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Flood and Water Management Bill

The amendments address hugely important issues. I am concerned, however, that there are real problems with new clause 3, as there were with the identical clause tabled in Committee. I agree with the hon. Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter), who is no longer in his place, that enforcing the establishment of pilot schemes and a long-winded assessment exercise could delay a move that residents in Cheltenham, and I would guess in York and elsewhere, need to happen as soon as possible to tackle a considerable cause of distress and cost to individual householders. We all know that the transfer of private drains and sewers needs to take place, and that it will be done at some stage. We already have an impact assessment, and Ofwat has done work to estimate the likely impact of adoption on household water bills—up to £12 per household per annum. Perhaps the hon. Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) does not trust Ofwat or the impact assessment to have produced the right answer, but in that case she might not trust the Environment Agency's assessment of the pilot scheme either. I am sure that the new clause was well intentioned, and it certainly addresses an important issue, but the consequence of it could be to leave residents vulnerable to continued unexpected bills running into thousands of pounds, and to cause huge problems to individual households. I have some problem with new clauses 5 and 6, in that they both refer to "sustainable urban drainage systems". Members who were not on the Committee will not know that we had considerable discussion on the precise definition of SUDS, and after considerable debate we established that the letter "u" did not stand for "urban" in the context of the Bill but was simply the "u" of "sustainable".