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Water and Sewerage Services (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for giving us that information. On regulation generally, some of what the Minister has said about the powers of the regulator give a little comfort. There is still real concern about the regulation. Again, I would like the Minister to comment on that in his winding-up speech. My understanding is that the regulator’s powers are derived solely from the licence, which the Government have issued for consultation, and there is no power in the legislation. For a regulator to be genuinely independent there must be some statutory basis for his activity rather than being dependent on a licence issued by the department, which can be changed by that department without the same formalities as would apply in other matters. The noble Lord made much reference to the affordability tariff. It is good to see it there. He said that it was being funded by the Government, which is nice to see, but it is only funded up to 2010. He said that he was sure that after 2010 the Assembly would want to continue to do that. If the Assembly is there, perhaps it will, perhaps it will not; perhaps it will have the finances to do so, perhaps it will not. The noble Lord is clearly indicating that if he and his colleagues have anything to do with it, the affordability tariff will not continue after 2010. My amendment calls for this matter to be deferred to the Assembly. I do not accept that that would involve a two-year delay. It would involve the Assembly having to make some decisions and address some of the issues that I mentioned. At least it would ensure that the community in Northern Ireland discovered what were the financial plans, the strategic business plan, the governance letter and so on, and that decisions were taken. It would be very good for the Assembly to have quickly to address this very difficult issue because it will not find its feet and develop properly unless it does. I should parenthetically point out that the reference in my amendment to the Programme for Government Committee of the Assembly sounds curious but it is in substance the shadow Executive. The committee was reconstituted in November, precisely as the Executive would have been: containing only those parties that would be in an Executive, according to the number of ministerial departments that each would hold. We had a briefing by the Secretary of State, Peter Hain, here a few weeks ago. He accepted that the Programme for Government Committee was the shadow Executive—so we have reached the point in Northern Ireland where there is a shadow Executive considering policy matters. The committee wrote again last Monday, I think, to the Secretary of State, asking for the matter to be deferred to it. We should have regard to that request. By way of conclusion, I want to emphasise one further matter. Within the financial structures for the new undertaking there is provision for a dividend to be paid to the Treasury from the Water Service in Northern Ireland. It is set at 5.8 per cent. In England the equivalent figure is 5.1 per cent and in Scotland it is 4.1 per cent. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, is not here because I would be delighted to point out to him that he and his formula are not to blame for that. Those are decisions taken entirely by the Treasury, and we can only speculate why it is so generous to Scotland. I would not like to speculate on the reason for that. I will not take Scotland as a comparator for these matters, but quite seriously—I want to press the Minister strongly on this—there should be parity between the return charge to England and that to Northern Ireland. The Minister made many comparisons between England and Northern Ireland. Consequently, he ought to accept this comparison. That would go a long way towards easing the difficult adjustment that there will be for people in Northern Ireland in having to pay significantly more than they have done in the past. They will have to pay more, and that will notbe popular, but it would help the Government enormously in gaining popular acceptance if they could say that they were treating people in Northern Ireland in just the same way as people in England in terms of the rate of return to the Treasury. The current provision is most unfair and I want the Minister to dwell on that—ideally, to do more than dwell on it. I beg to move. Moved, as an amendment to the above Motion, to leave out all the words after ““that”” and insert ““this House, having regard to the declaration of the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland that the draft order has not been subject to full consultation, and the repeated request of the Committee on the Programme for Government of the Northern Ireland Assembly that the legislation should be deferred, declines to approve the Water and Sewerage Services (Northern Ireland) Order 2006””.