While Michael Gove was deciding to weaken pollution laws for new housing developments this week, his own constituency was being plagued by the stench of human waste.
People living on the outskirts of Camberley, the largest town in Gove’s constituency of Surrey Heath, have been complaining for months that foul-smelling fumes from the local sewage works have ruined their summers, causing even the washing they hang out to stink.
There were mixed opinions of Gove in the house-proud suburbs of the town, where generous front gardens feature painstakingly tended flowerbeds.
“He’s a prat, quite frankly,” declared 63-year-old Brian Jackson, who described himself as a Conservative. “He’s two faced and spouts a load of hot air. Increasing the pollution and destroying the environment won’t go down very well down here. If [housebuilders] can get away with polluting, they will. You need development and houses for people to live, but it needs to be done in the right way.”
He said the deregulation was not the fault of Brexit, which he had voted for. “It isn’t to do with Brexit, it’s to do with Michael Gove and the choices he is making,” Jackson said.
He said that as he had a poor sense of smell following a Covid infection he had not been affected by the local sewage stench, but added: “But my wife has smelled it, she said it’s awful.”
John Anderson, a full-time carer for his mother, said he did not generally get involved in politics but cared deeply about sewage spills in the local area. The town had a particularly bad spill in 2012 when Thames Water illegally discharged raw effluent into the river, killing hundreds of fish. The company was fined £220,000 for permit breaches.
Anderson said: “There’s a sewage outflow on the other side of the valley there, there’s a whirlpool area where something’s getting streamed out in to that 24 hours [a day], seven days a week, which I don’t particularly agree with at all. You know, basically, when it comes to rivers, clean them up, don’t muck them up.”
Anderson added that he did not agree with the idea of removing pollution rules to encourage housebuilding: “Housing, I understand is obviously a problem, but it has to be done sensibly. We need to leave nature alone. Because we don’t have much of it left.”
Joanne Eves, a teaching assistant, had voted Conservative in the past but said she had never been a great fan of Gove. “I don’t have a terribly high opinion of him anyway. I know we need houses, but they don’t seem to actually care about the environment as well, which also needs protecting.”
She said she had been affected throughout the summer from the sewage stench “depending on which way the wind blows”.
Eves said she was unsurprised that the promise of tougher environmental laws after Brexit had not materialised. “They said they’d do lots of things after Brexit. I didn’t vote for Brexit and wanted to stay. None of the stuff they said would come after Brexit really has come after Brexit, and I’m not really surprised.”
Despite Gove’s majority of more than 18,000 votes in a constituency that has been solidly Tory since its creation in 1997, she thinks the levelling up secretary could be ousted at the next election. “I think it could easily go to Liberal Democrats. If you’d asked me maybe even two years ago, I would have said no, we’ll stay Conservative. But now I’m not so sure.”
Alasdair Pinkerton, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for the constituency, thinks Gove has underestimated the strength of local feeling about pollution and the environment.
Speaking of the sewage stench in the area, he said: “It’s quite extraordinary that this has happened, but in a way it speaks to poor regulation in this area. I think when people start to hear and understand that further deregulation of environmental protections is now being considered by the government, I think people will be pretty horrified.”
He said residents would be particularly aggrieved that Gove was ripping up development standards for homes. A campaign in the Camberley area recently stopped a park and recreation area being turned into flats, he said.
Pinkerton explained: “The people of Surrey Heath are acutely aware that our green spaces get chewed up and get turned into sometimes very poor developments. I mean, I wouldn’t say that the people here are nimbys in any way, but they are anti bad development and they’ve seen a lot of bad development over recent times that has not been done in harmony with the environment, that has led to, for example, local flooding, that hasn’t come with the associated services.”
One fan of Gove was happy to speak up, however. Millie, 75, would only give her first name but said she had been a fan of the MP since he presented a certificate to her child some decades ago.
“I’ve seen him around ever since, and he’s been to the church,” she explained, adding that although the local sewage smell was “quite bad at times” Gove had tried to fix it. “He’s been over there and he’s met with Thames Water and written letters, and he’s very active on Facebook about it,” she said.
