The clean rivers league table: which MPs are actually doing the work

Clean rivers has stayed near the top of the political agenda for over a year. The Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 is now in force, giving regulators stronger powers over water companies: Ofwat used it to ban bonuses at six water companies, including Thames Water and United Utilities, within months of Royal Assent.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee's "Reforming the water sector" inquiry is still running, with oral evidence sessions as recently as April 2026, and the Committee has separately questioned the DEFRA Secretary of State on the department's water work since. Parliament has debated water quality and sewage discharge repeatedly this year, in January, February and April alone.

So we built a league table. Using Frontbench's own records, we ranked MPs by their activity on clean rivers since this Parliament began on 4 July 2024.

How the league table works

We matched parliamentary contributions against a set of terms covering sewage, water quality, water pollution, water companies, bathing water, river pollution, rivers, clean water and access to nature. From that we counted three things for each MP, speeches (meaning Hansard contributions in debates that matched those terms), debates (meaning the number of distinct debates they spoke in), and Early Day Motions on the topic that they signed.

This acts as a reasonable guide to who has been putting time into this subject in Parliament, not a definitive verdict on anyone's record.

The table

What stands out

The first thing the table shows is how closely parliamentary activity on an issue can track whoever currently holds the relevant job. Five of the eight names here hold a frontbench or party-leadership role, and for three of them, the role is this exact brief.

Farron is a partial exception. He has campaigned on sewage discharge into Windermere, in his own constituency of Westmorland and Lonsdale, for years before he took on the DEFRA brief for his party, so some of this activity predates and sits outside the job description.

Steve Reed and Emma Reynolds tell a related story from the other direction. Both ran the whole of DEFRA as Secretary of State earlier in this Parliament, Reed from July 2024 and Reynolds from September 2025, and their totals were built mostly during those tenures. Reed left government entirely in July 2026's reshuffle. Reynolds moved to the Treasury.

That leaves Jim Shannon and Charlie Maynard as the table's genuine free agents. Both hold frontbench jobs on completely unrelated briefs, Shannon on health and human rights for the DUP, Maynard on Treasury matters for the Liberal Democrats, so nothing about their current role explains their appearance here.

Shannon's 184 signed motions is a real outlier, but it is not unusual for him specifically. He signs an extremely high volume of Early Day Motions across almost every subject that comes before Parliament, so this figure says more about his general approach to EDMs than about clean rivers in particular. Maynard's activity has no such explanation on offer. Ellie Chowns sits closer to the middle: she leads the Green Party's MPs in the Commons, and environmental issues sit at the core of what her party exists to raise, so a high ranking here is expected of her party's platform even if not written into her specific title.

The table spans five parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat, DUP, Conservative and Green, which is still worth sitting with. Clean rivers activity in Parliament is not confined to one side of the chamber or one obvious rivalry, even once you account for who is doing their job and who is doing more than that.

Frontbench tracks Hansard, EDM and division activity like this automatically for any policy area, alongside bills, committees and consultations. If you want to see how your own MP or a named champion is tracked on an issue you follow, the free tier is a reasonable place to start.