My Lords, I want to give the Minister a little encouragement. We all recognise that this is a hopelessly complicated Bill that has been many years in gestation. On a number of occasions, we have complimented Defra, rightly so, on its briefing notes—yet another has come out today. Start putting those on a website, and you will have a work of reference that will be of enormous assistance.
One of the things in previous decades that has led to confusion has been the fact that the three different regulatory authorities—the Environment Agency, Ofwat and the Drinking Water Inspectorate—have different agendas and, before these new duties of resilience came in for Ofwat, there was no reason why Ofwat and the Environment Agency should ever agree. As I said at Second Reading, I never really felt that I was going to feel sorry for the water companies, but on that aspect I did because they were being dragged in two different directions.
If you really want to manage water in an appropriate way, you should do it by catchments, but unfortunately you cannot organise Great Britain, or even England and Wales, by catchments. That is, alas, not the way that local government, or any government, works. In the Bill, we are trying to promote sustainable management of water. That means starting at the estuary and working uphill, and if that can be done by catchment, so much the better. You try and get all the different bodies together, preferably with voluntary agreement—I agree with my noble friend who moved this amendment that, if you can do that without regulation, so much the better—but of course there must of course be a regulatory framework, and no one is disputing that.
The reason that I have some small words of comfort for my noble friend on the Front Bench is that I think that the Bill, complicated though it is, goes a long way towards bringing the two main regulatory authorities—the Environment Agency and Ofwat—to a common agenda. If we asked in Scotland, where there is yet another regulatory authority, I think they would say that their relationships with Ofwat—on roughly the same agenda, but with a completely different competitive background for the past five years—can now only improve. That is important as some catchments straddle the Scottish and English border. If ever there was a case for ensuring that we work to a common agenda, it must be for those people in the catchment area of the River Tweed.
4.15 pm