I would do it straight away. I cannot see what the problem is. If water is a natural monopoly, as some people argue, no harm will be done by breaking the formal monopoly; it is just that nothing will happen. But of course it is not a natural monopoly, which is why the industry is fighting so hard to keep a legal monopoly. It knows that it will have to wake up and change quite a lot if it has to face competition.
We would have to give the market some help to get it going, because the monopolists are in a very strong position. We would need to tell them to use their pipe network as a common carrier, because other people would need access to it. However, the challengers might soon find, as was the case with those sorts of arrangements in the telecoms industry, that the existing assets are not so great and that they want to put in their own pipes. The challengers in telecoms did that with wires, and then of course the radio links became a cheaper and
better way of doing it. Who knows what technical breakthroughs there might be or how much challengers would want to use the common carrier network? However, to get competition going we would need to start with a common carrier network, so a system would need to be put in place to allow people access to the pipes.
We would also need to ensure that the Environment Agency was prepared to license borehole water and sensible levels of river extraction by other licensees. I do not want our rivers to be run dry by people taking too much out in a dry season, so we would need proper regulation for that. As has been pointed out, however, we let huge quantities of water go to the sea during wet periods, so we do not seem to be very good at planning our water use and holding it in suitable locations so that we have plenty in drier weather.
Another thing that I think the water industry needs to pay attention to, along with other utilities in this country, is the huge disruption they cause to our road network. Our road network is a nationalised monopoly and therefore has rationing and, looking at the tax bill, is extremely expensive. It has all the characteristics of monopoly provision that I dislike. One of the things that make our totally inadequate road network even worse is the fact that it is regularly disrupted by businesses digging up great chunks of tarmac and subsoil with pneumatic drills in order to lay new water pipes, other utility pipes and wires. Why on earth have we not learnt that it is not a great idea to put these things right down the middle of the road and then hard-pack soil, subsoil, tarmac and stones on top, which means huge delay, disruption and cost every time we want to change it? In modern buildings all the services run in ducts under the floors so that we do not have to rip out the plaster, half demolishing the place, every time we want to change the wiring.
Surely we could have a system to provide easy access along the side of our roads to pipes, wires and anything else we want to put down without having to dig up the road every time. We could at least start doing that when we build new estates, shopping centres or whatever. We should do it intelligently by putting in ducts to save all that money and time. I find utility companies very sympathetic to that idea when I invite them in to talk about it. They say, “It’s a very good idea, but it won’t work in this case, Mr Redwood.” We have to make it work, because many other countries are well ahead of us on all this. They think we are completely potty to go in for this idea that the water company digs up the road and puts in a new pipe, then six months later the gas people come along and do exactly the same thing in a slightly different position, and then the following year the electricity people turn up and do it again. It is mad, costly and inefficient, and it is doing huge damage to an inadequate road network.
For all those reasons, give us competition, give us choice, give us innovation, and give us some common sense, because we are getting a rotten deal at the moment.
5.35 pm