Latest news with #Anglia
The Independent
6 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Badenoch says Truss ‘carries quite a lot blame' for Tory record of as war of words continues
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said Liz Truss 'carries quite a lot of' responsibility for the party's record amid a row over the party's direction. Responding after former prime minister Ms Truss accused her of 'repeating spurious narratives', Badenoch said she was 'very focused on what the Conservatives are going to do now'. The Leader of the Opposition faced questions about Ms Truss's claim that under the Conservatives, 'the economy was wrecked with profligate Covid spending by (Rishi) Sunak' and that 'the huge increase in immigration has been a disaster'. Mrs Badenoch told ITV Anglia: 'I know that, as a former prime minister and a former foreign secretary, (Ms Truss) carries quite a lot of that blame. 'The party's now under new leadership. 'I wasn't in charge during those 14 years; she was. 'That's a criticism she's probably levelling at herself.' The Tory leader also said she was 'telling the truth' about her party's record. 'I'm telling the truth that immigration was too high – that's why we have much tougher policies to fix immigration,' she continued. 'I am telling the truth that taxes were too high, that we were putting a lot of regulation on businesses, and what we're seeing is Labour making every single thing worse. 'They're doing that because they haven't learned many of the lessons that we learned. They haven't learned from our mistakes. They're making worse mistakes.' The Labour government's mistakes include making 'no cut in spending at all – the books were not balanced', Mrs Badenoch claimed. 'We're spending more on welfare than we are on defence – that cannot continue,' she said. Mrs Badenoch had previously told The Telegraph that 'for all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes'. Ms Truss, who spent 49 days in Number 10, hit back when she said that 'instead of serious thinking', Mrs Badenoch was 'repeating spurious narratives'. She continued: 'I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. 'It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the 'heirs to Blair'. 'Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. 'The economy was wrecked with profligate Covid spending by Sunak. The huge increase in immigration has been a disaster.' Mrs Badenoch also took questions about her identity, after she told the Rosebud podcast: 'I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s. 'I don't identify with it any more, most of my life has been in the UK and I've just never felt the need to.' The North West Essex MP told ITV Anglia: 'I am definitely an Essex girl, that is a fact.' A London Assembly member before she took her Commons seat in 2017, Mrs Badenoch said: 'I represent an Essex constituency, these are my people. 'I was a Londoner, but Essex people asked me to be their MP, and I want to make sure that I do them proud. And I love this part of the world. 'It's fantastic being here. It's a rural community, and I've been talking to the farmers here. I talked about how my grandfather was a farmer, it's very hard work. 'The people of Essex and East Anglia – they are grafters. 'They work hard, and I want to make sure that we do right by them.' Mrs Badenoch spent Tuesday morning at a farm in Little Walden, where she tried her hand at harvesting wheat using a Claas Lexion combine harvester. She told farmers: 'A lot of farming just feels like constant interference. 'Everything is interfered from the minute you wake up.' Examples of interference included 'chemicals and insecticide, people you're hiring, how much you've got to pay them', plus changes to 'employers' NI (national insurance), then somebody wants to put pylons on, there's compulsory purchase, it's impacting the cost of the land, if you want to add a new farm building, there's planning applications', she said. 'It's just endless constant Government saying, 'You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't move forwards'. 'And the burden in my view has now crossed the threshold.'
Yahoo
29-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Anglian Water agrees to £62.8m redress package after Ofwat wastewater probe
Anglian Water has agreed to a pay £62.8m funded by shareholders after an Ofwat wastewater investigation. The water watchdog has announced the redress package - now subject to consultation - which will fund environmental and community initiatives across the East of England. The package was proposed by Anglian Water in response to Ofwat's industry-wide investigation into wastewater treatment works and networks. SIGN UP HERE FOR YOUR DAILY BUSINESS BULLETIN Last week, a report by Sir Jon Cunliffe set out how water companies should be regulated following public outrage at the state of the industry and multiple sewage spill issues. The sum proposed by Anglian Water will be entirely funded by its shareholders rather than customers, it said. More: Major new £55m business development by A14 'will bring jobs and growth' It includes a new £5.8m Community Fund to support local environmental and social courses. It will be ringfenced for causes in the Anglian region. Local communities and organisations will be able to apply for grants with priority given to environmental causes and those near Anglian Water storm overflows and capital investment works. The larger sum - £57m - will be used to tackle more complex issues in eight-plus "high priority" catchments with specific challenges. More: New £78m nature charity plans to make Suffolk 'most ecologically diverse' area This will include installing sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) to combat drainage and flooding issues, upgrading community-owned assets that contribute to flooding, and other local initiatives. The company also said it would accelerate planned investment to reduce spills at high-risk sites with new storage, removing surface water and misconnections and optimising the existing network. A longer term action plan will also be implemented to ensure spills from storm overflows are minimised and assets are compliant with legal requirements. The work will be in addition to its £11bn business plan for the next five years, in which £1bn will be targeted at driving storm overflows to low levels, and £1.7bn to improve maintenance and performance of water recycling systems. "The scale of the redress package is chiefly reflective of Anglian Water's turnover rather than an indicator of severity of issues and seeks to achieve a better outcome for customers and the environment," the company said. More: Suffolk Building Society 'sorry' to see joint agency with insurance broker close Anglian Water chief executive Mark Thurston said:'We understand the need to rebuild trust with customers and that aspects of our performance need to improve to do that. "Reducing pollutions and spills is our number one operational focus, and we have both the investment and the partners in place to deliver on those promises as part of our £11bn business plan over the next five years. "In the meantime, we have proposed this redress package, recognising the need to invest in the communities and environments most impacted. 'It will take time and investment to achieve a significant reduction in spills, but we are making good progress. "By 2030 we have allocated a dedicated £1bn for measures such as storm tanks, upgraded monitoring, nature-based solutions like wetlands, and sustainable drainage solutions to halve the number of spills." But he added that it would "take time" to upgrade the vast network of assets it manages. "We have hundreds of treatment works, more than 100,000 kilometres of pipes and sewers underground, many hundreds of water storage points and storm tanks – all of these need to be part of a significant capital programme to maintain and renew what is there. "This is what will be set out in our plans - to ensure we can make the improvements that are best for the environment and delivers on our promises to customers.' The enforcement package is subject to consultation which will be open for the public and key stakeholders to offer any final comments before Ofwat's final decision.
BBC News
29-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Anglian Water to pay £62.8m over wastewater failures
Anglian Water is facing paying out £62.8m after an investigation by the industry regulator found a "serious breach" in how the company managed its sewage has proposed a number of improvements Anglian Water must make to its wastewater treatment works and network after discovering "excessive spills from storm overflows".The firm could have been fined £57.1m but Ofwat said Anglian Water had acknowledged its failures and agreed to fund investments. Anglian - which is one of six water firms banned from paying its chief executive a bonus for last year - said: "We understand the need to rebuild trust with customers and that aspects of our performance need to improve to do that." Lynn Parker, Ofwat's senior director for enforcement, said: "Our investigation has found failures in how Anglian Water has operated and maintained its sewage works and networks, which has resulted in excessive spills from storm overflows."This is a serious breach and is unacceptable."Ofwat said Anglian would invest £57m to improve wastewater flows in its region and also pay £5.8m into a fund to support projects aimed at providing environmental and social benefits for local Thurston, who took over as Anglian's chief executive in July last year from Peter Simpson, said: "It will take time and investment to achieve a significant reduction in spills, but we are making good progress."He said the company has allocated £1bn to fund measures aimed at halving the number of spills by that time, the average annual household water and waste bill for an Anglian customers will rise to £631, compared to an average £491 last year. A recent report by the Independent Water Commission noted that water companies were hiking bills following years of have claimed that they have been held back from investing in the country's pipes and sewage treatment facilities because Ofwat limited price increases for year, Ofwat - which the report recommended to be scrapped and rolled into a single regulator - announced that water bills in England and Wales would increase sharply over five years to raise £104bn to invest in since being privatised in 1989, water companies have been criticised for paying out billions of pounds to shareholders, including to overseas investment Water is owned by a company that is registered in Jersey. Its biggest shareholders are based in Canada, Australia and Abu Dhabi.
Sky News
29-07-2025
- Business
- Sky News
Water firm faces £63m penalty over 'excessive' sewage spills
Why you can trust Sky News Anglian Water is the latest supplier to face down the prospect of a large bill for failures in its handling of sewage, leading to "excessive spills". The industry regulator Ofwat - soon to be scrapped under a planned shake-up of industry oversight - said it was proposing a £62.8m penalty and remedial action following an investigation. It was recommending the enforcement package after finding that Anglian had breached its legal obligations in operating its wastewater treatment works and network. The investigation found shortcomings in wastewater assets along with the processes and management of them, including at senior management and board level. As part of the package of measures it was proposing, Ofwat said that £5.8m of the penalty would go towards a community fund to support projects focusing on restoring the water environment. The rest of the money would go towards delivering systems, in at least eight catchments, that would enable storm flows to be substantially improved. 2:35 Lynn Parker, senior director for enforcement at Ofwat, said: "Our investigation has found failures in how Anglian Water has operated and maintained its sewage works and networks, which has resulted in excessive spills from storm overflows. This is a serious breach and is unacceptable. "We understand that the public wants to see transformative change. That is why we are prioritising this sector-wide investigation which is holding wastewater companies to account for identified failures. "We are pleased Anglian Water has accepted that it got things wrong and is now focusing on putting that right and taking action to come back into compliance. We expect all companies to do the same so that customers can regain confidence in their water company and the critical service they provide." 3:21 The company had already committed £100m to improve its spills and pollution performance. Anglian boss Mark Thurston said: "We understand the need to rebuild trust with customers and that aspects of our performance need to improve to do that. Reducing pollutions and spills is our number one operational focus, and we have both the investment and the partners in place to deliver on those promises as part of our £11bn business plan over the next five years. "In the meantime, we have proposed this redress package, recognising the need to invest in the communities and environments most impacted. "It will take time and investment to achieve a significant reduction in spills, but we are making good progress." The government announced earlier this month that Ofwat would be abolished in favour of a new super regulator after a landmark report on the industry. Sir Jon Cunliffe's review had made 88 recommendations, finding that the industry was not working for any stakeholders, including consumers. Users have been left angry over a historic lack of investment by firms, leaving them vulnerable to climate change-linked challenges including both drought and adverse weather alike.
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
How not to plagiarise Geoff Dyer
I am close to a complete first draft of a book about England called Anglia, but stare with anxiety at the seemingly convincing and large pile of paper, knowing that lurking in the crisp, regular type is an unviable mix of quite funny jokes and some amazing drunkenly typed rubbish. In order to avoid facing this problem I keep writing more stuff to dilute the terrible stuff. I fear that, in actuality, I am maintaining about the same ratio. The basis for the project was that I could not write a book about Britain from the Middle Ages onwards, as I had for Germany and elsewhere in earlier books, because too much of the story is already well known and so often parodied. I also had to restrict the book to England, as I could only deal with Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a cursory way as to be offensive. My heart sank at having to write about people like King John. But then I remembered a family story: my mother's grandmother was, as a little girl, present at the hanging of the 'Rugeley Poisoner' in Stafford in 1856. I realised I could start there and make a more detailed book that might have some unexpected information in it. Although flicking through the pile at the moment, an awful lot appears to be about Madame Blavatsky and her circle. County grounds I also thought as a basic writing discipline I should never refer to the royal family, elections or the empire, as these would take up too much space and would make me write filler guff. One further limit was that most of the book should clearly be rooted in specific counties, ideally with two stories from each county to spread the book countrywide, but chucking away some of the smaller bits and bobs (Rutland) to give their votes to London. In any event, with this series of Toytown-Ozymandian arbitrary decisions – an arbitrariness I now see as having deep and lasting roots in English history – I am sitting next to a pile of paper covered with words of variable quality wondering when my life took this wrong turn. Avoiding all Homework I happily had spent some three years writing and researching Anglia, inwardly smiling at some of its little bits of humour, when disaster struck. In May, Geoff Dyer published Homework, his memoir of growing up in England only about five years before I grew up in England. There is no writer I admire more and I felt suddenly that what had been my own rather special England-evoking project was now something like a trodden-on Thunderbird 5 toy facing off against a real-life Death Star. We even both grew up in spa towns and both (I assume) have access to very similar healing-waters jokes. Obviously I could not read Homework. I am drawn into the tractor beam of Dyer's prose style anyway and need to keep well away. And, worse, I saw a headline for a review of Homework that mentioned the word Airfix. I had planned to write about my Airfix model of the Nazi battleship Tirpitz, jokily saying how after hours of flailing effort with knife and glue to stick together my shambolic Tirpitz, it indeed now looked like the real thing, but in the aftermath of the RAF's legendary Operation Catechism. But what if Dyer had made the same joke and I was accused of plagiarism? In order to avoid reading his book I now had to cross out my Operation Catechism joke. The way we Wear Throughout researching Anglia there have been several points where I have found myself having to watch yet again Sunderland on Film, a DVD of documentary clips from the North East Film Archive that span from 1904 to Sunderland's 1973 FA Cup triumph over Leeds. Only an hour long, it has much of the impact of a great realist novel – the faces, clothes, gestures, hard work. The earliest films included as many people on the streets as possible, grinning and waving, as they would subsequently pay to see themselves projected on a screen. A wedding, a grand shop, a skittering horse-and-cart, two men waltzing, Great War commemorations, the Pyrex factory, an astounding scene of men blowing glass to make scientific instruments. The climax of 1973, with all shops shut and the streets empty for the final, had one shop sign stating: 'As a mark of sympathy towards Messrs Bremner, Giles & Company, this shop will be closed at 2pm on Saturday, May 5th.' The editing of the film is sort of a miracle, with shots of the game entangled with crowds watching televisions in shop windows, on a cinema screen, in someone's home, with close-ups of faces distorted and crying with tension. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It is probably good that we are largely sheltered from watching such material – it is simply too nihilistic, too raw, too long ago, and the viewer has to sit there knowing that much of what made Sunderland great was about to be swept away. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
