Biodiversity

I agree with the gist of what the Minister is saying. I think that the first tranche of the river catchment management plans were right in their approach and ambition, although we would have liked to have seen a little more ambition. However, they were met with some caution because they did not go far enough. The previous Government would have faced the difficulty of finding out how to do even more, and the Minister now faces the challenge of doing even more—we all agree that we need to move up the scale, logarithmically, on water quality—with less. Can he say with confidence that, whatever way he cuts it, whether through partnership or whatever, the outcomes approach he talked about will be apparent, so that we deliver huge, tangible improvements over the next five to 10 years not only in water quality, but in the ecology of those river systems?