Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

That is absolutely right. I am afraid that water customers across the country are paying the price for this Government losing control of inflation. The reason we are all facing these massive increases in the current financial year and the next is that inflation is out of control. We in the south-west are suffering like everybody else. However welcome the £50 cut is, it will already have been wiped out by the time we get it. People will not notice it because their bills will be no lower than they were before as a result of the two years of increases that they will suffer this year and the next. We must stop the culture of annual increases, and I hope that the Government will do that when they bring forward their full water Bill. The hon. Member for St Ives is absolutely right about this. We always talk about the water industry as though it is the same as the gas industry, the electricity industry and the other privatised utilities, but it is not—it is a monopoly private provider. Customers in the south-west cannot choose where they get their water from. Admittedly there is also a problem in the energy industry, but people do have a limited choice of provider for their gas and electricity. The other reason it is completely wrong to put water in the same category as the other privatised utilities is that water is plentiful. We live in a wet country; it rains. If it stops raining, we might as well all pack up go home, but that is not going to happen—we hope. Water is not like gas, electricity or oil, where the resources are finite. The Government must challenge the assumption that water prices should always rise. Given the advances in modern technology, there are strong arguments for water bills coming down rather than going up. I ask the Minister to look carefully at the structure of the industry and the strength of the regulator. For the reasons that the hon. Member for St Ives and I have mentioned, there is a very good argument for the water regulator being much stronger than the regulators of the other privatised utilities. The Prime Minister is fond of making speeches about crony capitalism; well, he can show us his mettle by dealing with an industry that is a private monopoly where customers have no choice. The industry has its hands round their necks, they cannot go anywhere else, they are fed up, and they do not understand the inevitability of year-on-year increases. Of course we have to improve our outdated infrastructure, and a lot of work has been done on that. However, when I hear industry spokespeople and Ministers saying that we are about to face a terrible drought, worse than that in 1976, I wonder why the industry and the Government have not looked more carefully at the idea of water trading, which I think has been mentioned by a Government Member. Why do we not pipe water from the Severn catchment area, where it is plentiful, to the Thames catchment area? That could be done quite cheaply. It is not hugely expensive or terrible for climate change, as the Secretary of State said in her opening remarks. A similar thing could be done across the country. My right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) mentioned reservoir capacity. There is no reason why in this country, which has a cool, temperate climate with plenty of rain, we should pay such high prices for our water. We should not accept inexorable rises year on year, particularly when families are feeling the pinch. I share the admiration of the hon. Member for St Ives for the current management of South West Water. However, in the increases that that company and the rest of the industry have asked for in this financial year and the next, they have not shown the sensitivity that they might have shown to the state of household finances.