In more than a decade as an MP, I have attended hundreds of meetings in parliament. Most pass. Some linger. Few stay with you. But a recent event was very different.

We hosted the actors, the real-life people they portrayed and the production team behind the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business. It tells the story of campaigners and families who have spent years fighting not just privatised water companies, but a system that was meant to protect them – and has too often failed.

At its centre is a mother, Julie Maughan, whose story is one of the most difficult of the series. Some years ago, her eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died after exposure to polluted water. It’s the kind of thing that you read about from a distance and struggle to take in. You register it, and move on.

But there’s no distance when you are sitting a few feet away from Julie in a quiet committee room that suddenly feels very small. Or when you hear her sobbing as the room watches the TV clip of her daughter dying; her voice breaking as she speaks of the impact this unspeakable tragedy had on her and her family. It’s something I will not forget.

There was no performance, no grandstanding, no playing to the audience. Just grief, dignity and a quiet determination that no other family should go through what they had. At the end of the meeting, she came over to thank me for the work we have been doing to bring water back into public ownership. That moment cut through everything. Because statistics can be argued with. Stories like this cannot.

And so, in that instant, this stopped being about policy or process. It became something simpler: what kind of country allows this to happen? And what kind of country decides it will not allow it to happen again?........

© The Guardian