I start by saying that I am most grateful to noble Lords who have voiced their support for the amendment. If we were to debate this in a wider forum, we might find a good deal more support. I certainly have that in mind. We may return to this matter on Report.
Having said that, I am very grateful to my noble friend for spelling out so clearly what she and her colleagues in government see as the difficulty of forming, as she came back to again and again, an aggregate view. I do not think that people are looking for an aggregate; they are looking for consistency and a common approach to find out how much of this investment will actually fall on consumers.
The example that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, gave of the Thames tunnel has been very carefully worked out by Thames Water with the help of Ofwat. What the charge is going to be on water consumers—I am one of them—is known, perhaps not over the next 80 years, but over the next two or three years. I do not know how long it will be. That is the kind of example that might well be extended to other interesting investments.
This is the impression I have formed on what the UKRN is going about. I was getting very depressed at one point when the Minister was spelling out the impossibility of doing what we were asking it to do. Yes, the UKRN is a very important innovation. It is a much stronger and more effective body than its predecessor. It is emphasising cross-sectoral issues and looking, as I said a few moments ago, for consistency. It will be able to add considerable wisdom over the next two or three years and help successive Governments to try to make a better estimate of what an investment programme of the size that we now face in this country, running into hundreds of billions of pounds, is going to cost consumers.