Katie Lam: Some think Britain is ‘going down the sewer’ – but those that built them have a lesson for how to avoid that fate

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.

When politicians talk about building more infrastructure, it can often seem like a fairly abstract ambition. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In January, thousands of people across Kent and Sussex, including in my constituency, lost access to running water after a “freeze and thaw event” caused pipes to burst. In other words, water infrastructure installed by the Victorians was unable to cope with predictable wintertime temperature changes after well over a century of use. Our infrastructure failed; the result was people in Britain, in 2026, forced to queue up for bottled water in order to wash themselves and cook their food.

The modern world rests on infrastructure.

The relative comfort in which we live was made possible by the building of previous generations. They created a world in which we were able to take roads, railways and reservoirs for granted. It is thanks to their work that we can travel easily around the country, heat our homes and, most of the time, rely on being able to turn on the tap to get clean, running water.

But this inheritance, impressive though it is, can’t last forever. It must be maintained and built upon. For many of my constituents last week, the consequences of failing to do that were all too real.

And what a failure it is. According to the National Audit Office, at the current rate of work and investment it would take 700 years to replace our ageing water system. In the meantime, outages like those seen in Kent and Sussex this week will, sadly, be commonplace. The promise of improvement in seven centuries’ time provides little comfort when you find yourself bathing in bottled water.

We can expect far more of this. We haven’t built a reservoir in this country since 1992, meaning that our rain-soaked island is likely to face water shortages in the decades ahead. Even if we’d built enough reservoirs, most of the country would still be relying on Victorian-era pipes, which bulge and burst as the temperature changes.

And our water system isn’t the only casualty of time and neglect. We haven’t built a new motorway since 2003, despite rising congestion. We haven’t built a new nuclear power station since 1995, helping to cause the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. The London Underground, a marvel of Victorian ingenuity, was built so long ago that the whole system now risks overheating. The plan seems to be to encourage people to carry a bottle of water on hot days.

In his memoirs, Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary founding father of Singapore, talked of taking his island nation from third world to first. It can feel like Britain is slipping in the opposite direction, from first world to third.

Yet we should not allow our current direction to define our future destination. Things can improve, and they must, just as they have before. The blockers which have been put in place to stop us from building on our inheritance were self-imposed; they can be removed. The drive and dynamism that will be required to turn our country around is considerable but is within our grasp.

After all, we’ve done it before. By the time of the Great Stink of 1858, the Victorians were still relying on the skeleton of the Roman sewage system. London’s population had grown forty times larger, and no effort had been made to manage this growth. Much of the capital was, in effect, an open sewer.

Within just six years, an entirely new sewage system had been opened, which would go on to be expanded over the next decade. By 1875, London had 1,300 miles of new sewers, and a whole new system designed to manage the city’s water and waste. In turn, the embankments built to support the new sewage system allowed the opening of new roads, new public gardens, and the Circle Line of the London Underground.

By contrast, since the Victorians laid the modern sewage system, the country’s population has merely trebled – an enormous challenge to be sure, but a smaller proportionate increase than from the Romans to the Victorians by some margin. We can, and should, also avoid making this challenge greater by adding hundreds of thousands of people to the population each year, as we have done for the past few decades.

There are plenty of rules which will need to be changed, and regulations which will need to be slashed, if we want to achieve anything on this scale again. Yet for even these changes to be made, we’ll first need to rediscover our national sense of ambition. We will need to believe that we are a country which can solve its own problems, rather than shrugging our shoulders as we stumble from crisis to crisis. We will need to recognise that we have our own part to play in creating the world that we want future generations to enjoy.

I believe that we can, and that we will – because while many of our politicians may have failed us, the British people are still the best in the world.