Asked by: Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the level of gearing in water and sewerage companies; how they calculate gearing for the purpose of any official or internal statistics on the insolvency risk of water and sewerage companies; and whether they use equity or assets as a denominator when making any calculation o gearing.
Answered by Baroness Hayman of Ullock - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The gearing of water companies is reported by Ofwat in its annual Monitoring Financial Resilience Report. Ofwat requires companies to report gearing as net debt divided by Regulatory Capital Value.
Water companies are allowed to raise debt to fund the delivery of their services; this is normal practice across all parts of the private sector. At sensible levels, debt can be an appropriate way to fund investment for essential infrastructure over the longer term. However, we recognise some companies will need to take further steps to strengthen their financial resilience.
The Independent Water Commission has made recommendations around the financial resilience of companies. The Government’s full response to the Commission’s recommendations - including those around financial resilience - will be outlined later this year through a White Paper. The proposed reforms will then form the basis of a new water bill to modernise the entire system so that it is fit for decades to come.
Asked by: Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many intellectual property licences the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs holds under contracts or terms of reference for (1) grants, (2) pre-procurement or proof of concept work, and (3) procurement; how many of those have sub-licensing rights; how many of those have resulted in sub-licensing; and how many of those sub-licences are for patents, and for which countries.
Answered by Baroness Hayman of Ullock - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The information requested is not held centrally and to obtain it would incur disproportionate costs.
Our standard terms and conditions have clauses setting out ownership, rights and permitted use of intellectual property (IP) assets created in the course of suppliers’ work for DEFRA. We do not keep a central register of IP assets and rights; these are the responsibility of contract owners and contract managers across DEFRA group.
To answer the noble Lady's question, we would have to access all individual contracts to ascertain what IP licensing terms have been put in place. This would mean that this request is manifestly unreasonable on the grounds of cost and time.