A South Cumbrian MP said he was disappointed a proposal to make it a crime for water companies to not meet pollution targets was turned down by Parliament.
The amendment was turned down in Parliament with 17 votes in favour of the proposal with 262 votes against.
The vote came after documents from United Utilities, seen by the BBC, showed that a fault at a pumping station in Bowness-on-Windermere in Cumbria left sewage being illegally pumped into Windermere for 10 hours in February.
After the vote, Mr Farron said: “I was disappointed with the outcome of the result because amongst the things we learnt from the event we discovered in the last couple of days is that regulation isn’t working as it stands.
“To make the failure to meet pollution targets a criminal offence would add extra emphasis to those targets and hold people to account.”
In Parliament Mr Farron said: “This is a personal issue to us. This is a lake at the centre of the Lake District’s hospitality and tourism economy, which brings in 20 million visitors every year—the biggest number of visitors to any part of the United Kingdom outside London. We are proud of that.
“It is an industry that employs 60,000 people, worth £3.5 billion to the local economy and contributing hugely to the national economy. The fact that this is permitted at the heart of the jewel in the crown of our tourism economy in this country is an utter outrage. The ecological side of it is even more utterly, utterly appalling.”
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice MP Laura Farris told Parliament pollution incidents are the subject of criminal sanctions available to the Environment Agency.
Ms Farris said: “It is the Government’s view that the amendments would create a dangerous and unacceptable risk of double jeopardy across the two regulatory regimes that are administered by Ofwat and the Environment Agency.”
Simon Fell, the MP for Barrow and Furness, voted against the proposal and said: “This was a well-meaning amendment but could well have made things worse rather than better.”
