I rise to speak to amendments 1, 2, 3 and 10, particularly amendment 1, which stands in my name.
There is enormous frustration in Nottinghamshire about the fact that when a new development takes place there is an obligation to connect and that often means that the public sewer, which is already under pressure, becomes flooded. Many Members will recognise that villages in our constituencies have grown over a number of decades. Often in Nottinghamshire, those villages have a working sewerage system but no one has developed a surface water system. That means that when somebody builds a new conservatory at the back of their house the local authority allows them to put the downpipe into the public sewer, and that puts pressure on an already pressurised sewerage system.
The problem is exacerbated when a new road is built. There is a good example of that in Nottinghamshire, where the Hucknall inner relief road, which has been permitted by Nottinghamshire county council, is about to go right through the town of Hucknall, and the plan includes dumping the surface water from that new road into an already flooding public sewerage system. That is unacceptable. To put it into Sherwood language, while we have got diggers on the ground digging up the whole town to put a new road in, it is not beyond the wit of man to put an enormous pipe underneath the road to take the surface water and not put it into the public sewer and flood the homes of people who are already suffering from sewage flowing through them.