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Flood and Water Management Bill

I knew that my hon. Friend had long experience of such matters, but I did not realise that it went back quite that far. He is absolutely right to identify this issue. We know from long-held experience that we should build sensibly, and we seem to have abandoned that needlessly. The Association of British Insurers predicts that, unless Government policy changes, a third of the 3 million new homes that the government wants to see by 2010 will be built on flood plains and:""Hundreds of thousands of homes could be uninsurable and uninhabitable"." The toxic combination of inaction on planning and inaction on insurance could create a lethal cocktail. The Government's hope that somehow voluntary agreements and the goodwill of the insurance industry are adequate to deal with this threat is just not good enough. More is also left out of the Bill. It is a water management Bill as well as a flood Bill, but with spectacularly unjoined-up timing, it seems to have missed the opportunity to address the issues of either the Cave or Walker reviews, and it is too late to influence the water pricing regime or water companies' plans now being put in place until 2015. It contains no reform of Ofwat's remit, which is badly needed. To be fair to Ofwat, it did not write its remit. It is a scary leftover from the high water mark of Thatcherism, when the only sustainability that counted was commercial and the interests of the consumer were regarded as purely economic. Issues such as the environment or social cohesion were simply not part of the equation. Other regulators, such as Ofgem, have already allowed—or been allowed to allow—sensible measures such as social tariffs to help the least well-off customers. It is high time that Ofwat was told to do likewise. Anna Walker's review rightly pointed out that water poverty was already becoming an issue and that it would become more of an issue if water bills had to rise, if metering became widespread and if the costs of environmental measures such as leakage control and sewage transfer were greater than expected. Walker says that we need""A package of help…closely targeted on customers with low incomes"" and asks the UK and Welsh Governments to consider updating the guidance to Ofwat. That cannot come soon enough. We do not have to design the whole social tariff system for this Bill, but I hope that it is not too late to, at the very least, change Ofwat's remit to stop it preventing water companies from introducing social tariffs as it does at present. The Secretary of State is looking sceptical, but he should ask the management of Dwr Cymru about their experience of Ofwat in this respect.