity for young people in Hastings and Rye to study and train in Europe again. As a coastal town, we also want to see the return of our closest link with our European neighbours through bringing back international trains to Ashford International, which this Labour Go…”

“I thank the hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) for bringing forward this urgent question. As the Minister knows from her visit to my constituency last week, millions of plastic beads recently washed up there. After initially denying any involvement, Southern Water has admitted that it was responsible…”

“So the boss of Southern Water should not be taking a bonus?”

“A company performing in this way, committing such an incident, should not be giving bonuses to their top bosses, should it?”

“This kind of incident is completely unacceptable.”

“Secretary of State, I want to ask you about the Government’s work to clean up the water industry and I want to start with a major incident that has been unfolding over the weekend in my constituency. Last week I became aware of reports that small, black plastic beads were washing up on our beaches, particularly prevale…”

“It is a very common misconception in Government that all coastal communities care about is fishing. We have many more challenges than that, which colleagues will come on to later. On the point about DEFRA’s responsibilities, the Committee’s understanding was that coastal communities sat with DEFRA. Has it moved recentl…”

“I want to come back on the earlier discussion we had about coastal communities and where responsibility sits. You said it was under Minister Fahnbulleh, but we have checked. She has responsibilities for communities as a whole, specifically social cohesion and faith groups, but she does not have coastal communities list…”

“So that is rural. What about coastal?”

“You will be familiar with the situation where Thames Water was called back because it was found to have been trying to circumvent the Government’s ban on bonuses by calling them “retention payments” for the senior leadership of Thames Water, instead of calling them “bonuses”. When this came out at the Committee, the th…”

“Is there a broad view on whether they should be let off fines and penalties?”

“David, is there anything you wanted to add?”

“Moving on to another specific case, you may know that we have had Thames Water before the Committee several times—the second time because they had misled the Committee the first time. We have been diving quite deeply into all the issues at Thames Water, and there is a lot of concern about whether Thames Water’s credito…”