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Water Bills (South-West)

I shall seek clarification from the Minister on that, and I shall come to that point shortly. DEFRA accepts that those changes will add to bills, but I do not think that its figures are very reliable. Rather than helping to reduce bills, the plans regarding private sewers will increase them. DEFRA estimates that the increase will be anything from £3 to £11, but the industry believes that it will be much higher. My experience from dealing with large numbers of constituents who face problems with this issue tells me that costs are likely to be extremely high. I do not believe that the figures take into account the fact that those sewers are likely to be extremely dilapidated and will therefore require very high levels of capital infrastructure costs, and not just maintenance costs. Typically, in our part of the world, many of the estates were not officially adopted when they were built precisely because their sewerage systems were not of an adequate quality and were often made of pitch fibre. They are currently collapsing and often need replacing. Whilst that is a huge issue for the residents of those estates, simply deciding to bung the problem on to South West Water bills without an adequate calculation of the likely increase in bills could leave us saddled with a repetition of the mistakes that the Conservatives made in the late 1980s. In my last debate on this, in 2005, I got the distinct feeling that the Minister who responded saw bills as a south-west problem and a south-west responsibility, but the entire country benefits from our coastline. In 2003, Cornwall alone received 5 million UK tourist visitors and there were 25 million tourist nights. Those figures do not include the 2 million overseas visitors. Our part of the coastline is part of the bedrock of Britain’s tourist industry and is a national asset, but just 3 per cent. of the national population is bearing the cost of cleaning up to a third of the national beaches. At the heart of the debate, more than the question of who should pay for what and who benefits from what, is the fact that the people who are paying for all this are the poorest in the UK. It is a mistake of the Minister’s Conservative predecessors, but surely a concern of the Labour party, that people on such low incomes, in such high levels of poverty, are paying such big bills without any help from the benefit system in the way in which it would help them out with housing or council tax costs.