It does, but obviously if a Labour Government went down that road, they would then have assets on the public sector books to match that spend, as the right hon. Gentleman is well aware. The arguments are not black and white, as he admitted in his speech. We do have to think out the policy very carefully. I am a great believer in radical policies. I voted from the Back Benches in favour of some of them under the last Labour Government when those were perhaps not the flavour of the month. We have to get it right.
I will mention one other issue and then finish. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, of which I am a member, did a report on the water industry. I commend some of the detail of that, and one detail in particular. The overflows from combined sewers owned by the water industry are a national disgrace. We have cleaned up our beaches in the past two or three decades, largely, dare I say it, because of European regulation.
We now need to clean up our rivers. Ilkley in my constituency is a great tourist destination, with swimmers in the Wharfe all the time. It connects downstream with the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) at Otley. We should not have sewage being discharged on a very regular basis. While I understand that various other things are going
on in Parliament next Tuesday, I will be concentrating on the afternoon drop-in session of the chief executive of Ofwat and the Environment Agency. I hope they will address the issue of sewage and commit to cleaning up our rivers, just as we have cleaned up our beaches.
10.14 am