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Water Strategy

I am keen on rolling out metering; that is the short answer. In the South West Water area, 60 per cent. of people are on meters, twice as many as in the rest of the country. The reason is that people want to mitigate high bills, so the incentives are that much stronger. To be fair, in the early days when it was discretionary, we had a much more flexible approach to the installation of meters in our part of the world than in other places, where people faced high charges if they got it wrong and had no opportunity to change. That opportunity now exists. The remaining number consists in part of those who cannot fit water meters—there are quite big issues of practicality in some mansion blocks and so on that have shared water supplies—and those who believe that they benefit from not having one. The implication of what I said about the rising block tariff is that those who use large amounts of water should pay for it unless they have a disability or similar situation that justifies such use. On water resources, everyone rightfully expects a continuous supply of clean, safe water to their homes and businesses, and they expect that water, once used, to be cleaned up before being released on to the beaches or the land. Delivering that supply despite the impacts of climate change and ongoing diffuse pollution is a challenge faced by the water industry. There is no doubt that tackling that challenge requires a new way of thinking and a move away from typical high-energy, end-of-pipe and highly chemical and capital-intensive solutions to an approach that uses soft engineering solutions and works with the natural landscape. A radical new approach, if delivered rightly, would give customers better value and lower bills in the long term as well as an infinitely better environment. With the growing impact of climate change, I do not believe that there is an alternative. That is why I return to the Government's water strategy, ““Future Water””. It is an excellent review of the correctly identified core issues of tackling climate change and diffuse pollution. The strategy rightly acknowledges that if we are to protect our valuable and vulnerable water resources, we need to take a new approach to managing them, and that the European legislation, the water framework directive, pushes us to take such a holistic view of our water resources. People often suggest that such legislation comes from Europe, but the Government signed up to it, so it came from the Government in the first place. There is a clear Government approach.