I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. If I felt a degree of paternalism towards the water White Paper, I feel one even more towards the Canal & River Trust, which is one of the great successes. It has seen volunteer numbers rocket since it went from being a government organisation—as British Waterways —to being in the charitable sector, and Members on both sides of the House should take pleasure in its success. Will the Minister respond, if not tonight, at some point, to the real concerns that the CWT has about clause 12? I hope that we can allay its fears because, as the Secretary of State rightly said, the CWT will be an important player in delivering the kind of connectivity we want in our water sector. The CWT will also be a huge resource, in terms of the economic regeneration of our cities, the potential for tourism and the social dimension of volunteer numbers. So I hope that the Minister is able to address the CWT’s concerns, which have been eloquently voiced to hon. Members on both sides of the House.
A debate is rightly taking place about the affordability of water. That was of primary importance in the Government’s mind as we developed the vision in the water White Paper and in the Bill, and I know that it is a great concern of the Minister as he steers the Bill through. Those who believe in price caps can relax about water, because we have a price cap for water—the five-yearly price review. Ofwat provides a price cap for customers, albeit one that is done by negotiation. It has been an effective way of keeping water relatively affordable, although I know that some of my colleagues from the south-west have views on that—we have partly addressed
those. Obviously, there are ongoing concerns about water prices, so it is also important to recognise what the Walker review said. It found that the rateable value of a property bears no relation to a customer’s ability to pay and it discovered that 40% of low-income households live in the top rateable value properties.
The concerns and fears that people have about increased metering do not necessarily correlate with the idea that we should leave as many households as we can paying for water through a rateable system. In the next price review period, possibly with the aid of some legislative stimulus, we could see a much higher rate of metering. Knowledge is power for households. We will not be having this debate in 20 years’ time, because we will all be managing our utilities on our laptops at work. We will be able to see that a rocketing in our water usage could be down to a leak in the system. We will be able to manage our household bills more effectively. The high level of metering in the south-west and the work that Southern Water and Thames Water are doing to increase the level of metering should be applauded and supported.
The WaterSure scheme and other social tariffs are important tools, but we should consider the whole question of affordability in a much more holistic way. The effect of a freeze in council tax, of getting more families on low incomes out of paying tax altogether and of other measures will have infinitely more impact on the total expenditure of those households than will tinkering around the schemes with some of these points.
My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), the Chair of the Select Committee, made an important point about bad debt, but I refer her to her own local water company, Yorkshire Water, which is an exemplar in dealing with bad debt. The money we all pay on our bills for bad debt varies around the country. Some are paying £14 or £15 and some are paying a lot more, because our water companies might be bad at dealing with bad debt. I was impressed to hear that, at Yorkshire, a resolve scheme negotiates repayment terms for customers with arrears of more than £500. A couple years ago, some 5,000 customers paid back £650,000 of bad debt, and the water company wrote off £1 million of bad debt. It is that kind of partnership approach that is delivering a much lower figure of bad debt, which should be seen in the context of affordability. Ofwat estimates that the next year’s price review could reduce bills by between £120 million and £750 million, which seems an awfully wide difference.
Of course we all want to keep water bills low and as many people as possible out of water poverty, but we concentrate on that at the risk of reducing investment. I have spoken about that matter recently in the House and I will continue to do so. A high level of investment is better for customers. It is about stimulating innovation and resilience and reducing the impact on the quality of people’s lives and ultimately on the bills they pay.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North mentioned my comments about the drought. In the spring of 2012, the Environment Agency said to me that there was a 3% chance of us having enough rain through that summer to refill the reservoirs and depleted aquifers. We were fortunate because it started to rain in May. It rained right through the jubilee and stopped just as the first athletes started arriving in the Olympic village. We all
thought, “Thank goodness”, although we did have a number of flooding incidents in certain areas. That rainfall might have caused us a problem that summer, but we were planning very seriously for a third dry winter. I put to the House this question: are we really content to see people in the most economically active part of the UK, which is sixth largest economy in the world, reduced to collecting their water from standpipes in the street? That is the sort of image that brings down Governments and causes wholesale, serious and endemic problems in society, and we must use this Bill to avoid that.