My Lords, very briefly, I support this amendment. Subsection (2) says:
“It shall be the duty of consumer regulators to promote the rights of consumers”.
I have been looking at the duties of Ofwat, the water regulator. It says that,
“our primary duties are to: … protect the interests of consumers, wherever appropriate by promoting competition … ensure that the companies properly carry out their functions … ensure that the companies can finance their functions”,
and,
“ensure long-term resilience”.
In the case of Thames Water, which is the biggest water utility, the regulator over the past 10 years has allowed the company to reduce its asset base to about a quarter of what it was, so it cannot now finance the tunnel that it wants to built under the Thames—the Thames tideway tunnel—without going into a kind of complex financial structure involving a separate infrastructure provider. The relationship between the infrastructure provider and Thames Water is extremely unclear. Who is liable if something goes wrong? That is also unclear, but the Government have been very nice and given them a guarantee if they run into financial trouble, because the provider is Macquarie Bank—and we would not want it to get into financial trouble, would we?
The extraordinary thing is that the regulator seems to think that this does not need any questioning or that any information should be given to the 12 million customers of Thames Water who are going to have to pay. There is a debate about how much they are going to have to pay a year, but it will be somewhere between £60 and £80 extra. This is a sewage charge, but all the people living in Oxford, Whitney, Newbury or anywhere which is part of the group, even though they are not going to benefit from the Thames tideway tunnel, will have to pay. I think the regulator has been asleep on the job.
This amendment should make things better, but Ofwat already has a primary duty to protect the interests of customers, and it is clearly not doing so.
Therefore, this amendment, if it is accepted by the Government, should put more pressure on it and some of the other utilities to do what they should do: to look at the needs of the customers, see whether there is an alternative and keep customers informed about what is going on. It is a good amendment and it will be interesting to hear what the Minister says in response.