THE Liberal Democrat MP for the South Cotswolds said she feels ‘grief and shame’ at the state of Britain’s waterways as she backed proposals for a Clean Water Authority.

Roz Savage urged her party to ‘go further’ on its sewage policy and bid to ‘remove vulture capital investors and replace them with benign sources of investment’.

She said: “At the moment when I think about what is happening to our rivers and waterways, I feel grief and shame.

“I feel grief for the precious ecosystems like our chalk streams that are being destroyed, and I feel shame that as a country, we are still allowing this to happen.”

Speaking at her party’s autumn conference in Brighton, held from September 14 to 17, Ms Savage supported Tim Farron’s proposal to replace Ofwat with a new body called the Clean Water Authority - which could set legally-binding targets to prevent sewage discharges into bathing waters and highly-sensitive nature sites by 2030 - and ‘lead the transformation of water companies into public benefit companies’.

The successful motion for the body to take on Environment Agency powers has become Liberal Democrat party policy after a vote.

Ms Savage holds Guinness World Records for becoming the first woman to row across two and then three oceans solo and for the longest ocean row by a solo female between Geraldton, Australia and Mauritius in 2011.

“Being able to swim safely in our rivers on a warm summer’s day just seems like that should be possible without noticing you’re swimming alongside something really disgusting or fearing that you or your pets are going to get sick as a result,” Ms Savage said.

“We shouldn’t have people’s homes and farmland being flooded with sewage.

“In my constituency, there’s a poor farmer who has lost cattle because they’ve been in sewage-contaminated fields.

“The Thames rises in my constituency, so I feel a very strong kinship with the River Thames.

“It’s where I first learned to row, and I’ve lived in many different places along the course of the river.”

Asked about why she felt ‘grief’ towards the state of Britain’s waterways, she replied: “Water has been a very big part of my life and a very character-building part of my life.

“I suppose the grief is a sense that a lot of people who are really passionate about and campaigning on the environment feel on a regular basis when we look at the destruction of our ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity.”

Ms Savage added that she wanted to see developers consider rainwater harvesting schemes because people ‘even waste a lot of clean water’ at present which adds to sewage system pressures.

“I think we’re at the point now where we have to admit that the experiment with privatising the water companies has been a complete and utter failure and has not led to better value for customers,” she said.

“In fact, we seem to be paying more and not even getting the most basic services that you would expect from a water company.

“The model has not worked, and we’re calling for the water companies to be turned into public benefit companies so that all surpluses have to be reinvested into infrastructure in the way that they just haven’t been since privatisation.”

Onstage at the Liberal Democrats’ conference, Ms Savage told party activists: “As well as revoking the licence of poorly-performing water companies, we also need to strengthen the environmental permitting to significantly reduce permissible pollution.

“Storm overflows are meant to be ‘exceptional’, and by ‘exceptional’, I think of the kind of rain that some of us experienced when we were out door-knocking this spring. It was torrential.”