In recent months, the true scale of the sewage crisis clogging our rivers and coastlines has come to light. As more scrutiny has been applied to the actions of water companies, more stories are revealed that can leave us feeling queasy.

We know that last year, water companies pumped raw sewage into our waterways for millions of hours. These sewage spills are not only happening during wet weather – last year there were almost 150 reports of ‘dry spills’, where sewage was illegally discharged when there wasn’t a single drop of rain falling. This is criminal behaviour and must be stopped.

Here in Devon, South West Water was hit with large fines and last year it received a one-star rating from the Environment Agency. This made it one of the worst performing water companies in the country, and yet they have still paid out millions in bonuses and dividends for their top executives.

We’ve seen a decided lack of action from Conservative Ministers in this space. They love to talk about rolling out bigger fines, but they seem content to leave the monitoring of sewage spills to water companies. That’s why I have tabled a Bill in Parliament to bolster the regulators.

The current Government-appointed regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, are simply not fit for purpose. With their existing powers, these regulators lack the ability to properly hold water companies to account - and even to properly scrutinise levels of sewage dumping.

At present, data on sewage spills are collected privately by water companies and then assessed ‘in-house’, with little oversight from Government. This means that water bosses are effectively left to mark their own homework.

I have no problem with the water companies paying for the collection of this important data, but they should not be trusted exclusively to collect the data. We need to beef-up our regulators by giving them a legal duty and new powers to assess this information. At the very least, I am hoping that my Bill will further expose some of the water companies’ sharp practices that investigative journalists have revealed in recent weeks.

Since the Conservatives have failed to take this issue seriously, I have taken matters into my own hands. The Bill I tabled in Parliament this week would mandate the Environment Agency to independently assess the data collected by water companies.

This way, we can hope to get a proper picture of what is going on. These changes could enable us to hold these wayward firms to account for harming our precious natural environment.