My Lords, I am grateful to those noble Lords who have participated in this short debate. Of course, I understand the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, that it is not just water quality that matters but water quantity as well. A number of noble Lords made reference to the River Thames. However, anybody who watched the BBC “Panorama” programme about two months ago would surely be left in no doubt that there is still much to do to clean up that river, which is in an embarrassingly poor state. Nevertheless, I understand that the quality of our rivers generally is much better than it was 20 years ago. I was very impressed by the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Randall, who clearly understands the problem well. He referred to an event in 1858, when there was general recognition of the appalling state of our rivers and the amount of sewage going into them. It is surprising that, in 2021, there is still quite the quantity of raw, or insufficiently treated, sewage flowing into our rivers.
I very much appreciated the support of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and quite understand his point that it is necessary to have co-operation between England and Wales over the rivers that flow between the two countries, and his acceptance that it would be entirely in order to establish a UK standard. I thank the Minister for his comments, and I was pleased to hear that, in the other place, Rebecca Pow has made a further commitment that the existing regulations will be enforced where required. But I again ask the Minister to consider whether it would be appropriate to establish
a UK standard. He did sort of refer to that when talking about metrics, but if he has doubts about the existing European standard then we should surely try to devise our own.
I would be grateful if the Minister would be prepared to discuss with me a way of making targets for water quality a higher priority. There are many aspects of water that need to be improved, nevertheless I am surprised that improving water quality is not yet considered a higher priority than it currently is. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.