I shall make just a few comments. Over the last three years, events in Yorkshire have certainly shown the unpredictability of the weather, which can swing from a real flood to a virtual drought within a matter of weeks. The hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), who I see in his place on the Opposition Front Bench, and my hon. Friend the Minister sat in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee when we debated these issues—both at the pre-scrutiny stage and when the amendments to the Bill were tabled. It was a constant theme of the Select Committee to call for the implementation of abstraction reform—certainly by 2022. If I understand the Minister correctly, he is saying that this will happen within five years of the Act being passed, whereas we asked for it within seven years. It looks as if we are on course.
Personally, I would have made the case to include abstraction reform within the context of the Bill. I hope this does not come home to roost in the intervening five, six or seven-year period, but given the climatic changes and swings in weather patterns that we have seen, I hope we do not rue the day that we failed to include abstraction reform in the Bill. I understand that there was no appetite for it and that the Department felt, as I am sure the Minister will confirm, that doing so would have brought an inevitable delay to the Bill.
The reason why abstraction reform should be included, and the reason why I welcome this group of Lords amendments, is that the current system of managing abstraction of water from rivers and aquifers was introduced in the 1960s and is woefully out of date. It does not effectively address the severity of pressures on water resources due to increasing demands from a growing population and an increasingly varied climate. The Environment Agency has mentioned that in a number of areas, including my own, it cannot, for understandable reasons, afford to maintain the upkeep of existing flood defence banks. Farm land in those areas will be prone to future floods.
Water from rivers and aquifers has many uses, and there is a fine balance between industrial and non-industrial use. I visited the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), which I had the privilege of representing as an MEP for 10 years, to see the difficulties that many industrial users such as jam manufacturers and others experienced in a climate that they were not used to. Essex has on occasions been compared to Egypt in respect of the amount of water fall that it receives. The weakness in the current system means that it could start to constrain economic growth, reduce the resilience of the water supply and lead to environmental damage.
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I would like to hear what discussions the Minister is having with the European Commission’s water unit. That used to be chaired by someone whom I count as a friend, Grant Lawrence, who was a British official who
did great work for the European Union, but who was mindful of the uses of water and the competition for use between agricultural users, anglers and industrial users. Mr Lawrence left a number of years ago and since then I have been briefed on a number of occasions by the water unit, and I am struck by the fact that it does not understand our approach to water use. One reason for that, as it explains it to us, is that our rivers might seem long to us, particularly the Thames, meandering as it does through a number of counties, but compared with the Rhine and the Danube they are not. So it approaches river quality, water quality, and—dare I say?—abstraction in a completely different manner from us. When the Bill receives Royal Assent and we proceed within the timetable that my hon. Friend has set out, what discussions will he have in relation to water abstraction and abstraction reform on the reforms to the water framework directive and the other EU directives that are trundling down the river as we speak? That is important with regard to drafting and considering water abstraction reform.
I hope that my hon. Friend will again say that there will be plenty of opportunities to consult a variety of industrial users, and, obviously, I would make a bid for the Select Committee to be consulted at an early stage. I would like to make a plea for the farmers. I represent a deeply rural constituency, and there is concern among the farming community that delaying abstraction reform until 2020 or 2022 will mean that their interests are disregarded, more so in times of drought than in times of flood.
The detail of any abstraction regime will need to be developed following the Government’s consultation, which closed at the end of March, and, as my hon. Friend has set out, legislative proposals will be produced. One of the difficulties with the Bill, which I hope the water abstraction reform legislation will not suffer from, is a bane of the legislative programme. This point of the legislative Session is like midnight, and we have only one more year. I hope that we can make a plea for adequate time in the legislative programme in the next Parliament for the new regime to be introduced and properly considered.
The Opposition tabled a new clause whereby upstream reform could not have been implemented until new primary legislation on the licensing of abstraction had been passed, and they made the case for five years to elapse to allow for its implementation, and that has echoes in what the Government propose today. I would have preferred the new clause that we moved on Report to have seen greater favour, but I take this opportunity to welcome today’s amendments.
It is appropriate to raise water efficiency in terms of abstraction and the environmental protection measures that my hon. Friend set out. The Water Industry Commission for Scotland raised concerns throughout the Bill’s passage that retailers should focus on offering water efficiency advice and other environmental services as opposed to companies being encouraged to cherry-pick customers to the detriment of the generality of an incumbent’s customer base. The amendments that I understand came from WICS were not successful, but they sought to remove the link between the proposed wholesale authorisation and the proposed retail authorisation, by requiring those with wholesale authorisations to interact with water companies rather
than retailers, and further that Ofwat would be under an obligation, among other things, to set charging rules in a way that helps to incentivise water efficiency and other services. The Government resisted those amendments, but they go to the heart of what the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) said about the background reports that have seen fruition in this group of amendments, in particular the Anna Walker report on water efficiency. Each and every one of us has a role to play by not heating more water than we need and not running water while we clean our teeth, all of which have an effect. I hope my hon. Friend will have some regard to the powerful arguments that have been made when we go on to consider greater efficiency and in the context of abstraction reform.