Chicken poo a factor in housing moratoriums, MPs told
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Chicken poo is a factor in low housing growth along the England and Wales border, MPs have heard. Poultry farming creates “significant challenges” for the River Wye, water minister Emma Hardy told MPs in Westminster Hall on Wednesday. Catherine Fookes, the Labour MP who tabled the debate about rivers, lakes and seas, described cleaning up waterways across the country as part of her party’s “growth mission”.
But Green Party MP Ellie Chowns said agricultural pollution in the Wye, which crosses her North Herefordshire constituency, is an “elephant in the room” which she fears the new water sector commission might fail to address. She and David Chadwick, the Liberal Democrat MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, both raised housebuilding moratoriums in their constituencies, introduced to limit river pollution.
Ms Hardy told MPs: “Maintaining healthy and clean water sources (is) vital to achieving this Government’s mission for economic growth.”. She added: “Water bodies such as the River Wye and the River Usk in Monmouthshire face significant challenges due to agricultural run-off from intensive poultry farming, leading to high phosphate levels in our water.”.
According to Lancaster University’s RePhoKUs project, a “rapid expansion” of the poultry industry means birds have now overtaken cattle as the main producer of manure phosphorus in the Wye. In turn, a “very high phosphorus input pressure being exerted on the Wye catchment is driven by the large agricultural phosphorus surplus”.
