Public Bodies (Abolition of the Advisory Committees on Pesticides) Order 2015
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, this is an order to be made under the Public Bodies Act 2011. As detailed in the explanatory document accompanying it, it delivers one of the outcomes of the Government’s programme of reform for public bodies. The order will abolish the Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the equivalent body for Northern Ireland as statutory non-departmental public bodies. The Government will then establish a new expert scientific committee.
I wish to make it absolutely clear that this is not an attempt on the Government’s part to stem the flow of impartial and independent scientific advice on pesticides—in fact, quite the reverse. We are very clear that the Advisory Committee on Pesticides has several strong features that must continue. These include: expertise, independence, impartiality, transparency, a direct line to Ministers, and the ability to initiate its own lines of inquiry. We will retain these qualities, but we see an opportunity to make improvements. I firmly believe that there will be benefits from the successor committee operating in a different and more flexible way, while of course retaining its independence.
We need new arrangements to reflect wider changes in the regulatory landscape for pesticides since the Advisory Committee on Pesticides was set up nearly 30 years ago. We need to establish a broader, more strategic and proactive role for the successor committee while meeting the continuing need for independent expert scientific advice in this area.
Over recent years, Defra has taken steps to improve its management of the wide range of scientific advice and evidence that underpins its work. As an expert scientific committee, the successor body to the Advisory Committee on Pesticides will work in a more co-ordinated and peer-reviewed environment. This is overseen by our chief scientific adviser and science advisory council. They do not interfere in the work of experts but provide valuable co-ordination, challenge and support.
We have consulted widely, as required by the Public Bodies Act, on the future of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. As we have reported, there was clear support for our proposals. We also have the full support of other UK departments and the devolved Administrations. We have secured the required clearance from the devolved legislatures for the order. I believe we have gained this support because we acknowledge that these other parties have a strong interest in the future arrangements. We have worked closely with them and with the committee itself to draft the terms of reference for the new expert scientific committee. The input of the committee members is particularly important because they will transfer to the successor body.
The draft terms of reference have been discussed at two meetings of the committee and small but important adjustments have been made. These changes have satisfied members that the draft clearly sets out a shared vision of the independence of the committee, its right to initiate work and its right to communicate directly with Ministers. This text has now been put to departments for final agreement.
The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report on the order highlighted several issues to be captured in the terms of reference. These included addressing the comments by the Advisory Committee on Pesticides in the earlier consultation about independence and proactivity. It also mentioned the importance of the Principles of Scientific Advice to Government and the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees. The report also called for the establishment of escalation routes to ensure that advice from expert scientific committees can be submitted directly to Ministers, as appropriate.
In flagging those points, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee nevertheless concluded that the Government have demonstrated that the draft order serves the purpose of improving the exercise of public functions as set out in the 2011 Act, in line with the considerations contained in it. The committee was consequently content to clear the order within the 40-day affirmative procedure.
I am glad to be able to confirm that the issues raised by the scrutiny committee are all carefully and fully addressed in the draft terms of reference for the successor body. I can also confirm, as outlined earlier, that the members of the current Advisory Committee on Pesticides and all the relevant departments have been closely involved in this work. The existing Advisory Committee on Pesticides has provided real value over a number of years and the Government are determined to carry over its strengths to the new body. However, the new structure will be more flexible and efficient. I commend the draft order to the Committee.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for spelling out the content of this order. Clearly, with the passage of the Public Bodies Bill—four years ago now—the authority to abolish this committee, provided the Government followed the appropriate procedure, has been there.
In Committee on the Public Bodies Bill, I queried the wisdom of abolishing this committee, and my noble friend Lady Quin queried it on Report. The significance of that for those who are not all that familiar with the history of Defra is that my noble friend Lady Quin was the last MAFF Minister to have responsibility for pesticides and I was the first Defra Minister to have responsibility for pesticides. We relied very heavily on the objectivity of the statutory committee, as well as the operations of the pesticides department—PSD—within Defra, because there are always some very difficult, if not controversial, issues arising about pesticides.
The difficulties and controversy have, if anything, increased in recent years. A number of bans at European level have been contested by the industry and some others in crop protection. There has recently been a serious disagreement between the Government and our European colleagues on neonicotinoids. There are always concerns for wildlife and, in particular, the bee population, the effects of various pesticides on them and therefore on their ability to fertilise a whole range of cultivated and wild plant life.
Within what is a no doubt objective and highly scientific area, there are quite often serious disagreements between experts. One of my main memories of my time as a Minister in this area was one huge row where—I will not go into the details—somebody was appointed to the committee whom the crop protection industry was not particularly keen on. It was always important to ensure a balance on the committee, with a range of people. Of course, that is quite difficult for government appointments. Almost everybody with a scientific background in this area, whether at university or in industry, has at some point in their career been employed or had their research sponsored by companies within the industry. It is therefore very important that transparency, accountability, independence—from industry as well as from government—and balance are clear in the advice that the Government receive.
Actually, the non-departmental public body requirements help to ensure that. My concern about the abolition of the committee was that we might lose that balance. The Government have gone through the correct procedures to ensure that there is understanding of the new way of carrying things out. I appreciate that and have every faith in the Government being very diligent in ensuring that that balance and independence are still there. They put it within a wider context where, effectively, this is an expert committee reporting to the science advisory council, which oversees the whole of Defra’s scientific work. That makes sense to a degree, provided that that is well resourced and that the expert committees covering specialist areas maintain the balance and independence I referred to.
I accept the Government’s good intentions within this area but they have to recognise that it is one where, publicly, media-wise and in the scientific community, controversy can jump out at Ministers who are without great expectation or, frankly, much knowledge of the balance of understanding on the scientific argument. That means the Government must be able to defend whatever future, more flexible arrangements are put in place. The Government refer to flexibility of advice. That should not be too ad hoc or Ministers would be open to the accusation that they have chosen the advice from those people most likely to favour their or the industry’s position. That would be unfortunate in an area where a degree of objectivity has generally been respected over the years.
Pesticides used in our agriculture and horticulture have an important effect on the countryside, wildlife, bystanders, rural communities and the productivity and economic structure of our agricultural sector, so this is an important issue. I hope that the new arrangements work as well as the old ones. I dug out the latest annual report. It is clear from even the summary of the activity—where there were 12 important authorisations of pesticides, some more authorisations of equipment and some serious discussions about the regulatory regime of pesticides in that very year—that that intensity is unlikely to diminish.
Single Use Carrier Bags Charges (England) Order 2015
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Viscount Ridley (Con)
My Lords, I want to make a couple of quick points and press a couple of questions similar to ones that have already been made. What we are talking about is known in economics as a Pigovian tax. I know this is not a tax but Pigovian taxes are intended to discourage activity. The one thing economists say about them is that they should be as technology-neutral, as transparent and as even as possible, otherwise they simply push down something that pops up somewhere else. I worry that we are talking about dealing with what is a very small part of the amount of plastic litter that ends up in the countryside. The point has been made that there is an awful lot of litter on roadsides, particularly at this time of year, and relatively little of it consists of supermarket plastic bags. I have heard the figure of 1%, although I do not know if that is right. Is it not possible to come up with something much more neutral about plastic technology generally across the board, to see whether we can discourage it without picking on this one bag?
I find it very hard to believe that the savings in littering and CO2 will be in the region of £780 million— I think that was the number I heard. This is only a relatively small part of the litter that is around. I cannot believe that 10 minutes less spent picking up litter on the side of the road because there are no plastic bags there will add up to £780 million. On the CO2 point, I echo what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester said. It is not at all clear that the alternatives will produce less CO2—unless we all use the equivalent of the right reverend Prelate’s bag and I am not sure that everybody will. We know that more energy often goes into making paper bags by the time that transport and everything else is taken into account, whether or not, as my noble friend Lord Holmes said, that paper bag gets reused. We also heard from my noble friend Lord Lindsay that oxydegradable plastic bags will have an impact on the recycling chain. Can we make absolutely sure that, when we quote figures for the amount of carbon dioxide that will be saved by this measure, they are honest and properly audited? One hears some claptrap in this area and it would be nice to be sure that the figures are right.
The hypothecation of taxes—that is, when a tax automatically goes to one use rather than just into the Treasury—is something that the Treasury has always resisted. I know that this is not a tax—it is a charge—but none the less it has been hypothecated to certain good causes. On the whole, that is quite a good idea, as long as the customer is allowed to direct where it goes. I hope that that becomes a slightly more general point across government.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I suspect the Minister was hoping for full approval for this government initiative. I am gratified that the Government have finally got around to it. I have been campaigning on this front for at least 15 years, so I am glad that, 13 years after the Republic of Ireland, and then following the devolved Administrations within the UK, we have at last reached this position. To continue the scriptural allusions of my noble friend Lord Dubs, there is always much joy in heaven for a sinner who repenteth, and we should all appreciate that. Nevertheless, we could have had a much clearer policy announced today—one that would have been better understood by the public. I was struck by the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, that it is people who litter, not bags. That is absolutely true. However, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said, the whole point of this tax is effectively to change behaviour. It is not a tax; it is a levy.
My noble friend Lord Anderson referred to the experience in Wales. I happened to be in Tesco in Dundee on Sunday with a young lad. I would not say that he had great green credentials nor that he was always affected by prices, but he had already—this is relatively new in Scotland—changed his behaviour and brought a bag with him. That is the point. Yes, in the end, it is people who create litter and, by using these plastic bags, not only cause unnecessary carbon emissions but bring desecration to our countryside, wildlife, marine life, beaches and many of our city centres. I am glad that my noble friend Lady Golding found only one plastic bag in her car park, but I must say that that is not the general experience in either urban or rural car parks, or in other open spaces. It has been reported that some 2,000 of them can be found on every square kilometre of beach. That is atrocious from the aesthetic as well as the environmental and economic point of view.
I welcome the principle, but it has been unnecessarily curtailed, and in such a way that it does not do what it alleges it intends to do. The big exemption is for retailers with fewer than 250 employees, which exempts quite large retailers and represents around a third of all retail outlets. These exemptions do not exist in the devolved Administrations, but the exemption for very small retailers from completing the reporting mechanisms—the real red tape and administrative burden—is set at 10 employees. That seems to be a sensible approach. The exemption should be from the reporting and administrative burden, not from the requirement to impose the charge.
The exemption makes a big difference to the figures in the Government’s own impact assessment. The net present value of this over 10 years, according to the impact assessment set out on page 7 of the Government’s report and as indicated by the Minister, is £782 million. However, it would rise to more than £1 billion if all retailers were included. The Government’s position would be understandable if the retailers themselves were strongly pressing for this exemption, but I am sure that other noble Lords have seen the representations from a number of organisations that represent retail outlets, all of whom are saying, “This is daft and will actually impose a burden on retailers that will put them at a competitive disadvantage in certain respects”.
The British Retail Consortium has said that it is unfair to put smaller retailers in a position where they have to choose whether to charge. There are doubts about having an inconsistent position across the UK. The Association of Convenience Stores has said that some 60% of its members support a single-use carrier bag levy being applied, and in Wales, where it has actually happened, more than 80% of convenience stores support it. The association would strongly support its own membership being covered by this in England as well as in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The British Independent Retailers Association, which is the voice of the independent retailer and is often critical of the red tape of government regulations, has said that this should cover businesses of all sizes and that the only exemption should be on the administrative burden, to which I have referred. The Government do not have the support of those who would allegedly benefit from the substantial exemption this order provides for.
There are other exemptions or potential exemptions which can also be queried. The noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, has spelt out comprehensively why the issue of oxo-biodegradable bags is not worthy of being considered as an exemption because of their knock-on effect on waste management and the reusability of plastics in general. Others have queried whether other sorts of bags that are being exempted should have that exemption. The big issue I refer to in that respect is: why should non-reused paper bags be excluded when they themselves have a very high carbon content and are a significant part of the litter around our towns and countryside?
Given, therefore, that there is now a general acceptance of this approach, and that the alleged beneficiaries of the exemptions do not seem to be in favour of the Government’s position, why do the Government persist in doing this? Why, in particular, do they do so when the rest of the United Kingdom does not provide for those exemptions, or most of them, and when we may well be faced with a European directive at some point, which will probably not have those exemptions either?
As I say, we should give at least two cheers for the Government for coming forward with this at last. Nevertheless, it is a pity that they have botched it a bit, and I hope that maybe they will fairly rapidly rethink this, and that, even if we adopt this statutory instrument today or when it is considered in the Chamber, they will come back and say, “Actually, these exemptions are pretty much a nonsense. Let’s make it straightforward so that everybody can understand it, and it will have the effect on everybody, whether they are a customer of a small or large business, whether they have a plastic bag or a paper bag, and whether they are in the country or the centre of our towns”. I hope that the Minister will take that at least as partial support, but some rethinking would be appropriate in his department.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their comments, but in particular I thank those noble Lords who have given at least the partial support that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, offered. I will see how many of noble Lords’ questions and comments I can address, bearing in mind that our process may shortly be interrupted. However, I will see how far I can get.
The noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, asked why there had been a delay in getting to where we have. I know that I will not satisfy him entirely, and I suspect that he may have heard me say this before. However, I will say again that we carefully considered the situation and looked at the effect of the scheme in Wales to enable us to design what we considered to be the most appropriate scheme in England. As he knows, we first used voluntary industry initiatives to reduce bags, which proved successful up to a point. The other point it is worth making is that we needed to work with retailers to give them time to prepare. I know that I am not satisfying him entirely, but he will allow me to make that point.
He also asked what the purpose of an end date to the legislation is. It is standard practice from the perspective of Better Regulation to include a sunset date. It gives the Government of the day the opportunity to review the legislation to decide whether it is fit for purpose, and indeed to amend it if they wish to do so. Seven years is standard practice in that regard.
The noble Lord raised the exclusion of SMEs, as did a number of noble Lords. I am aware that some SMEs wish to be included within the scheme, but we have chosen to exempt small and medium-sized businesses from the charge to reduce the administrative burden on start-up and growing businesses at a time when we are supporting new growth in our economy. It is important to remember that the large majority of single-use plastic bags are distributed by the large retailers, and the seven major supermarkets gave out more than 7 billion of those bags in 2013. Small and medium-sized businesses are able to charge on a voluntary basis if they wish, and we have been told about some that already charge voluntarily and are generating significant financial benefits from a reduction in the number of bags they supply. I thoroughly encourage that. There is a requirement in the order for the system to be reviewed within five years, and the scope of the review will be set by the Secretary of State at the time, but I am confident that the SME exemption will be one element of the policy that will be considered as part of that review.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, asked a related question. The impact assessment also states that there is an overall net benefit to society when SMEs are excluded from the scheme. The Government have therefore chosen to exempt them from the plastic bag charge to avoid placing an administrative burden on them at a time when, as I said, we are supporting growth in the economy.
Natural Environment
Lord Whitty Excerpts(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness for initiating this very wide-ranging debate. I thank her also for giving us a quick preview of what would be the Queen’s Speech of a Liberal Democrat Government—some of which sounds vaguely attractive, and I might support it.
The title of this debate ranges from the very local to the international, and we do not know where to begin. The noble Baroness began, as I rather suspected she might, with the situation in Somerset and the Somerset levels and the disastrous, distressful floods. There was a terrible impact on both the people there and the environment. However, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, said, the key thing about the Somerset levels is that they are not, in a strict sense, a natural environment. They have been created by manmade measures over the centuries: intricate water management, successive different forms of farming putting pressure on the system, deforestation, local pollarding of trees and so forth, and ever-changing farming practices. They all put pressure on the system. All those efforts gave an economic base to the area and the landscape that we love, but the levels are not a natural environment. They need to be protected, but we need a different system of human management for such areas.
The storms of last year which caused the floods in Somerset and elsewhere were a unique event and were unprecedented in their form. While one cannot ascribe any individual extreme weather event to climate change, climate change means that we are going to get more of them. The likelihood is therefore that the UK and the world will face greater storms, floods, droughts and other disasters, and we need human management to deal with that. In order to protect our environment, we need a change in intervention. As in 19th century Sicily, unless there is change, things cannot remain the same. We therefore need to recognise that the challenge of global climate change will mean a lot of new, local interventions. I do not want to be too despondent, but the world has largely failed on climate change. The conference in Paris this year may be the last-chance saloon to stop average global temperatures going over the 2 degrees level.
There are some fairly worrying indications. The fall in the oil price means that people and markets are switching back to fossil fuels. The development of shale gas and shale oil has displaced coal in America. On balance, this is a positive thing, but it has reduced the price of coal, which is being exported to markets at a low cost, as is US oil. The net result is that the price of fossil fuels, relative to nuclear and renewables, is changing. The problem is not just in places like China, where coal-fired power stations are coming on stream every month, or India where the explicit objective of the new Government’s policy is to exploit to the full India’s domestic coal resources—most of which are lignite, the worst form of coal. It is also true within Europe, where Polish and German lignite is now being used to a greater degree: even green Germany is opening new coal-fired power stations.
In aggregate, the global subsidies for coal far outweigh those for renewables or nuclear energy. The markets and, in some cases, government policy, are moving in the wrong direction. Over the years, the UK Government have, commendably, taken the lead in both establishing targets and introducing policies designed to offset this. However, most of those policies have not delivered to the extent that they should. The noble Baroness mentioned issues of energy efficiency in residential and other property, but so far the measures are faltering. The ECO is not working as it should, nor is the Green Deal, and take-up of the RHI is very limited. A report which I was partly responsible for found that there are very few pressures in the commercial and industrial sectors for increasing the environmental efficiency—and therefore the energy use—of commercial buildings, old and new.
As the noble Baroness said, we need intensified policies in all of these areas. We also need them on land management: how we use land and water. We need to plant more, appropriate trees on many of our hillsides; we need more effective water management by catchment; we need to reform the abstraction regime for water in our uplands. We cannot defer this, as we have done for many years. Some of these interventions, and some on the energy side, will be seen by some as detrimental to the natural environment, but that will only be in the short term. In the long term, they will protect our natural environment.
I am not saying that we should give up trying to mitigate the rise in carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. That objective is still there, but we need to recognise that a significant rise in global temperatures—probably over 2 degrees—is now almost inevitable. We therefore need to look at adaptation in the way that we have looked at attempts to mitigate. On the mitigation side, the Climate Change Committee has indicated that the next Budget will require us to cut, between now and 2025, by another 28%. We succeeded in meeting the first budget targets only because of the recession. The underlying change is nowhere near close to achieving those ends. That means that even in the UK—which is leading in this area—we are not likely to make our contribution to reducing carbon.
We therefore need to focus as well on mitigation. That will need capital expenditure by both public and private sectors. We know that the way in which projects are assessed in the private sector tends to focus on the short term. We know that the immediate fiscal problem with regard to public expenditure is limiting the amount of public investment in things such as flood defence, resilience of infrastructure and the whole area of protection of our countryside. Unless we put the money in and give some priority to that form of investment, we will neither protect what we call our natural environment nor avoid the major problems that are facing us through the process of climate change.
EU: Counting the Cost of Food Waste (EUC Report)
Lord Whitty Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I was a member of the Select Committee, serving under the very effective leadership of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. It was a fascinating task and she very deftly explained both the main points of what we have covered and what has happened since. I shall try just to underline one or two points.
My first point is what a big deal this is. On some estimates, the amount of food waste in the industrialised countries exceeds the total first production of the whole continent of Africa. This is an incredible waste of human effort and environmental and economic cost. I say, “On some estimates”, because we very rapidly found that the estimates in this field are rather difficult, which limits the degree to which the EU can play as effective a role as it perhaps ought. We found that measurement of food waste at different stages of the chain and between different countries was pretty incompatible. Until that is resolved, the EU level probably has to be aspirational, exculpatory and a matter of learning from best practice. Best practice in this area largely rests in the United Kingdom and, to some extent, in the Netherlands.
The next point I will emphasise is the key role of the retailers in the supply chain. Clearly, the retailers have done a lot to cut their own waste at their stage in the process and they are taking it further and helping out on aspects such as food redistribution, but it is also true that they bear a heavy responsibility for what happens at both ends of the chain. Their contracting deals with farmers and small producers inevitably lead to some wastage at that level.
It is part of the general imbalance between the great supermarket chains and farmers and other small producers that leads to alterations in contracts, including premiums for particular, very highly specialised specifications for vegetables and other materials. The way that contracts are actually carved up leads to waste at that level. That is something that needs to be addressed, particularly in the same context as the grocery code and the role of the grocery code adjudicator. At the moment, the adjudicator’s responsibilities do not really include a responsibility for ensuring that the contracting arrangements between the retailer and the provider do not create unnecessary waste, and I think they probably should.
Retailers also have a responsibility to the consumer. They fulfil some of it; I have certainly learnt from the labels on consumer goods and food that I have bought in supermarkets and which I have started reading since we have been engaged in this. It has changed my habits somewhat, as to storage, packaging, how long I think I can keep fruit and what should and should not be in the fridge. If I, who have some responsibility in this area, do not know how to behave in relation to my consumer responsibilities, and need to be told by a retailer, the retailer needs to shout even louder to the vast majority of the population. They are taking on that role, but they need to do more of it. It is undermined, to some extent, by some of the ways they market themselves, particularly with what are called BOGOF deals—where you are tempted to buy more than you need and half of it goes off—and other forms of incentive. That is the downside of the positive role of retailers in this area and it one that they need seriously to address.
Another point I underline is the role of WRAP in this area. Universally within the supply chain, here and across Europe, there is great recognition of the role that WRAP has played. We were rather dismayed to hear that the resources available to WRAP had been cut significantly and that there was some expectation that it would have to draw in its horns in this area. Can the Minister indicate what the latest development is on that front? The role of WRAP in the delivery of, for example, the Courtauld initiative with industry and in other initiatives that have taken place has been exemplary. It is one which needs to be retained and generalised across Europe.
We touched on another couple of things in terms of waste disposal for what is wasted. One of the problems with this was raised in debate on the Deregulation Bill yesterday. It is the differential approach to the labelling of waste between local authorities and the need for the public to understand therefore what should be put in what bin, and whether to have differential disposal of food waste because it can be used in different ways from other forms of waste. In some local authorities that is allowed and in some it is not, which seems completely barmy.
There was also some anxiety that in the waste hierarchy, which we considered would continue to be a useful tool, some of the incentives for moving food waste into waste for energy meant that other options such as animal feed, recycling and so forth appeared less attractive, even though they were higher up the waste hierarchy. While I am strongly in favour of anaerobic digestion, for example, and other forms of waste for energy, I think that area needs to be looked at because it distorts the way in which waste is disposed of.
My final point is about food redistribution, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, has just spoken about. Food banks are a feature of our life; we touched on them in the previous debate. Undoubtedly the shifting of waste food from the retail end—and increasingly, I hope, from the catering end because caterers as well as retailers need to take some responsibility in this area—into food banks is important. We saw in the Netherlands an example where fresh food was being used more substantially in that area. At the moment, if you go into supermarkets and see what is put into food banks, it is all food in tins and other packaging. In this country, there is in most cases a problem of providing fresh food. In the Netherlands, they seem to have cracked that; admittedly, we were in the middle of an intensive agricultural area. Nevertheless, for nutritional purposes as well as for food waste minimisation, food which was fresh and may have just passed its sell-by date could be diverted into food banks and other forms of food redistribution.
We learnt a lot from this exercise and a lot of things need to be followed through. I suppose that, at the end of the day, we did not think that the EU could help a lot in setting mandatory targets at this stage. However, we believe that the issue of food waste needs to be addressed by retailers here in particular and by the food chain as a whole, with support from the Government, in particular for WRAP, and by converting all of us into consumers who do not chuck quite so much away without consideration.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, I support Amendment 13, which was spoken to by my noble friend Lady Parminter and to which I have added my name. I do so as a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of which the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, who has already spoken, is also a member—other members are in their places today—to explain why that committee takes the strong view that a strengthened procedure, often called the super-affirmative resolution procedure, is important, at least on first exercise in the case of these regulations.
The context in which these amendments fall to be considered is that they are a wide-ranging set of amendments which represent a radical change of direction in the Bill. The Bill itself introduces considerable change in the way that the water industry operates, that industry being of great importance to the UK economy as a whole and to individuals. Although these amendments on retail exit are concerned with non-household supplies, as my noble friend has already stated, they are nevertheless of wide public importance.
The noble Lords, Lord De Mauley and Lord Moynihan, and my noble friend Lady Parminter have all explained the political context and impact of these amendments. I will confine what I say to the three reasons why a strengthened procedure is so important. First, there has been very limited time for the consideration of this scheme as a whole, as the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, frankly recognised. The amendments are introduced in this House at Third Reading in response to amendments introduced earlier, notably by the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Whitty and Lord Grantchester. However, in legislative terms, the amendments come, in this House at least, not even at the 11th hour: it is a minute to midnight. It is not, I suggest, satisfactory, and it is certainly not desirable, for nearly 11 pages of amendments to be introduced at such a late stage in the passage of the Bill without the time for lengthy and informed scrutiny of the detail of the proposed scheme. The amendments are complex and demand detailed scrutiny after all interested parties have had ample opportunity to consider them and to comment on them. The timing of their introduction has simply not permitted this to happen and the use of a simple affirmative procedure, as is proposed, would be likely to lead to a draft set of exit regulations being laid before Parliament for approval in unamendable form.
Secondly, quite regardless of the issue of timing, this is, I suggest, a case for a super-affirmative procedure in any event. The amendments would introduce into the Bill the power to make regulations which would effectively amount to an entire new legal framework to enable relevant undertakers to withdraw from the new market arrangements. If those provisions become part of the Bill without a super-affirmative procedure, then Parliament will have, as your Lordships well know, no opportunity to consider and report on the individual details of the proposed regulations and, in practical terms, no opportunity to invite detailed revision of their provisions. With the super-affirmative procedure set out in our amendment, there will be an opportunity for a committee of either House to consider the draft regulations in detail and to recommend changes to the draft for the Secretary of State to consider. The procedure proposed is similar to that in Section 102 of the Local Transport Act 2008, which the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee recommended as a model. There is no rush to introduce these exit regulations, particularly not when they are potentially of such importance. They should not be the subject of delegated legislation without a full opportunity for Parliament to consider their detail.
Thirdly—this was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Haskel—our committee was extremely concerned by the degree to which the amendments establish, not a list of requirements to which the Secretary of State must adhere in presenting the regulations, but a menu from which he can largely pick and choose at will. I have no objection to the fact that the power to make regulations in the first place, in subsection (1)(a) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 1, is permissive and not mandatory. It may be that the Secretary of State decides against exercising the power to make such regulations at all, although that is of course unlikely. However, if he makes such regulations, it is surely right that he should be required to incorporate all the safeguards of which the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, spoke, which are essential to protect customers, to ensure proper consultation with interested parties, to safeguard the public interest and to secure appropriate parliamentary scrutiny. Yet the amendments as drafted are almost entirely permissive in respect of such matters.
I will trespass on your Lordships’ time for a moment or two to look at a couple of examples. Amendment 1 provides that exit regulations,
“may include provision for protecting customers”,
affected by a relevant undertaker’s withdrawal. Amendment 2 provides that:
“Provision under subsection (1)(a) may require a relevant undertaker … to consult”.
Amendment 4 states that:
“Exit regulations about the transfer of a part of a relevant undertaker’s undertaking may include provision for the making of a scheme to transfer property”.
These are all matters on which this House would wish to be given the opportunity for detailed consideration.
General directions are of general application. I will address two points on Amendment 9. Subsection (1) states:
“Exit regulations may make provision for the Secretary of State to publish … a statement setting out general directions for the”,
regulators. Subsection (4) states:
“Exit regulations may make provision for the Secretary of State, before publishing a statement under the regulations, to consult”.
These are all matters which I would expect, and I suggest your Lordships would expect, to be requirements. They are matters which concerned the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. The list goes on. The central point is that it is vital for Parliament to have the opportunity to consider the proposed exit regulations individually and to recommend changes to particular regulations before they become law without being restricted by the limitation inherent in a simple affirmative resolution procedure.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister that, due to a misreading of the Order Paper, I was not here to hear his first couple of minutes.
The Minister gave us a fulsome presentation of the changed position of the Government, which explained in considerable detail how these new powers would work. Those of us who sat through Committee and Report will know that the Government were faced with a pretty widespread view across the House that they needed to change their mind on retail exit. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, headed a series of debates which eventually brought the Government to change their mind and present these new clauses that are before us today.
It is of course a pity in many senses that this comes so late. Given this stage of the Bill, which has gone through both Houses of Parliament, it is difficult to deal with such a complex set of amendments. I am sure that when the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, put amendments in this direction on the Order Paper at an earlier stage, and certainly when I did so, we did not expect to create quite such a substantial job-creation scheme for parliamentary counsel, but the Government have done a major job here and it would be churlish to quibble too much about it. However, there are problems with it. We all welcome deathbed conversions, but the central problem here is the lateness of the conversion. I wish that we were a stage earlier in the proceedings, when we could have tried to make minor amendments to the proposed clauses.
I echo the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, in particular that there are several points in this, from the first new clause onwards, particularly in the very first line and the reference to protecting consumers, where “must” really ought to be substituted for “may”. With a bit more time, the Government might have come to that conclusion themselves in the instructions that they gave to counsel. However, we are where we are, and this is a major concession by the Government to the House. In a sense, the whole process has been a vindication of the way in which the House considers complex legislation and minds are changed—and we have the result here before us.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle
Perhaps I may respond to that as I work through my argument.
Secondly, identifying the properties that will be subject to this special treatment will require the wisdom of Solomon and might create division and resentment among other property owners who are not able to benefit from the resilience measures used.
Thirdly—here I have some sympathy with the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter—Flood Re needs a strategy for the amount of reserves that will be appropriate and need to be built up to cover flood risk. A strategic approach to the amount of surplus required is important. It will be very difficult to determine what the reserve should be to cover flood risk over a period of years, but it is essential that a reserve is established to maintain adequate funds to cover significant flood risk.
Finally, my most important point—I respond here to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours—is that, as a policyholder, I do not want to continue contributing to a fund that has established a significant surplus. Once the surplus has been determined and achieved, I would hope that the Government and the ABI would have a mature discussion about reducing the contributions to the fund so that they do not establish an ever-increasing fund which may never be used. It would benefit the insurance companies if they did not need to continue collecting funds to contribute to this reserve. Resilience measures are essential and should be taken as properties are restored after flooding, but it is not the role of the fund to provide the resources to do that.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I can see the immediate attractiveness of the amendment but I share some of the reservations of the noble Lord, Lord Curry. If we are going to do this, we have to be more precise than the provisions in the amendment. The noble Lord rightly said that Flood Re will need a strategy for its surpluses and the limitations on the degree of cross-subsidy it can require from policyholders more generally. There will be a limit as to what is acceptable in that regard. It will also need a strategy to ensure that resilience and mitigation measures are adopted by those at the highest risk. If this amendment means that, and if it is a relatively small part of such surpluses—by which I mean a very small part—I can probably go along with it. If, however, it is as open-ended as it appears—and we know what the demands for flood mitigation as climate change and population pressures increase are likely to be—the temptation for insurance companies outside the system, the Government and the population to try to raid the Flood Re surplus for those purposes will begin to increase as well.
Despite the initial attractions, I do not think I can support the rather open-ended nature of the amendment as it stands. However, as we move forward and review the scheme, I hope that the Government and the administrators of Flood Re, along with other stakeholders, will find ways of ensuring a maximal take-up of resilience measures by those who own properties at risk and their insurance companies.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Parminter and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for Amendment 14. I am glad to be able to return to your Lordships, having considered the proposals in more detail. As I have said previously, reserves that build up during the lifetime of Flood Re will be used primarily to pay flood claims in the bad years. It will not be easy to identify surplus funds and any decision about Flood Re’s reserves will require a judgment about the level of cover needed for the unpredictable risks it bears. Any commitment by Flood Re to spend a proportion of its reserves in a certain way, such as on betterment or resilience, would potentially increase the amount of capital it needs to hold on an ongoing basis, thereby having an impact on the cost of the scheme and ultimately the levy.
However, it is entirely right that there should be clarity on the principles regarding how surplus reserves would be dealt with, should that situation arise. This is not about small reserves that could provide one or two years’ comfort for Flood Re, but significant additional capital implying that Flood Re is excessively capitalised. It is important to recognise that this is not a situation that we anticipate occurring in the first few years of Flood Re’s life, as reserves will build up only gradually, if at all.
We have previously set out that during Flood Re’s life, we would expect the levy and eligibility thresholds to be set in such a way as to manage down excess reserves. I agree with my noble friend Lady Parminter that it should be open to Flood Re to spend some surplus money on resilience measures if it is appropriate to do so as part of its commitment to support households to prepare for risk-reflective pricing. Flood Re will have a duty to deliver value for money. One of the benefits for both households and insurers of installing property-level resilience measures is that, properly fitted, they can reduce the cost of future claims. Research suggests that for some homes, installing resilience measures can reduce the cost of subsequent flood claims by more than 70%. While we recognise that there is still work to be done to improve the evidence base, a point that the insurance industry raised in the Public Bill Committee on the Bill in the other place, I strongly agree that investment in resilience measures from whatever source could have a role to play in reducing the overall cost of claims over the lifetime of the scheme.
I recognise, too, that it would be helpful to provide greater clarity about how Flood Re will support policy- holders to prepare for transition to risk-reflective prices. We therefore propose that the secondary legislation, which will itself be subject to the affirmative procedure, will set out in more detail the points that Flood Re’s transition plan should cover, including that Flood Re could encourage and incentivise policyholders to make their properties more resilient to flooding. We will also expect Flood Re to consider in broad terms the process for managing any surplus during the lifetime of the scheme, either as part of the transition plan or in its wider governance framework. Parliament will have an important role to play in holding Flood Re to account for its use of resources and the delivery of its purpose, and its directors will be directly accountable to Parliament for that.
In relation to any reserves at the end of Flood Re’s life, as I have previously explained, Clause 71 allows the Government to require Flood Re to transfer a sum of the reserves to government, following consultation with Flood Re. It will ultimately be for the Government of the day, in consultation with Flood Re and Parliament, through affirmative resolution, to decide on the treatment of any reserves. I reassure your Lordships that there is no presumption about how reserves might be disbursed.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for tabling the amendment and, more particularly, for reminding the House and the Government that at the end of Report there was still considerable confusion over inclusions and exclusions in Flood Re and, as the poignant examples that my noble friend has alluded to make clear, a considerable amount of alarm out there about the potential exclusion from insurance of leaseholders in particular but also of other groups of people who are not clear whether they are included or excluded. As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, has just said, it is a question not just of insurance but of current and future mortgage and other loans that one can raise on the property, and it therefore has very profound effects.
As the noble Earl said, whether we need a review every year is one matter, but it is incumbent on the Government to say that we need this continually under review, and the only formal reference to review is every five years. This confusion and alarm need to be cleared up a lot sooner than in five years’ time. I hope the Minister can at least give some reassuring words to my noble friend that that will indeed be done.
Lord De Mauley
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for his amendment and I thank him even more for reminding me that, in my excitement over my earlier amendments, I have so far omitted to declare my interests, and I should do so. I own a farm, through which a tributary of the River Thames runs, I have an extraction licence, a bore hole, a house which was flooded in 2007 and a minority stake in a lake. I am glad to put that on the record.
As I explained in previous debates, Flood Re will be subject to regular review. We expect these formal reviews will take place at least every five years. These formal reviews will need to consider the effectiveness of Flood Re in discharging its purpose and functions. Importantly, the reviews will also need to consider the levy and premium thresholds, particularly in relation to its capital model, which we debated in detail earlier in relation to the amendment from my noble friend.
The reviews will also need to consider Flood Re’s effectiveness in managing the transition to risk-reflective pricing over the operation of the scheme. As I said earlier, the secondary legislation will set out in more detail the points that Flood Re’s transition plan should cover. Flood Re will have to lay its accounts in Parliament on an annual basis, and its responsible officer will be directly accountable to Parliament. The Comptroller and Auditor-General will examine Flood Re’s economy, efficiency and effectiveness as well as its propriety and regularity.
It is also important to note that there is nothing to preclude the formal reviews taking place more frequently, which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, asked me to confirm, should concerns be raised; for example, if it is seen that excessive surpluses are being built up.
I hope that it is clear that Flood Re is going to be regularly reviewed and closely scrutinised, but we need to strike a balance and, in particular, I am concerned about significant risks to the certainty and stability of Flood Re income if it is under constant review. Flood Re, the insurance industry and policyholders need to have some degree of certainty about its operation and Flood Re must be allowed to plan for transition accordingly. Insurance is a long-term business. An annual review of the scheme would be resource intensive and I am not clear what added value it would bring in addition to the current arrangements for parliamentary scrutiny.
In addition to the formal review process which will be carried out at least every five years, as I have described, both the Government and the Association of British Insurers have committed to monitoring the market for flood insurance and will publish the results of that monitoring.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for these amendments and for his explanation. I will not oppose any of these amendments, as he is no doubt gratified to hear. I will make two points, one of disappointment and the other of praise.
The disappointment is that among amendments brought forward by the Government at this stage are not those that relate to clarifying the position on abstraction reform and on providing some greater assurance on affordability of water bills. Whoever is in government in the next couple of years must address those two issues with some degree of urgency. It is a pity that we did not manage that in the Bill.
My praise, like the Minister’s, goes to his officials, who undoubtedly gave us a lot of information at the beginning of the Bill and put up with all our idiot child questions throughout the Bill. We made considerable progress, even today. I thank the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for their patience.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
“Onshore oil or gas activities: effect on water environment
In Part 1 of Schedule 5 to the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010 (environmental permits) after paragraph 13 there is inserted—“Onshore oil or gas activities: effect on water environment
13A. Without prejudice to the operation of regulation 35(2) and paragraph 5(1)(d) of Schedule 10 and of regulation 35(2) and paragraph 7(j) of Schedule 20, the regulator shall refuse an application for the grant or variation of an environmental permit or for the transfer in whole or in part of an environmental permit if—(a) the regulated facility to which the application for, or transfer of, the environmental permit relates is to be carried on as part of an onshore oil or gas activity; and(b) the regulator is not satisfied that the applicant or the proposed transferee has made or will make adequate financial provision for preventing or mitigating pollution of the water environment, by ensuring all of the following—(i) operation of the regulated facility in accordance with the environmental permit;(ii) compliance with any enforcement notice or suspension notice or prohibition notice or mining waste facility closure notice or landfill closure notice which may be served on the applicant or transferee by the regulator under these regulations; (iii) compliance with any order of the High Court which may be obtained against the applicant or transferee under regulation 42 for the purpose of securing compliance with any of the notices listed in sub-paragraph (ii);(iv) compliance with any order of any court issued under regulation 44 against the applicant or transferee; and(v) recovery by the regulator of its costs upon any exercise of its power against the applicant or transferee under regulation 57;(c) for the purpose of this paragraph “onshore oil or gas activity” means any activity for the purpose of exploration for or extraction of onshore oil and gas;(d) for the purpose of this paragraph “adequate provision by way of financial security” means financial provision which is sufficient in value, secure and available when required.””
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, this subject may be familiar to the cognoscenti because it has been before this House in Committee and was discussed in the Commons. I am bringing the amendment back because it is an issue that the Government will have to face up to at some point, whether in this Bill or elsewhere, and the sooner the better. It concerns the effect on water supply and water quality of fracking for shale gas or oil.
I have been looking at earlier debates on similar amendments, and the Government’s responses here and in another place seem to reflect that they have assumed that this is an anti-fracking amendment. It is not. Indeed, it assumes that there will be significant development of shale gas over the next period, and that such development will eventually and inevitably use significant amounts of water, and may have detrimental effects on the quality of water and ecosystems if not effectively regulated. It makes no judgment on the broader issue of shale gas and fracking and its effect on overall energy strategy. We could have a debate on energy strategy today; if noble Lords want my view, it is that while there will be a significant development of shale gas in the UK and in Europe, it is unlikely to result in the kind of transformation in prices, energy supply and energy mix that we have seen in the United States. In terms of its effect on climate change and the carbon market, it rather depends. If shale gas leads to a faster reduction in the use of coal and oil for generations, then it will be positive. If it slows down the adoption of nuclear and renewable technologies, it will be negative.
Either way, there are concerns about the immediate environmental and resource effects of fracking processes—primarily, and in the context of this Bill, in relation to water. These effects occur in three broad ways. The first is the possible pollution of water systems and aquifers by chemicals that are released in the fracking process, and the release of methane. Secondly, there is the substantial effect on the level of abstractions and supplies of water needed in the fracking process itself. Fracking companies will need huge supplies of water—clean water, rather than direct abstraction—and that will have an effect on the levels of water resources available, sometimes in our most overstretched river catchment areas. That will therefore have an effect on total supplies and indeed on the cost of water. Thirdly, there are the effects of the operation of cleansing the water that is used in the fracking process prior to its re-entry into the water system, and its effect on the robustness and the operation of water treatment plants. On all three fronts, things can go wrong, and it certainly means that there are significant changes in both the water catchment structure and in availability and on the delivery of clean water.
I am not scaremongering. It is perfectly possible to regulate the fracking process to minimise pollution and to avoid drastic damage. It is possible to license the use of water and the supply of water resources so as to avoid any major curtailment of overall supplies. However, it is also true that the effects will not be contained by regulation operation by operation, and that there will be aggregate effects and potentially significant damage to ecosystems and detriment to the water systems over time. The amendment would recognise that and would try to ensure that the fracking operators, as a condition of their licence, made provision for possible future damage to the water supply system and the costs of clean-up. History shows us the necessity for this. Previous generations of different forms of energy sources—coal and nuclear, for example—show that substantial potential damage was done to the environment, in terms of subsidence or whatever, to the landscape and to public health but that liabilities or potential liabilities were not met by the entity actually doing the damage, whether that was the state in the nationalised period or the private owners of coal mines. The cost has in effect been met by taxpayers.
Lord Whitty
I thank the Minister for that detailed reply. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, for his support and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for their interventions. I accept that it is slightly odd to put this in the Bill. However, water is a big part of the fracking operation and fracking has a significant effect on water. In all that the Minister said, he did not say when he would come forward with the kind of structures that he promised in the previous debate and which are underlined now.
I recognise that one cannot differentiate in relation to conventional oil and gas operations onshore. We have had plenty of those in this country; we operated onshore oil extraction in Dorset for decades. One cannot differentiate in terms of the relative regulations.
I accept, too, that the issue is wider than that of water. However, somewhere we need to see the Government make progress in creating the arrangements that the Minister has now twice referred to—namely, an obligation to ensure financial resilience and possibly the creation of separate funds to ensure that they could meet the effects of clean-up. I am sure that the Minister is right that this requires substantial consultation. I certainly agree that ideally we should consider the effect of fracking holistically on all environmental issues across the board, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said.
I hope the noble Lord is right that we can move fairly rapidly on this as a large number of relatively small-scale operations could arise in a lot of locations. In view of the damage that could be caused, one has to question the ability of the regulatory authorities to enforce standards on all those operations at all times. The care that the operators will exercise will be proportionate to their financial stake in the operation and their bottom line. Therefore, it is important that they make financial provision to cover that before these operations reach scale. That is what this amendment is about. I accept that it is not entirely appropriate, but I think the Government have accepted that something needs to be done in this regard and I hope that they will introduce an appropriate measure in legislation or regulation as soon as possible.
In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I, too, do not object to these amendments and I congratulate the Minister on getting through them in six minutes flat. Many of them will be substantial improvements to the Bill, particularly the ones which iron out a few things in relation to Ofwat in terms of the changing competitive regime. I very much welcome that. However, the noble Baroness will be aware that, in its second riposte, the Delegated Powers Committee said that it is not entirely satisfied with the provision for only the first instance of definition being by affirmative regulation. The Government will have to have an answer to that. In general, it is sensible for Ministers to swallow hard and accept all the recommendations of the Delegated Powers Committee, otherwise it ends in trouble down the line.
The only other thing I would ask about is Amendment 90T, which relates to hybridity. I do not really want to have a debate on hybridity now, but the Delegated Powers Committee raised the issue, and I am not sure that the Government’s response fully meets the point, because it effectively says that, whether it is hybrid or not, we are going to ignore it. I am not sure that is a satisfactory response, but if the Delegated Powers Committee will buy it, I will not object. Otherwise, we welcome these amendments.
The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, this is the first time that I have spoken at this stage of the Bill and I, too, must declare that I live in a band H property. However, I also have a professional interest in parts of the Bill by virtue of being a chartered surveyor. I certainly welcome the proposals for the affirmative resolution procedures outlined by the noble Baroness and agree that the disclosure of council tax information is necessary. However, I have one query, which relates to Amendment 90CD. Could the noble Baroness confirm that the normal process of disclosure will generally relate to the identity of the property and its council tax band rather than the identity of the chargepayer, the latter being something that is normally held by the billing authority? If I have missed some point about the disclosure, and where the identity of the individual can be discovered, perhaps she would put me out of my misery.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as an owner of a band H property. Many noble Lords have spoken on this amendment at this stage. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and I spoke to a similar one in Committee, and I am pleased that the House has returned to it. I have one question for the Minister that is a matter of principle. While the rationale for the exclusions from band H properties is principally that some band H owners have higher incomes than others—that is not a proven principle but it nevertheless continues to be argued by the Government—does the Minister accept the view that the Flood Re scheme should follow the principle that those who contribute to this government scheme are afforded its protection?
Lord Whitty
My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Earl for tabling this amendment, and particularly for the way in which he outlined the dilemmas of this proposition. I think we all have a problem here. I hope that I do not need to make it clear that we on this side strongly support the basic concept of Flood Re and the reassurance that it will give to a lot of people who are currently worried about their future cover.
We have to recognise that the Government are not entirely on a free position on this; indeed, I congratulated the Government—that is quite rare for me—not long ago on reaching an agreement with the ABI, which I know is an incredibly difficult negotiator. Therefore, I do not think that any of us want to unnecessarily unravel the arithmetic that lies behind the Flood Re proposition as it now is. However, the wide-ranging nature of the noble Earl’s amendment means that we would be unravelling it quite substantially.
On the other hand, as noble Lords have made clear, this is not entirely a matter for the insurance industry. The structure of the project is an agreement between insurance companies but it has to be backed by Parliament and it therefore has a statutory base. Parliament has to be concerned about fairness, equity and proportionality. We therefore have to query whether the exclusion of certain properties, and such a large number of them in aggregate, is fair and equitable.
To some extent, I go along the same lines as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter: there are different arguments relating to the different categories. Some exclusions were in the previous statement of principle and are therefore in a changed position as a direct result of the demarcation of Flood Re. Small businesses were covered by the previous arrangements, as were tenants in leasehold premises—although there have been some concessions of late, which I will come on to in the next amendment—and band H properties. The exclusion of post-2009 properties is not a new position; it was the position under the old scheme.
I shall comment on my view on each of those. First, I accept that small businesses have a different way of meeting their insurance requirements. I also accept, on the other hand, that many small businesses, boarding houses, shops and small premises were seriously affected by those floods and, under their understanding of the previous settlement, would probably expect to be covered by the replacement scheme. It is therefore quite important that we bear in mind the position of small businesses. The insurance industry claims that there is not a market failure in this area, and the Government seem to have accepted that. Maybe we ought to put businesses in a different channel because they are not dealt with in the same way as residential properties under Flood Re. The Government should not lose sight of the fact that many small businesses are under serious risk and do not feel well protected by the current situation. I hope, therefore, that the Government will be able to come back to this.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Moynihan, and others referred to band H properties. It is a slightly odd move by the Government to exclude band H—an unusually populist, progressive move, to avoid cross-subsidy from the poor to the rich. It may be a welcome indication of things to come. However, it still leaves a number of people in difficulty. I think that the Government may have to look again at band H, but it does not make a lot of difference to the arithmetic. The number of people who are asset-rich but income-poor is relatively small and, therefore, it could not make a priority social case for re-including band H.
That leaves me with the subject matter of a subsequent group. Almost the whole of the tenanted sector and the private rented sector, even with the Government’s new concessions, are excluded from this. They all regard themselves as residencies, they all have domestic insurance in one form or another and they are all lived in by households and families. I think it is unfortunate that they are excluded. I would give my priority to that and I will come back with a further amendment. As it stands I cannot fully support the broad sweep of the noble Earl’s amendments. Nevertheless I thank him for the debate and the wide range of issues which, one way or another, the Government will have to explain to various sectors of the public.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for his Amendments 89 and 90. He raises issues which I know are of concern to people and I thank all noble Lords who have spoken on all sides of the argument.
Amendment 89 to Clause 51 would require that all properties included in the calculation of the levy are eligible for the scheme. It is important to remember that while many homes in the United Kingdom are at some risk of flooding, Flood Re is designed to address an affordability issue for the 1% to 2% at the highest risk of flooding. The levy will provide Flood Re with a funding pool which will be combined with the premium income from those policies which are to be ceded to Flood Re. This will be used for the purposes of the Flood Re scheme, including the purchase of reinsurance and payment of claims. The purpose of having a pool, as is the case for much of our taxation, is that costs are shared by many so that those most in need can benefit. If everybody who paid the Flood Re levy stood to gain, there would be fundamental implications for the required amount of the levy. Alternatively, if the levy was limited to flood-prone households, the pool would not be large enough to have a significant impact on prices and therefore on the affordability of flood insurance.
The insurance industry has been clear that low-risk and no-risk householders have historically subsidised flood insurance for those at a higher risk of flooding and that the move to risk-reflective pricing will over time remove this cross-subsidy from the market. The levy simply replicates and formalises this existing cross-subsidy. Indeed, the ABI has assured us that the levy can be introduced without having an impact on bills in general for householders at a low risk and no risk of flooding, for those in band H or for those with properties built after 1 January 2009—that is, those outside the pool.
If I understand the noble Earl’s intention correctly, I think he is particularly concerned to ensure that those properties which are not eligible for the scheme—such as band H properties, properties built after 1 January 2009 and certain leaseholders on commercial policies—either stand to benefit from Flood Re or do not pay the levy. While I understand that cross-subsidising something from which you will receive no benefit might be perceived as unfair, I have explained why there always have to be some net contributors to make a pooling system work, and this includes the overwhelming majority of households at low risk or no risk of flooding. We discussed the rationale for the scope of Flood Re at length in Committee, and I explained that we think that we have got the balance right. The Government’s approach was widely supported in the response to the 2013 consultation. This approach means that those who are most in need of support will receive it to enable a smooth transition to the free market.
The noble Earl commented on the complexity of the scope of Flood Re. The proposed criteria reflect the current situation for purchasing a domestic insurance policy. We are not seeking to change the circumstances under which insurance is purchased through Flood Re. We must remember that Flood Re is designed to help those people at the highest flood risk, which we estimate could be around 500,000 households. I have heard some very fanciful numbers being bandied around, and they all miss this point. I am not saying that the Government are not still listening to the debate. We will monitor the market, as will the ABI, and we will publish our findings. Should the evidence point to specific issues with insurance for particular sectors, we will discuss with the insurance industry what might be possible.
Lord Whitty
“Flood Reinsurance Scheme: report on the inclusion of leaseholders
(1) The Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report on the basis of the inclusion and exclusion of leasehold and tenanted properties in the FR Scheme.
(2) The report shall include a breakdown of—
(a) the total number of leasehold and tenanted properties which are in the risk areas covered by the FR Scheme;(b) the number of leasehold and tenanted properties where the land is controlled by large multisite commercial operators;(c) the number of leasehold and tenanted properties which are owned by smaller landlord operators; and(d) the cost of including in the FR Scheme properties in paragraph (a) and each of paragraphs (b) and (c).(3) The Secretary of State must lay a copy before Parliament within 6 months of this Act coming into force.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will try not to repeat too much of what was covered in the earlier amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, but there is obviously some overlap.
Of all the exclusions from Flood Re, that of leasehold and tenanted residential properties was, certainly out there, the most unexpected and, on the face of it, the least logical and most inequitable. As the argument about it has gone on, it has also become the most complex and confusing. Leasehold and tenanted buildings in a flood-prone area are faced with exactly the same risks as the freehold properties next door. That is where we start from. The families and individuals who live in these properties face exactly the same problems. These are residential properties; generally, no business is conducted from them. They are people’s homes. Yet the Flood Re project, which was the product of bilateral negotiations between the Government and ABI without any direct engagement with landlords, leaseholders or tenants, now appears to regard these properties and that risk as being different in kind to that of the freehold buildings in the same street. The rationale for that is that letting a property—whether long or short-term—is regarded as a business. The risk must be the same and the families will not be very different, yet they are treated entirely differently.
Since the original proposition for Flood Re, its terms have been, shall we say, “elaborated”—that is, amended in some respects or, to put it more bluntly, confused. For example, the ABI made it clear—this is a clarification, in a sense, but it confuses the issue—that contents insurance paid for by tenants and leaseholders would be part of the scheme and included in Flood Re, but obviously not the landlord’s buildings insurance paid for by the landlord. That makes the arithmetic a bit more complicated. Clearly, the £10.50 levy on other households—they presumably pay the full buildings and contents insurance—does not apply to that group. That leaves a lot of grey areas. For example, one of the most serious problems for leaseholders and tenants will often be that the flood damage has caused depredation to the fittings and furniture, some of which—in the case of fittings, most of which—will be covered by the buildings insurance of the landlord. Of course, landlords have contents insurance so it is not necessarily the same position as that apparent distinction creates. The effect is that the whole situation is more blurred and complicated.
The Government have also complicated the system. Just recently, they apparently conceded that properties of three or fewer leases are in the scheme, provided that the freeholder lives on the premises. Anything more than three, or where the freeholder happens to live down the road, is outside the scheme. There is also a rumour, though it does not seem to be substantiated, that the ABI and Government were also looking at the possibility of distinguishing between small landowners or single-property landlords and large, commercial operations. Where does that all leave us?
Let us take a typical street in a low-lying riverside area of a market town. For the purposes of making us all at home and in deference to the Minister’s patience in dealing with all the complications of the Bill, let us call it De Mauley Street. In De Mauley Street, No. 2 is a family house with three generations living there from two to 80. No. 4 looks and is very similar but is divided into four flats, one of which is occupied by the landlord at least occasionally. No. 6 is a house divided into four leasehold flats that have jointly bought the freehold and administer it as a leaseholder-owned company. No. 8 is, let us say, owned by a school teacher resident in London who bought the premises for her retirement and is letting it out as four student flats. No. 10 is a four-flat block owned by a commercial leasing company with four leaseholders. I am tempted to add a No. 12 that is a mixed property, but that would complicate it too far.
Under the original proposition, No. 2—the family home—is covered but nobody else. Under the ABI concession on contents insurance, No. 2 is covered and all the rest are, but for leaseholder-paid contents insurance only; everything else is not covered. Under the Government three-leases concession, Nos. 2 and 4 are clearly covered, provided you can prove that the landlord actually lives at No. 4, but only the tenant-owned contents in No. 8 is covered. As I understand it, No. 6 would also be covered because the leaseholders jointly own the freehold and therefore one of them lives on the premises. In Nos. 8 and 10, only the tenants’ contents insurance will be covered. We are already in a very confused position.
If there were a cut-off defined by size of landlord, nos. 2, 4, 6 and 8 would be covered but not No. 10. If there happened to be a social landlord in the same street—there would probably not be in De Mauley Street—nobody would be covered because social landlords are not. Incidentally, I am not sure because we have not touched on it what the position is on mixed blocks. With the right to buy, some of the social landlord’s property may well be owned by private leaseholders, who presumably ought to be covered and may well assume that they are—but are not. We have a bit of a pig’s ear of a situation here. None of it is very logical. The properties are pretty much identical, the risk is the same and they thought they were all included under the pre-existing arrangement of the statement of principles.
The long-term implications of this are particularly severe. Particularly with small landlords and their tenants, if they cannot get insurance then they cannot get a mortgage or raise money for improvements. Hence the buildings deteriorate. The only way they could raise money would be to raise rents or the service charge, so tenants and leaseholders suffer directly. The area starts going downhill because the buildings appear more dilapidated and more obviously at risk. The tenant and leaseholder experience suffers, the landlords suffer and the number of new landlords prepared to invest and buy property diminishes in those areas. This is not a situation that the Government find easy to defend, but I think even the insurance industry is beginning to find some difficulty in defending it.
Having said that, as I said earlier in the previous debate, we recognise that the actuarial calculations for Flood Re are delicate and depend on various assumptions. I do not intend to unravel those calculations at this point by this amendment, but it is important that Parliament understands the position so this is a relatively modest amendment. It does not require Flood Re, the Government or the ABI to do anything directly. However, because the scheme has to have statutory backing and because to give that statutory backing Parliament needs to be convinced that it is logical, equitable and proportionate, Parliament needs to understand the consequences of including or excluding different combinations of property.
The amendment therefore seeks to find that out. It does not seek to delay the process—well, not by much. However, it proposes that before we finalise the statutory instrument on this—and it will need a final statutory instrument—the Government report back to Parliament on: the number of leasehold and tenanted properties included; the number excluded; the number where the landlord is in business in a large way; the number where a landlord is in business only in a very small way—probably with a single property; and the cost that would arise from including each of those categories in the Flood Re proposition. I am leaving the dividing line between large and small largely up to the Government, but we need to have a clear one.
The information that that report would show to Parliament would mean that we, and interested parties, could have a meaningful discussion before the consultation started—or within the consultation—on the statutory instrument, which I am assuming, because this is supposed to start in 2015, would have to be within a very few months. Without that information, we in Parliament are in danger of giving the go-ahead to what appears to every rational observer to be a seriously inequitable, complicated and illogical scheme, which we are about to back by legislation. I do not need to tell Ministers that that situation is probably judicially reviewable.
This amendment therefore asks the Government to give us the facts before we finally go down the road. In a way, it is not delaying this legislation going through, but it would allow us to face up to the facts before the final statutory instrument is carried. At the moment, frankly, we do not have those facts. The Minister referred to fanciful figures. A number of very reputable insurance companies and others have bandied about a number of different figures. I do not know the total number that fall into each of these categories nor, I suspect, does the Minister or the ABI. However, we need to know—at least approximately—and we need to know the cost consequences for them, for the scheme and for those in the rest of society who are subsidising this scheme what the effect would be. Therefore, we do need that information. This amendment would allow the Government, without holding everything up, to get that information and to report back to Parliament. In my view it is pretty obvious that Parliament needs to know. I beg to move.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, this is a very mild amendment to which I certainly would have added my name if I had become aware of it in time. There is no doubt that the exclusion of the leasehold and rental sector is the worst lacuna of the current Flood Re scheme. I understand the original political thought process—that professional landlords should not be helped to overcome their flood insurance problems by those who live in band A properties, for example. Of course, that political thought process is a fairly simplistic and stereotypical understanding of the average landlord. This is an important fact: 78% of all landlords own a single dwelling for rent.
As noble Lords know, there are many professions where a dwelling goes with the job. In my part of the world, farm work is the most common example. Many farm workers and tenant farmers buy a house to retire to, and, of course, they let it while they are still working, largely to help with the mortgage. It is perfectly sensible retirement planning and the Government should encourage it. Furthermore, perhaps it is a typical English aspiration, but many people currently living and working in cities have a dream of buying a house in the country and retiring there—similar to the farm workers who I have just mentioned—and they will let it in order to help pay the mortgage on it.
This Bill does not recognise these dreams of ordinary—well, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, mentioned schoolteachers, but it could have been anyone really: secretaries, nurses, anybody. It does not, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, tread softly on their dreams. They are excluded from this scheme. Surely these are the people for whom this scheme should be designed—people whose mortgage companies will insist on full insurance, including flood insurance. But what about those who cannot afford a house, in the country or elsewhere, and buy a flat? I cannot think of a more appropriate person to benefit from this scheme. However, along with 60% of the other households, they will almost certainly be excluded from this scheme while at the same time contributing to it.
I will not give the rest of the speech on leaseholders and flat owners because that has already been very well covered by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. However, it seems strange to exclude householders whose only error has been to choose to live in a flat rather than a full-blown house. It seems unjust to me. A much more sensible cut-off point for the application of Flood Re would have been owners of, say, two, three or four let properties. However, all that apart, this amendment will at least ensure that we have a full understanding of the sort of owners, leaseholders and tenants whose property is being excluded and what they could have contributed to the scheme if they had been included. As I say, I think that this is a very mild amendment, merely touching on a problem that is a major shortcoming in the Bill. I hope that the Minister will look kindly on it.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I recognise some of the things that the Minister is saying, but the fact is that that is not the perception out there. I do not mean the perception of somebody who has read only a few articles in their local paper or the national press; I mean the perception of the representatives of small landlords. They do not think that is the position. They do not think it is easy for them to get insurance for properties within the risk area. The representatives of the Council of Mortgage Lenders are extremely worried about being asked by owners of leasehold and tenanted properties to advance mortgages against properties that it is difficult to insure. It is not even the perception of the managing agents, who by and large have the larger properties, who also think that they are in some difficulty. As it happens, I met all three groups first thing this morning. They remain unconvinced about what is essentially the Government’s line.
If you look at this from the point of view of the leaseholders and the tenants—let us leave aside short-term tenants for the moment, although I echo the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, whose support I am very grateful for on this, that most tenanted properties are actually owned by a landlord who has a single property—they have a difficulty in raising insurance in the first place, and certainly for property within a flood risk area they will find even greater difficulties now.
Probably the most acute difficulty, though, is for those who are in long leases and are leaseholders because of the nature of the freehold relationship to their property, but who for all other intents and purposes regard themselves as home owners. They have a long mortgage on the leasehold property, they conduct all their affairs, including their insurance, on their own part of that property, and they do not regard themselves as being any different in status, vulnerability or risk from the people next door who are freehold owner-occupiers.
There are many people in that situation in many parts of the country, including some that are subject to serious flood risk. For them, the message is going out, “The next-door neighbour is covered but you are not, because you own”—as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said—“a flat and not a house”. They may be on a very long lease, but, nevertheless, they are differentiated in this respect.
As I say, this amendment does not seek to rectify, turn over or redefine the boundaries; it simply asks that Parliament should know what the situation is before it finally signs off this scheme. It may be that everything the Minister has said is upheld in the feedback, but we have had representations from both landlords and leaseholders of property who, whether they have a property with 12 flats or three flats, have the same problem and do not believe that they are going to be covered. They think that the Government and the insurance industry are letting them down because they are not covered.
At least Parliament should know what the situation is. That is all my amendment asks. If the Government are not prepared at least to accept that they will formally report back on this to Parliament before the next stage, or before an SI is produced, for the sake of all those people out there who think that they are being treated inequitably, illogically, unfairly and non-transparently, I have to ask the opinion of the House on this amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I have some slight difficulties with this amendment. I understand the concept and, in a sense, I want the outcome. The role of the insurance companies’ relationship with householders—whoever they may be, in the light of the previous debate—in improving the resilience of their properties is an important dimension of this scheme. Some of it is deliverable through the normal relationship between insurance companies and their premium payers, in the sense that a condition of the insurance or of the level of excess on the insurance can be that they put in such-and-such a resilience measure or that they meet certain standards in the property. The insurance companies can in some circumstances go further than this and make a grant towards them. The problem with the amendment is that it feels too open-ended.
To answer the question about whose money it is, the money is contributed by the rest of us. It is the £10.50, or whatever it turns out to be, that the rest of the population puts into looking after high-risk properties. There is therefore a need for due diligence that that money does not go to diffuse purposes. If this amendment would lead to significant sums of money in surplus years being used in a different way, then issues of accountability arise. A more tightly worded amendment would probably meet with my approval, but people reading this could think that, if you have a surplus of £500 million after 10 years, you should be spending it directly on grants to householders in risk-prone areas to improve individual or communal flood defences. I do not think that is what is meant, but the wording could be susceptible to that meaning. I therefore support the general concept, but I do not think this amendment achieves it in a way that is easily defensible to home owners who are contributing to the financing of this scheme.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Parminter for her amendment, which deals with a very important subject. I thank all other noble Lords who spoke to it.
Actions taken by government, communities, individuals and businesses to reduce levels of flood risk are indeed the best and most cost-effective way to secure affordable insurance and value for money from Flood Re in the long term. In addition to the substantial levels of investment in flood defences that I referred to in an earlier debate today, we are also taking action to ensure that households are supported to improve their property-level resilience. For example, grants of up to £5,000 are available for households and businesses that have flooded this winter, and applications open tomorrow. In addition, there are community projects in which we are investing more than £4 million over two years in order to learn about the most effective strategies to drive community resilience to flooding. Nevertheless, I recognise my noble friend’s intention to see Flood Re’s role reflected in the Bill.
Reserves that build up during the lifetime of Flood Re will primarily be used to pay flood claims in the bad years. Flood events are by their nature unpredictable, so while it may be possible that Flood Re would have a number of good years in which it built up reserves, it is equally possible that a run of bad years with heavy flooding could wipe out any reserves built up within Flood Re. As such, it is not easy to identify surplus funds, and any decision about Flood Re’s reserves will need to involve judgment about the level of cover needed for the unpredictable risks it bears.
Added to this, as an authorised re-insurer, Flood Re will be required by the Prudential Regulation Authority to hold certain minimum levels of capital. Any commitment by Flood Re to spend a certain portion of reserves in a certain way—for example, on betterment or resilience—would necessarily increase the amount of capital it is required to hold on an ongoing basis, having an impact on the cost of the scheme and ultimately the levy.
It may well be that, in due course, the Flood Re administrator decides that investments of the sort my noble friend would like to see present the best way of Flood Re fulfilling its obligations to manage the transition and act in the public interest. However, these are choices that are difficult to make before the scheme is established or has any sort of track record. Nothing in the Bill precludes this.
Alternatively, in due course, Flood Re may decide, in consultation with government, that the best use of any surplus is to reduce the level of the levy, thereby helping to deliver affordability for all policyholders, not just those in Flood Re. We would not, at this stage, wish to see Flood Re’s hands tied in legislation that could have an unpredictable and undesirable effect.
We have always been clear that there should be a gradual transition to more risk-reflective prices. We expect the transition plan to set out how Flood Re intends to support households to adapt to the withdrawal of support from Flood Re over time. We will not designate Flood Re unless we are satisfied with the industry’s proposals for the scheme, including the transition plan.
It is important for Flood Re to retain flexibility in the way it discharges its public interest duty and plans for transition in order to ensure that it is in a position to balance these requirements against its core financial obligations. However, my noble friend’s amendment draws attention to the need to offer more clarity about what might happen in the event that a surplus is accumulated, particularly in relation to managing the transition.
I should say that I have considerable sympathy for the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. I have first-hand experience of where exactly the type of sensible resilience measures he has suggested cost no more than putting things back exactly as they were before the flood so the insurance claim could cover them. He also referred to advice, which is clearly an important part of that. A number of sources of independent advice are available today. The National Flood Forum can direct flood victims to appropriate measures. Furthermore, we are continuing to discuss with the industry whether any of the reserves could be used to fund surveys.
As I have said, I am very grateful to my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for bringing this to my attention. I would like to take the opportunity to discuss their proposals with them further before Third Reading. Although I cannot of course guarantee that I shall be able to bring something back, I may be able to clarify the Government’s position further. I hope that I can persuade my noble friend to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Whitty
“Appeals on removal from the Flood Reinsurance Scheme
(1) The Secretary of State shall by order establish a right of appeal for a household which has been removed from the Flood Reinsurance Scheme.
(2) The Financial Conduct Authority shall be responsible for the hearing and administration of appeals under subsection (1).
(3) An order under subsection (1)—
(a) shall be made by statutory instrument; and(b) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by resolution of each House of Parliament.(4) An order under subsection (1) must be made before the Flood Reinsurance Scheme has been implemented.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, Amendment 90DA is relatively straightforward. Clause 63 provides for reviews and appeals against premises being deemed not eligible to be entered in the register of those covered by Flood Re. As it is written, Clause 63 indicates that when the register is drawn up there is a list of which households are either in or out, according to the risk assessment at the time.
This is a 25-year scheme and things will change over 25 years. My amendment is designed to add to the provisions of Clause 63 and appeal against the removal from that list at a later stage. It is really a tidying-up. However, removal from the list could arise for a number of different reasons. It could be because the insurance sector had decided that the risk had changed; but that could be because the Committee on Climate Change—the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, is no longer in his place—had advised of a change and that there was less risk in that particular area. It could be that the Environment Agency’s map had changed. It could be that the aggregated data from the insurance companies showed that that type of property was at less of a risk than it was assumed to be at the beginning of the scheme, bearing in mind that we are potentially 25 years on. It could be that resilience had been provided on some other basis—for instance, a flood defence scheme may have been built down the road—or that the catchment management in that area had significantly improved and diverted the flood away from that property to somewhere else. In an urban area, it could be that there had been major investment in the drainage system, which meant that the property was significantly less susceptible to surface flooding. There are all sorts of reasons why, objectively, the flood risk might diminish. Regrettably, in the light of the macro information from the Committee on Climate Change, it is more likely that a property will be drawn into the list than drawn out of it; but there will be such exclusions.
There could also be exclusions that are more esoteric to the insurance industry, in the sense that if insurance companies were insisting, as a condition of continued insurance, that that resilience measure should be introduced at the expense of the householder, one way or another, and the householders were not prepared to provide for that level of resilience expenditure, then either the offer, or renewal, of insurance would be taken away or the excess would be put at a level which the premium payer was not prepared to pay.
There are all sorts of reasons why a property might end up being removed from that list. If that is the case, there has to be the equivalent appeal against that in a situation where one is excluded from the list from the word go. As I read it, Clause 63 provides only for exclusion from the register in the first place; it does not provide for removal from the register. My amendment seeks to correct that gap. I beg to move.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for this amendment. As we have previously discussed, a rigorous regulatory and dispute resolution regime for the insurance industry already exists, to ensure that insurers treat their customers fairly. Flood Re will not change the direct relationship between the insurer and the householder. Where households do not feel that a complaint has been treated fairly, they can contact the Financial Ombudsman Service, which offers a free dispute resolution service for people who wish to complain about how their insurance company has treated them. While the Financial Ombudsman Service is equipped to deal with individual complaints, the Financial Conduct Authority has a statutory objective to protect the wider interests of consumers and ensure that firms are giving a fair deal to their customers.
We need to remember that Flood Re is a voluntary scheme: insurers are not obliged to use it. We therefore maintain that there is no need for a specific appeal mechanism for Flood Re per se. Flood Re is not based on a register of properties; it is a voluntary scheme and so there are no grounds for an appeal mechanism.
However, the noble Lord is emphasising concern about who might be excluded from Flood Re over time. As was said in the other place, the memorandum of understanding agreed between the Association of British Insurers and the Government last year talked about genuinely uninsurable properties. As my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Water, Forestry, Rural Affairs and Resource Management said, there will be no such thing as a genuinely uninsurable property at the start of Flood Re. However, there might be a case that over time, if householders choose to take no action to tackle their flood risk, Flood Re might seek to find a mechanism whereby they no longer benefit from the public subsidy. We have reflected further on that issue, working closely with the ABI. I can reassure noble Lords that our focus is on supporting households to become more resilient, not on excluding them from the Flood Re scheme.
As householders with policies ceded to Flood Re will be benefiting from subsidised insurance, important signals to them about flood risk—for example, the price of insurance and the levels of excess charged—will be lost. We have therefore agreed with the industry that Flood Re will provide information to insurers to pass to householders about flood risk, Flood Re itself and how to reduce the likelihood and impact of flooding. An amendment to that effect has been tabled.
We are continuing to explore with industry how people could be incentivised, perhaps, for example, by Flood Re paying for a survey after a property has flooded a number of times. My noble friend mentioned that. This would depend on Flood Re having sufficient reserves. Another incentive could be to increase the excess after repeated flooding.
There are a number of practical considerations to work through. However, there is a clear commitment between the Government and the insurance industry to putting in place an incentive-based approach rather than an exclusionary approach. I hope that noble Lords will also agree that the approach we have outlined strikes a fair and appropriate balance between supporting householders at high flood risk and the affordability of the scheme as a whole, and that the amendment will therefore be withdrawn, bearing in mind what I said at the beginning about the direct relationship between the insurance company and the householder and the means of redress that they can avail themselves of.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that reply but I am not sure that it entirely meets the point. As a former chair of Consumer Focus, I am very familiar with the steps that people can take to obtain redress from financial services agencies, including the insurance industry. I am perhaps slightly less sanguine about the effectiveness of it but that is a different matter. However, the fact is that the Bill provides for a register and, in Clause 63, provides for people to appeal against a body being excluded from that register in the first place. Unless I am completely misunderstanding the issue and what the noble Baroness said, I took it she accepted that there was a possibility of someone being excluded in one of the situations that I described—namely, when the insurance company’s request that the householder introduced some resilience measures at their own expense as a condition of continuing to have that insurance could lead to their exclusion from the list. All I am saying is that if there is an appeals process at the beginning, why is there not one all the way through? I may have misunderstood something that the noble Baroness said and the purpose of Clause 63.
Baroness Northover
Perhaps I can clarify at least one point in relation to Clause 63 and the register. Clause 63 relates to the flood insurance obligation. It is not relevant to Flood Re. However, I am happy to write to the noble Lord to clarify this area.
Lord Whitty
That would be useful for all concerned, so I will shut up. I am very grateful for the Minister’s offer to write to me. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
“( ) Granting a retail or restricted retail authorisation for supply to non-domestic sector customers must be done in such a way and on such terms that it does not disadvantage domestic customers.”
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I hope noble Lords are not leaving because Amendment 1 is such a complicated amendment. It is one of the most straightforward amendments on the Marshalled List today.
As the House will know, we on this side have supported the objective of introducing a degree of competition into the retail end of water supply for the non-domestic sector. However, our support for that—and I think a lot of people’s support for that—was on the clear understanding that there would be safeguards to ensure that there was no disadvantage or detriment to domestic consumers as a result of the competition operating within the business or non-domestic sector. That has of course proved to be the case in Scotland, but the Scottish structure is not exactly the same as the English structure, and we felt that it was necessary to make explicit that there should be no disadvantage. In principle, the Government appeared to agree. We therefore asked the Government to make that proviso clear in the Bill but the Minister said that that was not necessary.
Since Committee, we have pressed the department on how the existing safeguards would work and where those existing safeguards appear. According to replies from the department, the safeguards that it is relying on are twofold. First, they can be found in the Water Industry Act 1991. There is a similar reference there but that is in the context of a piece of legislation in which no competition was envisaged. It was in the context of monopoly regional supply and is therefore not completely effective in dealing with the entirely changed situation that the Bill would introduce.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, I start by reiterating the interests that I declared in Committee. I am the owner of a farm, through which a tributary of the River Thames runs; I have a bore-hole, which supplies farm and tenanted properties; and I have a property that flooded in 2007.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving his Amendment 1 on the important issue of protecting householders. The Government take this issue very seriously. We are very keen to ensure that household customers remain fully protected following our reforms to the non-household market. I am confident that we have achieved this. The Water Bill introduces reforms that will enable us to manage future pressures as efficiently as possible while ensuring that customer bills are kept fair for the long term.
Mechanisms are already in place to prevent business customers’ bills being subsidised by household bills. Ofwat’s policy of setting different retail price caps for household and non-household customers in the current price review means that households will not subsidise the competitive market. We also expect household customers to benefit from the efficiencies and innovations that competition will foster.
It is also important to remember that the Secretary of State, Ofwat and the Consumer Council for Water have a shared duty to protect customers. They must have special regard to people who are unable to switch suppliers—that is, household customers—when carrying out their statutory functions. I am therefore confident that household customers will be protected against any negative outcomes resulting from the expansion of the competitive market.
This brings me to government Amendments 57 and 58. I was grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Grantchester, for highlighting in Committee the important work that is done by the Consumer Council for Water. The noble Lords tabled an amendment to require incumbent water companies to consult the Consumer Council for Water on their draft charging schemes. In Committee, I explained that the Consumer Council for Water already does this, but I agree that it is a good idea to place into legislation the central role of the Consumer Council for Water, ensuring that the consumer voice is heard. That is why I am bringing forward Amendments 57 and 58 today. The Consumer Council for Water already plays a fundamental role in working with the companies to ensure that their charges schemes meet stringent, research-informed safeguards on behalf of customers. We want to see this continue.
I hope that our amendments illustrate that the Government are listening. I am grateful that we have continued to collaborate in a positive way throughout this process and am delighted to see real improvements coming forward. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I think that the Government have gone slightly further than previously in referring to there being no disadvantage in relation to the cost of water. Indeed, we will return to the affordability issue later today. The Minister did not deal completely with the issue of non-price disadvantage. The servicing of consumers could suffer from the introduction of a degree of competition if too much of a company’s effort was focused on the business end and led to a diminution in service as well as a disadvantage in price. The Minister has probably said enough for me not to press this point today or in this Bill, but the department and Ofwat will need to be quite clear as to their intentions in that and in their beefing-up of existing mechanisms designed to protect household consumers. I therefore welcome the Government’s amendments and will support them when we reach that point. I shall withdraw this amendment with some slight regret, but the Minister has been relatively helpful. It has been a good start.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, have an amendment in this group which argues for retail exit, but adds a few provisos. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has once again made a tremendous speech in favour of his amendment, which I would certainly support. I will not repeat the full range of his arguments. If he has not convinced all noble Lords, I am sure that I will not manage it, but it sounded pretty convincing to me. It boils down to the fact that if this Bill provides for orderly entrance to the market it needs to provide for orderly exit as well for a proper market to function.
In a sense it is pretty straightforward, and I find it difficult to understand why the Government have hitherto been resistant to this. In Committee the Minister’s objections were largely about investors’ uncertainty, which I never really bought. I felt that most investors in these fields would be more inclined to support a system of regulation which allowed them to exit from failing parts of the business rather than be put off by it. Indeed, that has been borne out by a number of potential investors writing to us since the Committee stage, including the one to which the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred.
Since Committee, the Minister seems to have shifted to a concern for consumers, both business and domestic, who might be left stranded in certain circumstances. Indeed, as has been said, the Consumer Council for Water has expressed concern on that front. Amendment 54 attempts to meet those objections by making explicit some of the matters to which the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred and puts a proviso and a brake on the implementation of those before they have been thoroughly examined. Of course, Ofwat already has the duty to ensure continuity of supply, so the likelihood of anyone being left stranded is remote. The requirement in my amendment is that the regulations should provide safeguards for all classes of consumers. It also provides a brake in the sense that the Secretary of State would have to approve any specific withdrawal. If the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, were to be accepted by the Government and the regulations drafted under it, we would certainly support that.
The Government have to think carefully now. In Committee there was a fair degree of support for the principles of these amendments. Given that widespread support, the support of the regulators, the support of many of the companies within the industry and the support of potential investors in the industry, the Government need to think where they are going to take it from here. Basically, they have three choices. They can accept the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and promise to tidy it up a bit—and I hope incorporate parts of my amendment—for Third Reading; they can resist the amendment but promise to come back with something on Third Reading, which may be a more attractive proposition; or they can resist the amendment outright, in which case the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, would have the support of these Benches if he decided to press it.
The ball is well and truly in the Minister’s court and I hope that he makes the right decision.
Lord Whitty
“Abstraction reform
(1) The Secretary of State may by order appoint a day on which section 1 is to come into force.
(2) The Secretary of State may only make an order under subsection (1) if—
(a) new primary legislation on the licensing of abstraction has been passed; and(b) 5 years has expired since the passage of any legislation under paragraph (a).”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, in moving Amendment 41 I will also comment on the government amendments in this group. I am pleased to see that the Government have at last recognised the importance of this issue and brought forward some amendments of their own. I will listen carefully to what the Minister says, but my first take on them is that, although they are very welcome, they are unclear in certain respects and do not yet go far enough.
This issue is one where economic and environmental regulation overlap. One of the central provisions of the Bill will allow and indeed encourage the eventual development of competitive markets, including in upstream water bulk supplies. That will not happen instantaneously—the Government have indicated that it will probably not happen until after 2020—but the legislation which will govern it happening is already the legal basis for that extension of competition into upstream areas. I am not opposed in principle to that, but there is a very basic problem. All competition, at least in the early stages, requires a surfeit of supply. However, difficult though it has been to believe over the past few weeks, there is a serious shortage of upstream water, in particular at key points in the summer. The level of water abstractions in the majority of our rivers in England—it rains rather more in Wales so I will confine this to England—is such that they have been overabstracted and at times are running dangerously low. This is the result in large part of overabstraction in the upstream areas and a shortage of water in the summer months. The reform of the abstraction regime has been talked about for a long time. Some limitation of abstraction rights is an essential prerequisite to introducing multiple suppliers with competition upstream.
Past legislation has given some powers to the Environment Agency and to the Welsh authorities in this respect, but most of the abstraction rights were embedded in the 1960s—so they are already 50 years old—at a point when there was much less concern about there being a limited supply of water. When the EA is carrying out its functions and rationalising, restricting and, in some cases, possibly taking away abstraction rights, that legislation requires compensation to be paid. That is paid out of the Environment Agency’s grant in aid and, in effect, out of Defra’s budget, so it has been very careful in using its powers. This Bill, rightly, makes one major step forward in removing from the water companies—which are the biggest, although not the only, abstracters—the right to such compensation. Although we note that the companies can, subject to Ofwat approval, recoup any loss from attenuation of abstraction rights by charging the consumer, this is a very welcome change as it means that the Environment Agency can be more aggressive in pursuing the restriction of abstraction rights in general, including those of water companies.
A further distortion and danger is that in many of the catchment areas, current abstraction rights are at a much higher level than the actual level of abstraction. Indeed, on average, 40% of the theoretical abstraction levels are actually drawn in most years. However, even with people taking up under half of their abstraction rights, several of our catchment areas are under severe pressure. If we have new entrants into the upstream area, some of that unused abstraction will undoubtedly, one way or another, be transferred to those new entrants. The logic is that we need a reformed abstraction regime, putting a cap on abstractions and allowing the restriction of or attaching conditions of time or place to the abstractions that are relevant to individual catchment areas. We need to do that before we introduce upstream competition.
It is clear from the amendments the Government have tabled that they recognise that. Indeed, the earlier Defra White Paper recognised that. Yet the Bill does not provide for any future legislation on abstraction reform as it does for upstream competition. The consequence of that is that if the Bill stays as it stands, even if the government amendments are adopted, we will be able to move to competition upstream, which would almost certainly have the consequence of greater use of dormant and underused abstraction rights and therefore more pressure on our catchments. It is true that in the very long run effective competition will lead to greater efficiency upstream, but the immediate effect of introducing competition would be more drawing-down and more abstractions, and there is no adequate limit on the totality of those in the abstraction regime as it stands.
Of course, Defra is currently consulting on changes to the abstraction regime. It is quite a good consultative paper, I have to say, although it was issued well after the Bill entered the parliamentary process. What I am trying to guard against is the possibility that down the line abstraction reform has not happened and yet the number of people using water upstream for commercial purposes has increased. The government amendments give some greater powers to the Environment Agency and the NRBW to check on this, and they institute a five-year delay, but the provisions are fairly weak.
It is not enough to consult with the regulators without giving them effective legislative backing for intervening and for restricting or putting qualifications on abstraction rights. That is why we say that reform should be in place and enforced before we move to introduce upstream competition. The government amendments and the five-year gap do not mean that abstraction legislation will be in place. They call for a report to Parliament. I do not want to be too cynical in your Lordships’ House but we know that plenty of reports to Parliament never actually see their way through to explicit legislation or regulation.
The department clearly recognises the problem and has been prepared to move a bit with the amendments in this group, all of which I can support, but they are necessary but not sufficient. The Government could say to me today that they will strengthen their approach and include a requirement to have legislation in place before the upstream competition provisions are triggered. They could still bring that forward at Third Reading. Indeed, that is probably the best way of proceeding. I hope the Minister will say that but in the mean time this is such a serious issue that I have to ask your Lordships to seriously consider my amendment. I beg to move.
Baroness Parminter
My Lords, along with a number of colleagues around the House, I raised serious concerns in Committee about the potential for environmental damage resulting from the upstream competition proposals being agreed in advance of reforming the water abstraction regime. I will not repeat those this afternoon. However, I am very pleased to say that the Government have clearly listened to our concerns and are proposing a number of significant amendments to address them.
First, the Government propose to report in 2019 on progress in reforming the water abstraction regime. The Government’s stated aim, following the publication of their consultation on abstraction reform last December —which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, welcomed—is to legislate early in the next Parliament and implement abstraction reform in the early 2020s. The report will therefore give Parliament an opportunity to scrutinise the management of the interface between what should be by then the two pieces of legislation and their implementation. We can then seek to ensure that their implementation delivers the desired outcomes for both customers and the environment.
I am also grateful that specific concerns that I raised about sleeper licences and bulk trading were heard. The Government have introduced amendments to require Ofwat to consult the Environment Agency or Natural Resources Wales before they issue the codes on bulk supply agreements and before allowing a water supply agreement between relevant parties and incumbent water companies. Equally, relevant parties will be required to consult before entering into bulk supply agreements, and Ofwat will have to take into account any response from the Environment Agency or Natural Resources Wales. In that regard, I do not agree with the noble Lord on the Front Bench opposite that these government amendments are weak. I know from my conversations with Ofwat, which did not want the amendments to be tabled, that it most assuredly does not see them as weak.
In advance of the abstraction regime being reformed, the Environment Agency is already seeking to vary and remove unsustainable existing licences. It will be helped in that by the Government’s removal in this Bill of a statutory right to compensation for a water company resulting from such modifications or the revoking of a licence. The Government have therefore gone a long way towards addressing concerns that noble friends and colleagues expressed in Committee. These proposals satisfy my concern that legislating now for upstream reform in advance of reform of the water abstraction regime could lead to an unsustainable increase in abstraction. Therefore, I would not support any further amendments being tabled by the Opposition Front Bench.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, it is difficult for me to respond to that point without knowing the strengthening that the noble Lord has in mind. I am, of course, perfectly prepared to meet him and discuss that between now and Third Reading.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very comprehensive description of the position and I reiterate that I support the government amendments as a significant move in the right direction. However, they are flawed in one serious respect which I will come on to.
The Minister referred to complementarity between the abstraction reform regime and the new competition regime. I am absolutely in favour of complementarity and I think that both are very important for environmental reasons and for reasons of preservation and effective delivery of our water resources. Therefore, in principle, we are not divided. However, the provisions in this Bill are asymmetrical. We have quite detailed provisions on upstream competition. Nothing I have said affects retail competition. Upstream competition is provided with all the legislative framework that you will need—there will need to be some more regulation, but in effect it is there. The abstraction reform has only just started on its consultative phase. Both the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and the Minister have said that they intend to legislate in the next Parliament, which is nice to hear but we do not quite know who will run the next Parliament and it is not normal to pre-empt the Queen’s Speeches of the next Government, even if they happen to be the same one. In any case, the timescale is out of kilter.
The essential flaw in the Minister’s position is that all he is referring to is a report in five years’ time after the passage of this Bill, whereas my amendment says that legislation should be introduced in roughly that time and before we trigger upstream competition. That means that they are complementary; that means that the timescales are in line. The danger is that if we miss that early in the next Parliament commitment, they will be seriously out of line; and if we wait for the parliamentary report before we legislate, they will also be seriously out of line. Therefore, that essential commitment to wait until legislation is there is missing from the otherwise admirable amendment that he is proposing today.
This is so important that all parties need to be reassured that we have complementarity as an objective but complementarity along both tracks in the way in which we proceed. It is therefore with some regret that I would like to test the opinion of the House on this matter.
Lord Whitty
“National affordability scheme
(1) The Secretary of State must, by order, introduce a National Affordability Scheme for water.
(2) The National Affordability Scheme must include an eligibility criteria, determined by the Secretary of State, in consultation with—
(a) the Water Services Regulation Authority; and(b) the Consumer Council for Water.(3) An order under this section—
(a) shall be made by statutory instrument, and(b) may not be made unless a draft of the order has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, in moving Amendment 55 I will also refer to Amendment 56 in this group.
The Bill covers a wide range of dimensions of our water supply industry and its economic and environmental effects. However, it completely fails to address the social problems of those who face growing water bills and difficulty in facing growing pressures on their low-income budgets or their family responsibilities. It is estimated that for 11% of our population water bills account for more than 5% of their income, and for 23% of the population they amount to 3% of their income. That is a pretty significant cost. We have to accept that how people pay for water in this country is singularly irrational but also singularly unprogressive.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for explaining his amendments and I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. It will not surprise those of your Lordships who sat through Committee on this Bill to learn that I will not be supporting the noble Lord’s amendments.
I shall deal, first, with the Opposition’s national affordability scheme. The Government take the view that companies are best placed to work with their customers to develop local solutions concerning affordability. After all, it is those customers who foot the bill. That is why the Government’s approach is focused on company social tariffs. The companies’ own business plans show us that by 2015-16 most will have put a social tariff in place voluntarily following a process of engagement with their customers. I am struggling to see the advantage of a national affordability scheme in comparison with the guidance and framework for social tariffs which is already in place and which has, as my noble friend Lady Bakewell said, now been in place for a year.
The Government’s social tariff guidance sets minimum standards in a light-touch way. It does so taking into account the reality of diverse regional circumstances. The minimum standards set in the guidance allow water companies to talk to their customers—the ones, as I said, footing the Bill—and to innovate. Imposing more specific minimum standards on water companies would limit their scope to address the unique circumstances of their respective areas. It would disincentivise companies from coming up with something more creative and more targeted. We should not ignore how different the affordability issues facing the water sector are in different parts of the country.
Our social tariff guidance provides a clear steer on the factors that must be taken into account in the development of a social tariff. However, it leaves final decisions for companies to take in the light of local views and local circumstances, rather than seeking to impose schemes from the top down. The most important requirement of our guidance is for effective customer engagement in the development of a social tariff. The Government believe that some customers should not have to subsidise others without being properly consulted.
All the companies have begun that process of consulting with their customers on whether a social tariff is right for their area and, if so, what form it should take to address local needs. The guidance requires that the companies must work closely with the CCW to ensure that their proposals align with customers’ views of what is acceptable. Undertakers will need to be able to demonstrate that they have listened to customers and organisations representing customers. The social tariff guidance applies to both the companies and Ofwat. Where a company brings forward a social tariff that complies with this guidance, there is a clear presumption in favour of approval by Ofwat.
It is crucial that those who are struggling to pay their water bills get assistance, but the difference between what is suggested and what we have in place is our recognition that local people should have a say. Local factors should be, and are being, taken into account.
I turn now to Amendment 56, which concerns billing information. First, I thank noble Lords for raising a very important point about the WaterSure scheme As noble Lords are by now aware—but sadly many customers are not—the scheme is a mandatory safety net for low-income customers. It is available for customers who have a meter and, for reasons of ill health or because they have a large family, use greater than average amounts of water. I have said before that it is unfortunately a feature of all such means-tested benefits that take-up fails to match eligibility. People who are eligible simply do not sign up. Through informing people that WaterSure exists, I am confident that we can increase uptake. That is why it is important that billing information includes details about WaterSure.
However, that is already happening, and it has been happening for years. The Consumer Council for Water has confirmed to me that information on WaterSure and other similar schemes operated by companies is included with bills. CCWater works closely with each water company on the information provided on household bills to ensure that customer interests are met. Its very practical advice is that customers are likely to be put off by too much additional information on the face of the bill. Taking the other suggestions in the amendment, such as requiring all water companies to provide information about tariff structures and the lowest available tariff, I must confess that I find this requirement rather bizarre. What tariffs are we talking about? This is not the energy sector. Water companies simply do not have complex tariffs. In fact, as I pointed out in Committee, the situation is quite the reverse. There are just two tariffs: charging by a meter, or by the rateable value of a customer’s home.
Water companies provide advice to customers on whether or not they might benefit financially from the installation of a meter. They have to fit one free of charge, if asked. The recent publication of water companies’ business plans has demonstrated how this system can work to claw back benefits for customers using the price review process. By taking account of lower financing costs, Ofwat estimates that the next price review could significantly reduce pressure on bills from 2015 by between £120 million and £750 million a year. Most water companies are proposing flat or declining customer bills from 2015 to 2020.
The amendments are well intentioned and raise important questions about the water sector and help for those who are struggling to pay. I thank the noble Lord for bringing the issues again before the House, but I believe the amendments will not help. I have explained my reasons The Government are absolutely committed to helping hard-pressed customers where we can, and I hope that I have demonstrated that adequately today. On that basis I ask that the noble Lord withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that, and I thank everybody else who has taken part in this debate, even though there was a marked lack of enthusiasm for the exact proposition that I put before the House. I think that there was also some degree of misunderstanding, but I shall clear up one or two points.
The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, rightly raised the issue of the impact on bills because of people who will not pay their debt, as well as those who cannot pay their debt. In some water companies, the level of debt is horrendous. We are bringing before the House later tonight—probably, if we make it—a couple of amendments that will address precisely that problem. On the one hand, a lot of the unpaid bills arise in private rented property. There was a provision in the 2010 Bill that would have allowed the Government to introduce secondary legislation to require landlords to indicate who was responsible for those bills. In areas such as the Thames Water area, this is a huge part of the company’s unpaid debt. The present Government, however, declined to implement that part of the Bill on the ground that it was too much of a burden on landlords. The alternative is that landlords themselves should be responsible for the bill and recover it through the rent, which is another way of approaching it. We are attempting to address that problem and the costs of debt which get transferred on to the rest of the consumers.
To put it at its mildest, some companies are rather more aggressive than others in chasing the debt among the “won’t pay” element. We have another later amendment referring to Ofwat. If a company was clearly at a higher debt level than the average due to its own failure to pursue the debt, Ofwat could, in the next price review, refuse to cover it in the price settlement. Therefore, there would be pressure at the company end and pressure on landlords to produce the names of the people they regard as being responsible for their bills. There are things that we will do. My noble friend Lord Grantchester will be pursuing this later for those who can stay. We are addressing that dimension as it has an impact on bills. The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, is absolutely right, as he was in his report six years ago.
The proposition for a national affordability scheme is to push along the developments that people are saying, again, are already happening. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, spoke eloquently about the range of social tariffs and similar schemes being provided by Wessex Water. I am also a customer of Wessex Water and I am pretty satisfied with it in that regard, as in others. Not many companies are as advanced on that front as Wessex Water, and some are well behind. Even in Wessex, if there are only 14,000 on the various tariffs—in, effectively, most of Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire, what was Avon and parts of Wiltshire—those who are eligible to be covered by the scheme are not taking it up.
It is true that with all quasi-means-tested benefits there is a lower take-up than the optimum, but this is far worse than in other fields. It is important to give a kick not only to the introduction of schemes but to companies to ensure that those who are eligible know about them and apply for them. My proposition is not that the companies should not be innovative and creative and relate the schemes they operate within their own areas to the kind of demography and costs they face.
In reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, I would say that you cannot specify a national figure because the average charges differ company by company. So you would probably have a minimum level, which was a proportion of the average scheme, company area by company area. We have deliberately left that for the Minister to pursue in defining the minimum standards of a national affordability scheme. It would allow for the maximum flexibility, both geographically and creatively, of the schemes the companies could go for.
The record of the companies so far, and the failure of Ofwat to pursue them, is the reason why we need a push at national level to get them all involved. There could be a variety of schemes, from a discount to a particular tariff based on a proportion of the average or, in the metered sector, to the level of usage required, as the WaterSure scheme does. There is all the scope in the world in my proposition for different schemes to apply in different areas as long as they meet the minimum requirement. At the moment, however one defines the minimum requirement, eight companies are not, as of today, offering such schemes, and those that do have attracted to them only a small proportion of those who are potentially eligible. That is why we need a kick-start to this, and the national affordability scheme would allow for that kick-start.
I hope that the House will recognise that some of the criticism of what I am proposing is misplaced. Obviously, I have failed at successive stages of the Bill to carry across the argument, but I hope that I have now spelled out clearly what the position is.
On the information scheme, I recognise that most companies provide some information on tariffs and that there will be more tariffs. The exposition of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, of the position in Wessex shows that many schemes are particularly geared to classes of consumer. If all consumers were told about those, that would be useful. We do not have the 2,000 or so tariffs which exist in the energy sector, so I was a little surprised when the Minister described as bizarre our proposition that we should inform consumers of what tariffs are available and what is most likely to suit their needs. That is exactly what has recently been put into the energy regulations at the behest of the Prime Minister. I am therefore surprised that the Minister takes a different view on water. It would be simpler and easier to do than in energy and I see no reason why water companies should not take on the obligation of informing their consumers, via their bills, of what options are available.
I am sorry that the Government seem unable to take up this scheme, even though it gives them maximum flexibility in how they implement it. The issue is so important, and there is such a huge lacuna in the totality of what is covered by the Bill, that it would be remiss of me not to attempt to take the opinion of the House. I think the Government are in the wrong place. If they had come up with an alternative proposition, I would obviously have considered it. However, there is not even that on the table, and I therefore wish to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Parminter
My Lords, I, too, thank the Government for listening so assiduously to the concerns that I and colleagues around the House raised in Committee. The Government have listened very carefully to those concerns, and I particularly welcome the new amendment which outlines that the resilience duty includes promoting the efficient use of water. This powerful commitment to water efficiency is testament to the tenacity of my noble friend Lord Redesdale. It also delivers the Liberal Democrat party policy agreed five years ago to reform Ofwat’s remit to put water resource efficiency at the heart of water company plans.
I also sincerely thank the Minister and the Bill team for accepting my genuinely strongly felt concerns about the necessity of the Government taking account of social and environmental matters when formulating the strategic guidance with which the regulator has to conform. Their amendment to Clause 24 reflects that and I am extremely grateful.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I, too, welcome all the government amendments in this group. However, I do not understand why they have not gone the full hog towards what the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and I were arguing to begin with, which is that if you give Ofwat a responsibility or a primary duty for sustainable development, these things would naturally flow from that. These are criteria that are applied to other regulators. Everything that has been said in this debate and in the White Paper, including everything said just now by the noble Baroness, shows that you need to have a holistic approach to the management of water. This is not about just one dimension or aspect, but about the cost to consumers and to business, about providing infrastructure for the country, about water quality for consumers, about whole ecosystems and catchment areas, about maintaining water resources against climate change pressures, about resilience and about efficiency.
Resilience and efficiency have now been written into this, but not very much of the rest. I, too, admire the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for the pressure that he has brought to bear regarding water efficiency—he has won a notable victory here—but this still baffles me, and my amendment reiterates the need to provide a broader primary duty. The Government have obviously recognised some aspects of upgrading that responsibility because they have, rightly, taken up the earlier amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, that changed,
“may have regard to social and environmental matters”,
to “must” in respect of the Minister’s statement. They recognise sustainability in general and that it is an important part of how we manage in the context and framework within which Ofwat works.
As there are multiple regulators in this system, it has traditionally been assumed that Ofwat is primarily an economic regulator, the Environment Agency primarily an environmental regulator and the Drinking Water Inspectorate primarily a quality regulator. However, they actually overlap: the Environment Agency has serious economic responsibilities in its remit, very specifically about water resources, while Ofwat has a secondary sustainability duty and now, as a result of the amendments on resilience, broader aspects of its responsibilities relate to sustainability. I appreciate the references to resilience. When sustainability was being pushed in the Commons, the Government came up with the resilience criteria, and when it was being pushed in the Lords, they pleased the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, with the water efficiency criteria.
Baroness Byford
My Lords, I apologise that I was not able to play a large enough part in Committee. However, I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, can tell me what Ofwat does not have. My understanding, having had earlier briefings from Ofwat, was that it already had a sustainable development plan duty, which the Bill will further introduce and strengthen. What is missing from the responsibilities that Ofwat already has? I am a little confused.
Baroness Byford
I am sorry; I did not think that that was necessary at this stage—I hope I am correct. That is my question for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I am slightly confused about what is expected of Ofwat in terms of its sustainability duties. I thought that that was written in and already exists. Hence I am not sure where the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, would take us.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I contributed to the Bill in Committee but that was all on the Flood Re insurance aspects and did not relate to this part. However, in listening to the debate on sustainability and resilience, I was struck by the points about whether the Bill was worded strongly enough as regards the importance of sustainability. I recall the reply in Committee from the Minister, my noble friend Lord De Mauley, when he made it absolutely clear that Ofwat has had a stand-alone statutory duty to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development since 2005. In response to what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has said, I would like to turn it a different way round and say that this is actually about the outcome produced, and whether sustainability is strongly enough part of the Bill.
I pay tribute to the work of my noble friend Lord Redesdale in this respect. With this amendment, the Government have delivered the outcome that we want. The question is whether Amendments 61, 62 and 63 are sufficient to meet the arguments that were put forward in favour of the word “sustainability” at that stage. I think that these amendments are sufficient, and I have two reasons for concluding so. First, the resilience duty now requires the promotion of increased efficiency in the use of water. Additionally, the amendments made on Report in the House of Commons mean that the resilience duty includes a requirement that the sustainable management of water resources should be promoted as part of that resilience duty. In practice, therefore, the sustainability test is now being met.
Secondly, the Blueprint for Water coalition of environmental groups, which includes the World Wide Fund for Nature, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, makes it clear in its comprehensive briefing for this Report stage that the Bill satisfies its previous call for Ofwat’s secondary sustainable development duty to be raised to a primary duty. I find its support for the Government’s position reassuring in this respect.
With the other proposals relating to abstraction reform, together with Ofwat’s existing trading and procurement code, which includes a sustainability clause, I think that the Government have made their case and should therefore be supported. Again, I pay tribute to the role of my noble friend Lord Redesdale and his advocacy on this issue. His efforts in Committee have produced the amendment that we are debating today.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes)
My Lords, perhaps I can be of assistance to the House, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Paragraph 8.137 of the Companion to the Standing Orders says quite clearly:
“On report no member may speak more than once to an amendment, except the mover of the amendment in reply or a member who has obtained leave of the House, which may only be granted to … a member to explain himself in some material point of his speech”.
My interpretation is that provided the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, gets the leave of the House, he is able to answer—if he so wishes, of course.
Lord Whitty
I am not sure whether the leave of the House is divisible business. With the leave of the House, I will explain to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, that the sustainable development duty under the current Ofwat remit is a secondary duty. For several other regulators, including Ofgem, it is now a primary duty. That is what my amendment seeks, and it would cover social, environmental and economic matters, not simply resilience and water efficiency.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Redesdale, Lady Parminter and Lord Shipley and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for their thanks for the government amendments. I hope that noble Lords around the House are pleased that there has been so much positive engagement between Committee and Report. The noble Lords who have spoken are right to emphasise the importance of the environmental context of everything we are doing here. I am very glad that my noble friend Lord Redesdale can go from here to a meeting to celebrate what has been achieved.
Turning to Amendment 64, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I make it absolutely clear that we agree that sustainable development must be at the heart of all that the regulator does. I hope that that reassures him and is also of interest to my noble friend Lady Byford. That belief is at the heart of the Government’s statutory guidance to Ofwat, the strategic policy statement. That guidance requires the regulator to report on an annual basis on its contribution to the Government’s sustainability objectives. I am pleased to be able to say that Ofwat is making such a contribution.
Much of the broader debate about Ofwat’s sustainable development duty dates from the 2009 price review. Much has changed over the past five years. Ofwat has made good progress; for example, it has taken active steps to correct the perceived bias towards capital investment. The current price review is very different from previous price reviews. For the first time, there is a balance between capital and operational solutions as a result of Ofwat’s new approach, which now looks at total expenditure rather than at capital expenditure and operational expenditure in silos.
Ofwat has been working with water companies and Infrastructure UK to halt the up-and-down cyclical investment that has affected the sector for many years. This change in approach has had tangible outcomes; for example, Ofwat has recently given permission to water companies to bring forward £100 million of investment into 2014 to smooth the investment profile and benefit the water-supply chain.
All of this is reinforced by what we have been doing to move the horizon from the short-term view of the next five years to a sustainable long-term focus. That is why the Bill will introduce a new duty of resilience that deals directly with the long-term pressures facing the water industry. The new resilience duty encourages investment in additional water storage. It pushes the sector to tackle unsustainable abstraction. It places the focus squarely on the responsible management of water resources. Importantly, it promotes the reduction of pressure on water resources, and reducing demand for water.
Noble Lords will also be aware that the new duty was amended in another place to be absolutely clear and unambiguous about what that means. It is about managing water resources sustainably. We have now made further amendments to be absolutely clear that the resilience duty means that Ofwat is expected to promote efficient water use by companies. I thank my noble friends again for their welcome of this.
We recognise the importance of preparing the water sector for the future. We recognise the need for a strategic response to climate change. We recognise the demand on resources that future population growth will cause. It is because we agree with the aims of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that we have addressed this at all these levels. The changes that the Bill introduces, and the changes we are already seeing in the regulation of the sector, show how much this debate has moved forward. I hope, therefore, that noble Lords will accept the Government’s further amendments—it sounds as if everybody welcomes those—and that the noble Lord opposite will be willing not to move his amendment.
Lord Whitty
“Primary duty of sustainable development
(1) Section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 (general duties with respect to water industry) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (2A)—
(a) omit the “and” at the end of paragraph (c);(b) after paragraph (d) insert “; and(e) to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development.”(3) In subsection (3) omit paragraph (e).”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, in view of the response from the Minister and the fact that it may be returned to in the next Water Bill, I will not move my amendment.
Lord Whitty
“Duties of undertakers to furnish the Secretary of State and Authority with information
(1) In granting, reviewing or renewing licences under this Chapter, the Authority will be required by the Secretary of State to take into account broader issues when conducting or reopening a price review and such broader issues may include for any licensee or applicant licensee—
(a) their corporate structure and financial structure;(b) the total amount of investment in England and Wales;(c) the total amount of dividends paid to owners and shareholders;(d) their taxation structure;(e) their company and group overall performance; and(f) their corporate social responsibility strategy.(2) Licensed water undertakers must furnish the Authority and the Secretary of State with information on the above and publish such information in an annual return or otherwise.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I think this is the last business of tonight for us. Amendment 78 deals with an area which has overshadowed the debate on the Bill and the public commentary on the water industry. It is concern about the overall structure of the industry as it stands, and is likely broadly to stand for a considerable time, despite the attempt to introduce a degree of competition in a small sector of the market.
Nearly 30 years after privatisation, the water industry consists primarily of huge private regional monopolies whose public reputation is variable, according to area, but in some cases is pretty low. Relatively recently, commentaries on the totality of the way in which the water industry operates have been pretty scathing.
I am the first to acknowledge that since privatisation we have achieved a very significant amount of investment in the water industry, and much of it has been very effective in delivering the service. In that context, there have been some investments that it would have been sensible to pursue that, because of the combination of company interests and boundaries and Ofwat’s priorities, have not been made, including interconnection between the various water areas; nevertheless, there has been very substantial investment. It has been in a context where company behaviour and the regulatory structure have focused primarily on capital investment in large-scale improvements and maintenance and relatively little on water efficiency matters and related subjects.
In terms of the finances of the companies, we have seen very substantial increases in their capital value. In some cases, they have gone dramatically through successive changes of ownership to the benefit of their past and present shareholders, but not noticeably to that of British consumers and British business. We have seen very substantial payouts of dividends to those successive owners. Indeed, in the last full financial year, more than 90% of profit was paid out in dividends. We see very low levels of UK taxation, partly because of the structure, and that is again anomalous in the eyes of many commentators and the public. This results, in most cases, from a very high level of gearing. The investment has been largely paid for, and is increasingly largely paid for, out of money raised on the markets.
At the point of privatisation—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is no longer in his place, but he was there at the time—I do not think that that was envisaged by its proponents. I was not one of them, but nevertheless I do not think it was what they envisaged would happen. It was envisaged that there would be a series of UK companies, probably financed by the Stock Exchange, whose investment would largely be funded through equity off the balance sheet rather than through going to the market, whose ownership structures would be based primarily in Britain and would be transparent and open and which would therefore pay UK taxes proportionate to their turnover and profits.
Instead, we have ownership which is, in many cases, overseas, which is not a problem in itself depending on the behaviour of the companies which are so owned. Dividends, to which I have referred, are paid, and UK taxes are going downwards. Largely, the investment the companies have benefited from has been financed from international markets. Issues arise, the most obvious being that if money is being financed through the markets, you have to cost it in the price reviews. The biggest failure of regulation in the past two or, perhaps, three price reviews has been that the regulator allowed a significantly higher level of capital cost than actually applied in the markets. That enhanced profits, at no great expense to the company, and allowed for dividends to be paid in the way I have described.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving his amendment. We have heard about asking water companies for information, much if not all of which is already freely available in their annual reports and accounts. I have said before that the amendment would, to that extent, simply duplicate existing powers.
What we are really talking about is Ofwat’s ability to examine what companies are doing to ensure that they are not profiteering at the expense of their customers. Although I disagree with the amendment before us, I most certainly agree with the principle that water companies must be effectively regulated. I believe that the regulator is doing its job robustly.
The focus of the amendment is, in particular, on reopening a price review. In fact, Ofwat already has the power to reopen the price review in two ways. It can do this under the “substantial effects” clause of a water company’s licence or by making an interim determination. It is clear that Ofwat has the power to revisit price determinations, if it so wishes. In fact, in October last year, Ofwat consulted on whether or not it would be right to utilise this power with respect to Thames Water. However, given the fundamental importance of regulatory stability in the water sector, it rightly utilises these powers with caution. Ofwat considers carefully whether any intervention it might make would be in the overall interests of customers.
Of course, it must be right that Ofwat does this with the bigger picture of stable economic regulation firmly in mind. The objective of setting prices for a five-year cycle is to create a period of stability during which companies are able to invest and deliver the outcomes that they have agreed with the regulator. They have a period during which they are allowed to receive the benefits of that settlement and then, at the end of the period, prices are adjusted to capture those benefits for customers.
That is what is currently taking place through the price review process. Ofwat believes that by taking account of the current low cost of borrowing it will be able to limit price increases from 2015 to 2020 by between £4 and £25 a year. Accordingly, I am unable to see what purpose the proposed annual returns will fulfil. We should look to the future and look at what Ofwat is doing. Let us be clear about the direction of regulation in the water sector. Ofwat is already taking action to improve standards of corporate governance across the sector. It is putting pressure on water companies to strengthen audit arrangements, board member appointments and governance. Ofwat recently published new principles relating to board leadership, transparency and corporate governance. These set out clear standards for the sector and a clear timetable for their introduction. The response from the water companies has been positive and I welcome this. Ofwat is also consulting on principles for holding companies covering risk, transparency and long-term planning. It has made it clear that the companies’ licences may need to be brought up to date to reflect these reforms and it is already discussing this with the companies. Further reporting burdens will not contribute positively to this process. I hope that the noble Lord will agree to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I did not really expect the Government to fall over themselves to accept this amendment today. However, I am glad that I have raised the issue because I think that the Minister is right that Ofwat is now taking greater cognisance of the broader picture. The early years of Ofwat regulation were undoubtedly seriously light touch, even though it required an enormous amount of information from the companies. My aim here is not to duplicate the provision of information but to allow Ofwat to use that information and, if it was inadequate, to require more from the companies. The overall picture is very difficult to justify. The level of borrowing, the level of dividends and the level of taxation, taken as a whole, is very difficult to justify to the British people over a set of companies which is supposedly regulated tightly, and which plays such an important part in their lives. I therefore think that we need to find some mechanism which does not transgress the lines that the Minister set down about regulatory stability and Ofwat acting primarily in the interests of customers; I do not wish to upset either of those objectives.
However, there is an oddity about the structure of this industry that, at some point, some Government or regulator is going to tackle. I am very appreciative of Ofwat’s latest moves in the general direction of tightening up and looking after consumers better. The reason for me saying that is not that when we finish here I am going to the Ofwat reception over the road. I think that it is improving and broadening its role without imposing pernickety regulation. In fact, it is getting rid of some regulation in terms of provision of detailed information.
Ofwat is moving in the right direction, but it is a big problem. I would have hoped that the Government could have recognised it a little more explicitly, because I think it may come up at some point and bite whichever Government are in power when something goes seriously wrong with one of these companies. We have been close to that once or twice in the past 30 years, and I do not think that current Ofwat powers, and certainly past Ofwat practice, were up to dealing with that.
I thank the Minister for his reply. I will not return to this issue, but I suspect that somebody else will at some point in the next few years. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
“Onshore oil or gas activities: effect on water environment
In Part 1 of Schedule 5 to the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010 there shall be inserted after paragraph 13—“Onshore oil or gas activities—effect on water environment13A (1) Without prejudice to the operation of Regulation 35(2) and paragraph 5(1)(d) of Schedule 10 and of Regulation 35(2) and paragraph 7(j) of Schedule 20, the regulator shall refuse an application for the grant or variation of an environmental permit or for the transfer in whole or in part of an environmental permit if—
(a) the regulated facility to which the application for or transfer of the environmental permit relates is to be carried on as part of an onshore oil or gas activity; and(b) the regulator is not satisfied that the applicant or the proposed transferee has made or will make adequate financial provision for preventing or mitigating pollution of the water environment, by ensuring all of the following—(i) operation of the regulated facility in accordance with the environmental permit;(ii) compliance with any enforcement notice or suspension notice or prohibition notice or mining waste facility closure notice or landfill closure notice which may be served on the applicant or transferee by the regulator under these Regulations;(iii) compliance with any order of the High Court which may be obtained against the applicant or transferee under Regulation 42 for the purpose of securing compliance with any of the notices listed in sub-paragraph (ii);(iv) compliance with any order of any court issued under Regulation 44 against the applicant or transferee; and(v) recovery by the regulator of its costs upon any exercise of its power against the applicant or transferee under Regulation 57;(c) for the purpose of this paragraph “onshore oil or gas activity” means any activity for the purpose of exploration for or extraction of onshore oil and gas;(d) for the purpose of this paragraph “adequate provision by way of financial security” means financial provision which is sufficient in value, secure and available when required.”.”
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, before we get on to this afternoon’s main business of flood insurance, I have down one amendment, relating to environmental regulation, which concerns the effect that fracking will have on the water supply system. This has been a major concern in another place for a number of Members of Parliament, who have local problems about the impact that any major expansion of fracking might have on watercourses and water supplies.
I do not intend, this afternoon, to open up the whole debate on the importance or otherwise of fracking, what its effects might be and whether we could repeat, in the UK and Europe, the experience of the United States. For what it is worth, I doubt that it will be transformational, but it will be important and will produce some significant gas and oil in this country. That will need to be tightly regulated by the Environment Agency, the HSE and local planning systems. In particular, water supplies and watercourses will need to be protected and, if anything goes wrong, fracking companies will have to be seen to be clearly liable.
On the relationship between fracking and water supplies, there are three main issues. First, there could be pollutants released, potentially, into water systems and aquifers by the fracking process—that is, the chemicals contained in the fluids that are used in the hydraulic fracturing process. There are also naturally occurring contaminants which could be released from the shale itself, including naturally occurring radioactive contaminants. There could also be fugitive emissions released into ground-water, particularly of methane. All of those could have serious effects on water quality, ecology, habitats and water supply. To a greater or lesser extent, all have been experienced in the United States, although on a limited basis.
Secondly, if the fracking industry develops on any scale, for the purposes of shale extraction fracking will also require major abstraction of water from the system. As we have already stressed in previous days in Committee, the urgency of reform of the abstraction system needs to take into account the impact of mass fracking on abstraction levels and hence on already stressed catchments. This is linked to amendments we discussed the other day. For example, if fracking companies take up the headroom in existing licences in particular catchments, then a lot of catchments could be in serious trouble, if they are not already.
Thirdly, there is the requirement for the cleaning and treatment of the water that has been used in fracking, which will need to be decontaminated.
Amendment 154 really focuses on the first of these effects, and to some extent the third, but all three are important for the water system and need to be taken into account. It is vital that we protect ground and surface water. For example, in the south of England, 70% of the water supply depends on healthy aquifers. This includes drinking water as well as water for industrial and agricultural use. Frankly, the American experience, though variable, is not completely reassuring. In another place, my colleague Joan Walley quoted an example from Pennsylvania, where methane was found in 82% of drinking water samples. We need to be reasonably confident that our regulators, the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, will operate a much more effective regulatory regime here in the UK than has been operated in certain parts of the United States. Even so, and with a fairly high degree of confidence in our regulators, disasters—or at least leakages—may well happen.
We have a history of earlier energy sources to instruct us: the legacy of coal mining and, in a somewhat different vein, the earlier phases of the nuclear industry. Not only can pollution occur, we have seen the inability of the organisations that produced the pollution to finance the decontamination and the clear-up, which have required very substantial sums. We all support the “polluter pays” principle in theory, but we also have to ensure that the polluter can pay. In both coal and nuclear, it has in effect fallen to the taxpayer to pay for the clear-up over the past few decades, and that is still going on.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has explained, Amendment 154 would require onshore oil and gas operators to provide financial security when applying for an environmental permit so that funds would be available to deal with any water pollution incident caused by the operator. The amendment would impact on both the conventional and unconventional oil and gas sectors. It would address any pollution that they caused to the water environment but not any other damage that might be caused by their activities.
We want a successful industry in this country—an aspiration supported at Second Reading—to provide us with an important source of gas for our future, but it is vitally important that it is safe. We already have a well established UK conventional onshore oil and gas industry that has happily coexisted with local communities, in some cases for half a century or more. This has been achieved not least because the industry has maintained a good record of environmental responsibility and competence. The existing controls and the application of good operational practice have served us well to prevent pollution from onshore oil and gas activities and to tackle in an appropriate way any problems that emerge.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change assesses as a matter of course whether a company has sufficient funding for its planned operations prior to awarding any licence. It also checks at the drilling stage and, where relevant, at the production stage that the company has appropriate insurance. Similar financial competence checks are also carried out by the Environment Agency as part of the permitting process. In the event of serious damage to surface or ground-water, the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales have powers, under the Environmental Damage (Prevention and Remediation) Regulations 2009 and the equivalent Welsh regulations, to serve a notice requiring that the polluter pays to clear up the pollution. If a significant environmental risk becomes apparent, the Environment Agency has the authority to stop the activity. These powers apply to a wide range of operations and activities undertaken by different industries. I do not think that it would be appropriate to create any specific provisions for the oil and gas industry.
However, the Government are aware that there are widely felt concerns about the capacity of companies exploring for shale gas to tackle any liabilities that might arise. This is the concern that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is pointing to. Therefore, I am pleased to inform your Lordships that the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the shale gas industry are working to put in place a robust scheme that would cover liabilities even if the relevant operator is no longer in business. They are also in discussion with leading insurers about proposals to build expertise and capacity in the insurance market to facilitate the development of products specifically appropriate for unconventional operations, which in turn could facilitate the development of an industry-wide scheme. In addition, while we already have a robust regulatory framework in place, I can confirm that it will be reviewed and refined as appropriate as we move towards the production phase. The question of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, will be addressed in that process. This regulatory review will include the question of environmental liabilities in the wider sense, not solely relating to water.
I am sure that noble Lords will agree that these two initiatives, taken together, constitute a sensible approach towards ensuring that liabilities are covered in a comprehensive and proportionate way, rather than taking what might be a rigid legislative approach on a piecemeal basis. I hope that this news provides the reassurance that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, needs that the Government are taking the right steps to ensure that liabilities are dealt with appropriately, and that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that. It is a degree of reassurance. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, for expanding the area of concern into the issues of the effect that bringing sea-water on land for use may have on watercourses and the possibility of contamination of the sea-water itself.
There is the potential for such a widespread effect on the water system that I feel justified in bringing this amendment before the House. I am pleased to hear the Minister say that the industry, the insurers and the Government are looking at a scheme. This obviously recognises the very widespread concern in the country about the possible impact of fracking which, he is right to say, is wider than the issue of the effect on the water supply system.
I am still slightly concerned that we might get into a situation where, if the industry develops to the degree that many of its advocates suggest is possible, we end up with a substantial problem—a problem that could end up on the taypayer’s desk or bank account. In the nuclear industry we have provided for such a possibility for current operations, although obviously there is a huge legacy that has not been provided for and a huge bill for the taxpayer as a result. We have done the same on a much lesser scale in relation to landfill. We could probably also establish a regime in relation to fracking to ensure that this liability was covered. However, the Minister has indicated that there is some progress. I will watch this space, as I am sure will others. At this time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, in her opening remarks, the noble Baroness was correct to set this matter in the broader context of where we are now, and have been in recent years, with instances of serious flooding in Somerset this week, possible serious flooding in Surrey by the end of the day, that which occurred in Keswick not long ago; and the resources that are needed to ameliorate that position in the long term which are, essentially, the resources that the Government are putting in. We will no doubt return to that issue at some stage in these proceedings. However it raises the question of whose responsibility this is. I have slight reservations about these amendments in that regard. The public authorities and the Government have responsibility for ensuring that adequate resources are available for flood defence and catchment management to mitigate the impact of flooding and insurance and reinsurance schemes can help through their normal operations. However, insurers can insist on mitigation or flood recovery measures along the lines mentioned by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours as a condition of renewal or extension of policy cover or as a deduction, if you like, from compensation. That is a normal insurance operation.
These amendments seem to be saying that Flood Re would take on some public responsibilities and social objectives and have executive responsibility for delivering flood limitation measures. It is important and right that Flood Re should co-operate with the public authorities, landowners and everybody else in this area, so in that sense I support Amendment 156B. However, it is also important that we do not transfer the risk from public authorities and property owners to an insurance system which, at the end of the day, is viable only if it takes a cut from all policyholders, including those whose properties are not at all at risk of flooding.
This is a difficult issue. The noble Baroness referred to public money. In one sense public money is involved because we are legislating for the system and the Treasury will, therefore, regard the expenditure involved as public money, but it is not really public money—it is the policyholders’ money. At the end of the day, you cannot place too many responsibilities on the Flood Re operation when it is dependent on individual households and businesses paying into it for insurance purposes.
It may well be that a surplus is generated and that the assessment of who pays for flood defence is looked at more broadly. Clearly, there are limitations on public expenditure and expenditure on better flood defence and catchment management could be met by those who are the most direct beneficiaries of it. You could argue that insurance companies themselves benefit from fewer claims as a result of more effective flood defence, but that is a slightly wider argument than placing the statutory responsibilities for which these amendments ask on to Flood Re itself. I think that that is slightly going round the back door.
As I say, I am slightly torn on this issue because I agree with a lot of what the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said. However, I think that we would probably place too much responsibility on Flood Re if we adopted all these amendments.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Parminter for her amendments regarding flood resilience and Flood Re’s role in that matter, and to all noble Lords who have spoken. Regarding Amendments 154A and 154B, I agree with my noble friend Lord Shipley that we need to tackle the root cause of the difficulties with the availability and affordability of flood insurance—the flood risk that households face. The coverage of the tragic events of the past couple of months, which my noble friend Lady Parminter mentioned, have brought the full impact of this home to us all. I thought that the letter read out by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, set out the problem very well.
Households benefiting from Flood Re need to understand both their flood risk and the likely impact of the withdrawal, over time, of the subsidy on their future premiums. I hope that noble Lords will be reassured to hear that we have agreed with the Association of British Insurers the principle that insurers will be required to provide such information to customers when a property is ceded to Flood Re and at the point of a claim. I hope that the statutory requirement for the Flood Re scheme to manage, over the period of the operation of the scheme, the transition to risk-reflective pricing of flood insurance for household premises also offers some reassurance.
The ABI has now come forward with draft proposals for ensuring that the correct incentives are in place to drive uptake of resilient repairs after a flood, particularly for those properties subject to repeat flooding. We are still agreeing the detail of this approach and I hope to have more to say on Report. Encouraging households to become more resilient over the period of the scheme will help to reduce the impacts of subsequent flooding.
Turning to Amendment 156A, the subsection that my noble friends seek to amend has been drafted in such a way to provide firm pointers as to what the Flood Re scheme administrator would need to have regard but is also intended to allow for a degree of flexibility that may be needed as the scheme is finalised. I assure noble Lords, in the strongest terms, that the Government are absolutely committed to taking forward Flood Re, together with the insurance industry, and that both parties are working very hard to achieve this.
We expect the administrator to act responsibly in its management of the scheme throughout its life and we have every intention of ensuring that it discharges its functions in a proper manner, supported by the duties we will place in secondary legislation. The regulations made under Clause 54 will be subject to public consultation and we are currently considering carefully the Delegated Powers Committee’s recommendation that regulations made under this clause should be subject to the affirmative procedure. I trust that this assurance puts on the record our intentions in this regard.
As regards Amendment 156B, my noble friends are right that co-operation between Flood Re and flood risk management authorities will be important, in particular should Flood Re wish in the future to commit any of its resources to supporting flood risk mitigation measures. Clause 54 provides for Flood Re to share information held by it with the Environment Agency, its equivalents in devolved Administrations and any other bodies specified in regulations. It also provides for Flood Re to have a duty to act in the public interest, so where it is in the public interest for Flood Re to co-operate with other risk management authorities, it would be expected to do so.
Under the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, flood risk management authorities have a duty to co-operate with each other in the exercise of their flood and coastal erosion risk management functions. This is because the causes of flooding can cross organisational boundaries and responsibilities. For example, flood risk management schemes to protect one area may make the problem worse elsewhere if there is not a partnership approach to developing solutions. Flood Re will not have an operational role in designing or implementing flood risk management schemes. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, suggested, that would be beyond the scope of Flood Re and would require different skill sets. Flood Re will therefore not have the same degree of interaction with the risk management authorities that they will have with each other. I am not convinced that there is a need to extend the requirements based upon the Flood Re body.
Perhaps I may say to my noble friend Lord Cathcart that while directly managing flood risk is not the purpose of Flood Re, it is nevertheless vital that Flood Re does not just deliver affordable flood insurance. It should also contain the right incentives for householders and insurers to put in place the necessary measures to become more resilient, since otherwise the effective price limits in Flood Re may remove some of the financial incentive to take such action. He has suggested—the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, also asked about this—that Flood Re will need to build up its reserves, which is of course right, but it will have access to the proceeds of the levy and be able itself to take out reinsurance. Can I offer to meet noble Lords before Report, on which occasion I shall of course be happy to provide an update? Perhaps I could also address the point made by my noble friend Lord Crickhowell at this stage. I shall come back on Report to noble Lords with more details of how those who flood repeatedly might be treated. For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that I can persuade my noble friend to withdraw her amendment.
Earl Cathcart (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends Lord Moynihan and Lady Parminter on tabling Amendment 155, as it has given us a good chance to debate flood insurance for businesses, whether in Flood Re or in another mutual set up specifically. We are all under pressure to include small businesses under the Flood Re scheme. That is quite understandable. If I had a business in a flood risk area, I would want to insure it under the Flood Re scheme. I know that the Association of British Insurers and the Government looked at whether businesses could be included within the Flood Re scheme, but found that it threw up more problems than it solved. This is best illustrated with an example.
I am a free range egg producer on my farm in Norfolk, and when it came to buying insurance for the business, I was presented with a long shopping list of types of cover relevant to my business: property; business interruption; loss of profits; contractors “all risks”; terrorism and malicious attack; livestock, including theft, worrying, death after straying, accidental or malicious death; deterioration of stock, in my case probably due to bad feed or electrical failure; perils and fatal injury; livestock in transit; disease, in my case probably something like bird flu or salmonella; goods in transit; motor, for lorries, trucks, vans or cars; employers’ liability; public liability; product liability or environmental liability; legal and professional expenses.
The list goes on, but I hope that gives your Lordships a flavour of the range of commercial insurance on offer. I, of course, had to cherry pick the cover that was most relevant to me. For instance, I did not buy livestock or goods in transit cover, because this is the responsibility of third parties with whom I have a contract. Also, I have no vehicles in that business, so motor insurance was not an issue. However, salmonella is an issue for my business, but because the insurance is so costly I chose not buy it. I hope that I got that one right. I have to choose not only the type of cover that I think is appropriate to my business but how much cover to buy for each category, the cost and the level of excess necessary to reduce that cost. The excess across my shopping list varies from £100 to £20,000.
Although there are hundreds of egg producers up and down the country with identical businesses to mine, I very much doubt that there is another that has commercial insurance exactly the same as mine. They will all be different, and that is the problem: all businesses, whether a corner shop, a pub, a guest house, a property investment company, a hotel or guest house, a manufacturing company or an engineering firm, will buy commercial insurance to suit their particular circumstances. The whole point of a mutual, whether Flood Re or one geared specifically to small businesses, is that the conditions are common to all. The price, the excess, the cover and the conditions must be standardised. This can be done for homeowner insurance—it is pretty bog-standard—but sadly, as I have tried to illustrate, not for commercial insurance. You just cannot standardise it. If it were standardised, virtually all commercial members of that mutual would end up with a policy that did not give them the cover that they wanted.
It would be good if everything could be included in Flood Re, whether owner-occupied houses, rented homes or small businesses, but the line must be drawn somewhere. It has been agreed that those with homeowner insurance, buildings and contents, will be included and that commercial insurance will not be. If I had a property in a flood-risk zone that was deemed to have commercial insurance with it and was therefore excluded from the mutual, I would ask my broker to split my insurance cover into two separate policies: one for the bog-standard homeowner cover, buildings and contents, to ensure inclusion within the Flood Re scheme, and the other to include all elements that made my cover commercial, such as owner’s liability or public liability cover. That might be a way forward for many of those finding themselves excluded from the Flood Re scheme because of the commercial element of their policy.
Flood Re will help up to 500,000 homeowners who cannot currently buy flood cover, but I am sure that with a little bit of inventiveness, many, although I am afraid not all, small businesses, including buy-to-let and leasehold properties, can buy their insurance in such a way as to be included in the scheme.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, my noble friend and I have two amendments in this rather complicated group. The group as a whole is beginning to get us into the area of who should be in and who is out of Flood Re, and we have some groups of amendments later that touch on the same issue. Before the Bill leaves this House, we must be clear who is in, who is out, and why.
My Amendment 160 would require the Secretary of State to report on the numbers of properties in flood-risk areas that were eligible, and those that were not, for inclusion in Flood Re. It would include looking at the specific exclusion as it stands of council tax band H and post-2009 new build. The report would look at how much it would cost to bring them in and who would bear the cost if they were brought into Flood Re, in terms of both premiums and the effect on the non-risky properties’ cross-subsidy.
We all have some sympathy with those groups that are excluded. However, we must be careful, as this is a delicate arithmetic deal between the Government and the ABI. I understand that negotiations were hard and long. As far as businesses are concerned, it is obvious that this must be addressed somehow. We have all seen the effects of flooding in recent weeks and the past few years, on small businesses and farms, on the Cockermouth high street a year ago and on the seafronts at Dawlish and Aberystwyth in recent weeks. We also know that the businesses that are hit—the shops, boarding houses and small businesses—are key to the prosperity of those local economies. It must be frustrating for small businesses, and those advocating their case, like the federation, because they were covered in some way under the statement of principles under the old scheme. However, the old scheme was a different sort of scheme. It was a deal struck by the ABI, agreeing that it would continue to cover—even then, it was not offering new cover—small businesses as well as households if the Government committed themselves to a certain level of expenditure on flood defence.
This is a different sort of deal; it is actuarially based. While we have all received representations on behalf of businesses, the approach now has a different basis. Even so, it is complicated. Some micro-businesses operated out of the owner’s house could be covered because they pay council tax rather than business tax. However, others will not. There are good reasons for this. The noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, described the bespoke way in which businesses negotiate their insurance as distinct from the more generalised way in which households are covered. It is difficult to see how businesses could be included in Flood Re as it stands without serious reconfiguration of the whole arithmetic. Therefore, while I have sympathy, I would not go so far as to press the Government on this front. However, I am in favour of knowing more about this. Therefore I support the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, that we look at this and report on it and see whether that might lead us to some other form of provision in parallel with Flood Re.
Some of the other boundary issues are even more complicated, particularly in relation to leasehold properties and the issue of whether landlords and tenants are included. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, has dealt with one element of this and others are dealt with later on. Some of the government literature refers to leasehold properties. However, in general, the ABI and the Government do not think that leasehold properties are included. The situation with single landlords and tenants is not clear, although commercial providers of leasehold property are not included. The differentiation here is more the nature of the insurance than the nature of the property. While the property may be defined as being in risk or not, in a landlord/tenant situation, the tenant probably takes out the contents insurance, which is covered, whereas building insurance, which is the landlord’s responsibility, is not covered. That is quite a complex position, and it would also be true for multiple leasehold property. A future mortgage on such property is dependent to some extent, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, on there being ongoing insurance on the property. Leaseholders and the owners of the property may be faced with a double whammy if they are not careful.
As I said, I am not in favour of widening the group at this time because of the delicate arithmetic involved. We must address some of these issues in the Bill but for the moment I cannot support the amendments proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, nor the proposals of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, on mixed hereditaments. I am not sure whether Amendment 160A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, which would effectively delete the exclusion of post-2009 properties, is in this group. That is in a rather different category because people have been building in high-risk areas when they have known that they were going to be excluded under the old agreement, let alone the new one. I therefore have less sympathy for that group than I might have for the others.
Lord Whitty
“(8) Prior to making any regulations under subsection (5), the Secretary of State shall require the Committee on Climate Change to provide current and projected estimates of the number of properties that would be eligible for—
(a) inclusion in the Flood Reinsurance Scheme;(b) the value of levy required under section 53; and(c) the likelihood of additional levy or contributions being needed from time to time.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 158. As we have discussed, actuarial calculations for the establishment of Flood Re have had to be pretty robust and tight, reflecting the level of risk assessed by the insurers and by the Government at this time, but we also all know that flood risk will change over time. We cannot, therefore, establish Flood Re on a totally static basis; it needs to be a dynamic process. The reality is that the numbers at high risk of flood damage are likely to increase, particularly, but not solely, because of the effects of climate change. The Committee on Climate Change and its Adaptation Sub-Committee are the key adviser to the Government on the numbers likely to be at risk of flood.
Over the next few years, Flood Re is supposed to operate in an area in which the Committee on Climate Change has already indicated there will be a significant increase in the numbers at significant risk of flood. The definition of “significant” in this context is one in 75 years. At the moment, that relates to about 370,000 properties. The information that Defra put into the basis of the impact assessment derived from the Committee on Climate Change statistics. I am not sure whether it is the database to which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred or some other, but given that we are working on a 25-year timescale it said that this figure will have increased by the 2020s to between 475,000 and 825,000 and by the 2030s to between 525,000 and 1 million. That is a pretty big increase. By the end of the 2030s, the end of the 25-year period, it is potentially three times what we are talking about now.
Obviously, some mitigation will happen, but regrettably the level of flood defence expenditure fell—it is now rising again, but it fell—and the figures that have been used in these calculations show that there is a gap between the required expenditure and what is likely to be needed of about £500 million over the period of 20 years. That means that we have a significant problem in defining what is at risk in 10 or 20 years and therefore where Flood Re has to get to in terms of its financial arithmetic and the number of properties that it is going to cover. The Committee on Climate Change can advise on the likely change in crude numbers—indeed, it already has. It can apply probabilities to that, it can indicate what degree of mitigation, at what likely cost, is likely to offset this and it can look at the change in the nature of the risk and the areas to which it applies. It is important that both the Government and the administrator of Flood Re get strong, independent assessments of this changing and growing risk.
Indeed, this goes beyond climate change; there are the interrelationships between climate change, population growth, distribution of population, development pressures, water resource pressures, ecological consequences and so forth. The Committee on Climate Change and the Adaptation Sub-Committee are the authoritative bodies to do that and their role should be written into the Bill. My Amendment 156 does that and Amendment 158 would then require the Secretary of State to take notice of the advice from the Committee on Climate Change when setting targets under Clause 58 and more broadly. I beg to move.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for drawing attention to his wish to ensure that that the policies set out in the legislation respond to the demands that climate change may bring in future—in particular, by including a formal role for the Committee on Climate Change. I was not entirely sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, accepted that formal role.
We fully agree that climate change and adaptation to it are vital. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, added the additional factor of population growth. He rightly challenges us on the uncertainty of the future and we are very much aware of the need to plan for the future in this regard.
The Committee on Climate Change and, in this respect, its Adaptation Sub-Committee play a very important role in providing independent advice to the Government. The information and analysis provided since the committee’s inception have helped to shape the debate on climate change. Although the evidence of climate change is becoming increasingly compelling, it is clear that we need to do more to understand and plan for its impacts. This is a challenging task, given how interrelated and unpredictable those effects are. We have seen how variable the jet stream has been over the past few years, for example, and how it has brought us drought and flood.
Although, clearly, dealing with the current devastating flooding is the immediate absolute priority, we also need to reflect on our management of flood risk and assess our preparedness for climate change. The Government published the UK’s first national adaptation programme report in July 2013, which sets out the action that we propose to take. There is great expertise in this country, not least in your Lordships’ Chamber, which we can access and are accessing, as well as learning lessons from elsewhere.
Specifically in relation to Flood Re, I assure noble Lords that climate change projections were considered alongside other risk factors during the design of the policy and that the effects of climate change will continue to be considered during future levy-setting discussions. I remind your Lordships that in the memorandum of understanding with the industry that has been used to craft the Bill—I mentioned it in relation to a previous group—we have recognised the importance of the programme of flood defence and have committed to a specified amount of expenditure for 2015-16. However, we believe that advising on the scope and financial parameters for the transitional Flood Re scheme is a role for the insurance industry and would be outside the current remit of the Committee on Climate Change.
To clarify, the number of policies that would be eligible for Flood Re is based solely on the cost of the flood risk component of any policy, which is set by the insurers. This assessment of flood risk will indeed change over time, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, acknowledged, and it would not be possible for the Committee on Climate Change to provide any estimates without detailed knowledge of industry pricing models. Similarly, the value of the levy required and the likelihood of the need of any additional contribution by insurers is based on a number of financial parameters that could change year on year. Those include the level of premiums received, the cost of reinsurance and the amount of levy collected.
The Government and the Association of British Insurers have worked hard to determine the value of the levy required and the likelihood of the need for additional contributions, based on industry data and assumptions that were subject to independent review by Professor Stephen Diacon. In addition, extensive modelling, using a model that was quality-assured by the Government Actuary’s Department, has been carried out by the Government using there data, as part of both the pre-consultation and post-consultation impact assessments.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency will continue to collect and analyse data on flood risk, which will feed into the Government’s ongoing assessment of the scheme. In addition, as Flood Re is directly accountable to Parliament, detailed audited information about Flood Re’s ongoing operation will be reported to Parliament regularly.
I turn now to the proposed role of the Committee on Climate Change in advising the Secretary of State on setting the target number in relation to the flood insurance obligation. Clause 58 gives the Secretary of State the power periodically to set a target for the proportion of properties on a register of properties at greater flood risk that relevant insurers are collectively required to issue with insurance policies. The register, to be created by the Environment Agency and its counterparts in the devolved Administrations, will be based on the flood risk maps published by those bodies.
The number of properties indicated as subject to flood risk may change with time, as a consequence of climate change or through better information and mapping. The Secretary of State would set an overall target for the number of registered properties that the industry as a whole needs to cover. In setting this target, the Secretary of State would consider evidence on existing take-up rates of insurance and other relevant data. This could include advice from the Committee on Climate Change, should the Secretary of State wish.
The setting of the target number is a decision regarding the appropriate breadth of support that should be given by this financial support mechanism. Again, we believe that advising on the target number would be outside the committee’s current remit and, for reasons discussed in relation to Flood Re, would not be the most appropriate use of its resources or expertise.
Although, for the reasons that I have set out, we do not feel able to accept these specific amendments, I would like to return for a moment to the wider spirit behind them. We absolutely recognise that climate change is a most important consideration for the management of future flood risk and we value the expertise of the Committee on Climate Change. We are pleased that the independent Adaptation Sub-Committee will be publishing a revised climate change risk assessment report in summer 2016. We will consider that evidence and any implications for flood risk management carefully once the report is received.
Noble Lords know about various measures that we are putting in place to reduce the risks of flooding and coastal erosion, so I will not expand on that right now. I hope that the noble Lord will have been reassured by what I have had to say, setting what we are doing here in the context of our deep understanding of the potential implications of climate change and the unpredictability of measuring it into the future. I hope that he will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister, who clearly recognises the issue. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who, I thought, accepted the additional responsibility—although slightly conditionally. The conditionality was that the financial information, at least in broad terms, would be available to the committee.
I am a bit disappointed by the Minister’s reply. She recognises clearly the importance of climate change in defining the nature and scope of the problem. The Government have an authoritative independent committee available to them to feed into their deliberations, along with the administrator of Flood Re, but she is saying, “Actually, the Minister might or might not take notice of what the Climate Change Committee says, but, in any case, it is not the role of the Climate Change Committee and the Adaptation Sub-Committee to talk about financial risk assessment”. That is not what we are saying, though. To feed in to the risk assessment, you need the most authoritative input that you can get, in order that the financial structure can be changed to reflect those increased risks, changed probabilities or changed distribution of risk. I would have thought that it would be useful to the Government to have it written into the Bill that they have an authoritative input on this from the Committee on Climate Change.
In response to the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, I am not looking for this input before we get Flood Re off the ground. I will be looking for an ongoing input. The administrator of Flood Re, as well as the Government, is going to look increasingly for this kind of authoritative input. At the end of the day Flood Re is—despite its statutory base and its reporting to Parliament—a private body informed by the expertise of the insurance industry, but that expertise is itself informed by the best information that can be got on risk. In my view, the best information that can be got is probably from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who is no longer in his place. I would have thought they would be the best and most authoritative sources to be relied on. I am surprised that they are not prepared to get that reflected in the Bill. For the moment, I withdraw my amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I broadly support most of these amendments, but I have a few queries. I support the first two amendments, Amendments 156C and 156D, unequivocally. It should be part of the role of Flood Re to help raise awareness, both among policyholders and in the community at large, and it will need to do so in conjunction with the Environment Agency, local authorities and so forth. However, clearly, the insurers also have a responsibility, as is reflected in these amendments. This will help both the beneficiaries and the insurers to move to a more systematic, cost-reflective basis for the whole system over time. It is also true that the administrator should be required to produce a plan for the operation of that scheme, as provided for in Amendment 156D. There must also be an overall longer-term plan for transition over the 25 years of the plan, as is proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter.
I am less sure that we should stipulate a five-year review period in legislation. In a sense, the scheme is always under review and will be changed in the light of new advice or new experience of flood conditions. Tying this down to every five years may not be the most sensible thing to do. Part of that assessment would be to indicate what measures would be needed to reduce long-term costs, as provided for in Amendment 156F. Insurers may encourage both individual and collective schemes of mitigation. As I have said before, this may involve mitigation by the policyholders, as a condition of that policy, or as a “cream-off” from compensation received in order to renew the policy. The noble Lord referred to Flood Re’s assessment of the need to invest in order to save in the longer term. I understand all of that. I am, however, a little worried by the term “subsidising”, which is included in Amendment 156E. I am not sure who is subsidising whom in this context. If the noble Lord means measures such as these, I think that is appropriate, but I would not use that term, as it might suggest a cross-subsidy over and above what is already provided for in the scheme.
Even after the noble Lord’s gallant attempt at explaining Amendment 156G, I do not follow it fully. As I understand it, the objective is to keep the levy cost down for those outside the scheme and the means would be some sort of quota-sharing agreement. I bow to the greater expertise of those involved in the insurance industry to tell me whether that will work. Subject to those queries and my slight lack of comprehension on the last amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness are in the right territory with these amendments.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I concur with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in Amendment 156C that it is important that householders whose policies are ceded to Flood Re are aware both of the flood risk in their vicinity and of the transitional nature of the scheme. Knowing about flood risk is vital so that households can take simple steps, such as signing up to free flood warnings, as well as investigating longer-term options for managing their flood risk, and can understand the likely impact on their future premiums of the withdrawal of the subsidy from which they are benefiting.
We will work with insurers and Flood Re to support people at flood risk to plan for and adjust to risk-based pricing. I hope that noble Lords will be reassured to know that we have agreed with the ABI that insurers will be required to provide information to customers about their flood risk, Flood Re and the actions that they can take to manage this, both when a property is ceded to Flood Re and at the point of a claim. Of course, raising awareness of flood risk remains primarily a matter for risk management authorities, such as the Environment Agency, so it will be important to ensure that any action by insurers on behalf of Flood Re complements their work.
Turning to Amendment 156D, I understand that by changing the phrasing of the power in Clause 54(3) from “may” to “shall”, the notion that Flood Re is a transitional measure is strengthened. I point to the Government’s stated policy objective in the June 2013 public consultation that,
“there should be a gradual transition towards more risk-reflective prices”,
and to the existing provisions in subsection (2) of the clause, which may require the administrator to have regard to the transitional nature of the scheme in discharging its functions. We have been clear that there should be a gradual transition to more risk-reflective prices and that we are committed to ensuring that the scheme retains incentives for flood risk to be managed. The Government will not designate the scheme until we are satisfied with the industry’s proposals. As I have already said today, the regulations designating the scheme will be subject to public consultation and we are currently considering the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee that regulations made under this clause should be subject to the affirmative procedure. While I recognise that the shift from a permissive power to a firm expectation could be claimed to underscore Flood Re’s duties in this regard, I believe that there is sufficient clarity in Flood Re’s role to manage the transition to risk-reflective pricing and for that to be achieved through the current drafting of the Bill.
Turning to Amendment 156E, from my noble friend Lady Parminter, I can confirm that it is, as she said, our firm intention that the policy will be reviewed every five years by the Government. This review will assess the level at which the levy and the eligibility thresholds are set to ensure that the policy objectives of Flood Re continue to be delivered, including the transition to risk-reflective pricing. The plan will be a public document and Parliament will be able to use existing powers to call Flood Re’s staff to answer any questions. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, in the case that Flood Re’s finances are out of kilter or the scheme is not operating effectively, that review will be brought forward. We are working with the ABI to define this process. The amount of the levy and the thresholds will be set out in secondary legislation. We intend those instruments to have a review period, always accepting that they might be reviewed early if circumstances require it. In addition, as I have just said, we are taking a power to make Flood Re’s responsible officer directly accountable to Parliament for the scheme’s value for money and for propriety and regularity. There are powers to require Flood Re’s audited accounts to be laid before Parliament and provided to the Comptroller and Auditor-General to examine and compare against Flood Re’s published transition plan.
I now turn to Amendment 156F, which would require the Flood Re scheme administrator to set out how it intends to manage the transition to risk-reflective pricing by investing in flood risk mitigation measures. Actions taken by households, communities, businesses and Government to reduce flood risk are the best and most cost-effective way to secure affordable insurance for households at risk of flooding in the long term, and I recognise the noble Lord’s intention to see this reflected in the Bill. As I said earlier, Flood Re will have a duty to have regard to the need both to act in the public interest and to ensure economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the discharge of its functions. It may well be that the Flood Re administrator decides in due course that investments of the sort that the noble Lord would like to see present an appropriate means of complying with these requirements where there is a clear case for doing so. Nothing in the Bill precludes this. However, we think that it is important for Flood Re to retain flexibility in the way that it discharges its public-interest duty and plans for transition, in order to ensure that it is in a position to balance these requirements against its core obligations as a reinsurer. Accordingly, we do not think that it would be appropriate to mandate Flood Re to subsidise flood risk mitigation measures.
Finally, Amendment 156G would limit the maximum proportion of the cost of a claim that an insurer could reclaim from the Flood Re scheme to a specific amount, as part of the Flood Re scheme’s management of transition to risk-reflective pricing. I understand that the intention is that this would restore an element of risk-reflective pricing to insurance policies in Flood Re. This could create a financial incentive for households and insurers to put in place the necessary measures to manage their flood risk. However, price is one, but not the only, signal to households for achieving that and our proposals for ensuring that households have the necessary information to make informed choices about managing their risk should also act to drive resilient behaviours. While superficially attractive, sharing an element of the risk between Flood Re and households would also have the effect of creating a more complex system to administer, thereby adding to the overall costs of the scheme. Having listened to what I have said, I hope that the noble Lord will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, there is an element of confusion both outside and inside this House as to where the words which define the exclusion of leaseholders are to be found. I understand that Defra put out a notice in which it excluded leaseholders, but can the Minister tell us where this provision is made? The public are confused. The assumption when anyone reads this Bill that freeholders are included will be interpreted by flat-owners who have purchased their freehold but manage their blocks through leasehold companies—companies which have been established to manage the freehold, owned by the residents who have 999-year leases—to mean that they are also included. They will assume that because they are freeholders they are included. My understanding from my reading, although, as I say, I have not found the authoritative piece of literature, is that they are not included. In other words, people out there who believe they are included—freeholders of blocks of flats; not corporate interests but individual share-of-freehold owners—will think that they are included when they are not. That needs to be sorted out.
I cannot understand why they are excluded. Indeed, I would argue that they are probably less of a risk to insurance companies, even though they may well live in buildings on flood plains, because very often you find blocks of flats where no one is living on the bottom floor at all and the first flat in the block is on the first floor, above the area at risk of being flooded. If I am correct in what I am saying, will the Minister tell us why share-of-freehold owners in blocks of flats are being excluded when, in fact, they are freeholders and when, as I say, people reading the Bill will presume that they are included?
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I think my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours is going back to a point that I raised earlier—namely, that the Flood Re parts of the Bill may have been produced relatively late in the Commons. However, the dividing line between what is included in terms of property and what is not is not as clear as it should be. My noble friend has just identified a group for whom this issue is particularly confusing, but in any case the distinction is not in the text of the Bill. As I said earlier, there is slight confusion about the various bits of paper that Defra has produced on this matter, so we need clarity one way or the other as to which groups are included and which are not. We have heard various bits of clarification from the Minister today. I think that most of those should end up in the Bill before we finalise it and I look to the Government to come forward with amendments on Report or at Third Reading to make sure that the position is clear.
I am afraid that I confused the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in this group with an amendment in an earlier group and commented on it earlier. However, whereas I have great sympathy with a lot of the other excluded groups, I have virtually none with those who built on and developed land in high-risk areas after 2009 because it was already clear from the previous agreement between the Government and the ABI that new insurance would not be given for those developments. Like the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, I do not think we should give those people leeway retrospectively. If we shift the deadline now, somebody will argue for a deadline at a later stage to allow yet more development in inappropriate places, and that will skew the insurance figures and the whole calculation behind Flood Re. Therefore, I do not support the noble Lord on this occasion.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, my noble friend’s Amendment 160A seeks to make all houses built and occupied before its introduction eligible for Flood Re. This amendment would move the cut-off date for inclusion of properties in the scheme to the start of Flood Re, rather than from 2009, and would also bring band H households in scope of the scheme.
I apologise to noble Lords as I suspect that I may be repeating what I said earlier today and, indeed, we may repeat it yet again later. First, I reiterate why we intend that properties built before 1 January 2009 and those in council tax band H and the equivalents would not be eligible for the scheme. However, before I do that, I shall respond to my noble friend Lord Shipley and a number of other noble Lords who asked what state the property must have been in at 1 January 2009 in order to qualify. It must have been in possession of a council tax band, which would imply that it was habitable at that date. I hope that is helpful.
The 2009 cut-off date recognises that new housing development should be located to avoid flood risk, or where development in a flood risk area is necessary, it should be designed to be safe, appropriately resilient to flooding and not increase flood risk elsewhere, in line with the national planning policies in place. This date therefore reflects the fact that homes built since 2009 should already be insurable at affordable prices. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, that marker has been in operation for several years, and it has been maintained under the Flood Re proposals.
The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked about surface water mapping. The new mapping has shown that the total number of properties affected by surface water flooding is lower than previously thought.
Band H properties are not included in the scheme because, as I explained in some detail earlier today, Flood Re is designed to target support to those who need it most.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, raised the issue of leasehold properties. As we have discussed, commercial policies are out of scope of Flood Re, which is designed to support households. We believe that this approach is fair and practical, and it was supported in the public consultation. However, the leasehold sector presents a more complex situation, where the contents policy is classified as domestic, but a buildings policy could be classified as either commercial or domestic and could cover multiple dwellings. As I said, I recognise the strength of feeling on this issue, particularly in light of the ongoing extreme weather conditions, and I feel we need to take time to consider it in more detail, although, without evidence of market failure, it would be difficult to justify action. However, we will examine the evidence further with the ABI and I hope to provide an update on Report.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Crickhowell (Con)
I rise to make a very brief comment, prompted by the remarks of my noble friend on the likely possibility of incumbents seeking to defend their positions. I seem to recall that, in reply to my noble friend Lord Moynihan in our previous debate, the Minister told us that the water companies had said that they were against what was proposed. I remember thinking, like Mandy Rice-Davies, “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”. It was just an indication of the kind of attitude that one is likely to get from incumbents—perfectly naturally—in trying to defend their existing position.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, last week’s de facto alliance between the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and me extends in part to these amendments, in that it would be sensible for the Government to contemplate positively some of the latter amendments in the group, particularly those that inhibit the degree to which incumbents can effectively square the market against new entrants. However, my agreement does not extend all the way, I am afraid, particularly to the earlier amendments in the group. We must remember that the Bill is not quite as radical as all that, and, if it were to be a bit more radical, a lot of other things should follow.
We are, actually, introducing competition immediately only in a narrow part of the market. It is an important part, and there may be subsequent lessons to be learnt, but it is going a bit far to say that Ofwat’s central duty should be extended to promote competition. It already has a duty to look after the interests of consumers, where appropriate through competition, and we are making sense of that in a way that has not been done in the past 20-plus years of privatisation. However, we are not in any way legislating in this Bill for residential properties to be subjected to competition. Some noble Lords may think that we should be doing so, and it may be that I could be persuaded of that, but the fact is that we are not doing so here. If we were, that would raise a whole range of other protections and issues that would have to be considered.
It is also true—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred to upstream competition—that a number of hesitations were expressed around the Committee last week about triggering the upstream aspect to this, particularly in relation to abstraction reform occurring first. I would not want the noble Lord’s Amendments 115 and 116 about promoting competition to give Ofwat the impression that their provisions would override the need to ensure that abstraction protection was in place before competition in the upstream area was triggered.
Therefore, I cannot support this group of amendments as a whole. The Government may wish to consider one or two of them but, at this point, many of them go too far beyond the scope of the Bill or could be interpreted as doing so.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Moynihan’s Amendments 115 and 116 would introduce a new duty on incumbent water companies to “facilitate competition”. This would sit alongside their primary duties to supply water and provide sewerage services to their appointed areas. Amendments 138 to 145 would change Ofwat’s powers to amend licences to introduce the market reforms set out in the Bill.
One part of the proposed new duty on incumbents would require them to act in a manner that did not “prevent, restrict or distort” competition. I think we can all agree that it is essential that incumbent water companies play by the rules of the market so that customers benefit from competition. That is why the Competition Act 1998 already prohibits business from making agreements that involve the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition, or from abusing a dominant position in the market. Both incumbents and licensees are subject to an overarching competition law regime that deals with the concerns that the amendments seek to address. As my noble friend thought I would say, Ofwat is able to enforce the Competition Act 1998 in the water sector because it has concurrent powers with the Competition and Markets Authority.
In some of our debates on Tuesday, noble Lords made comparisons with Scotland, as did my noble friend today, but I note that a facilitating competition duty was not imposed on Scottish Water, although it, too, is subject to the aforementioned Competition Act. It is worth noting here that WICS does not have the same powers as Ofwat under the Competition Act, which may explain some of the differences in the way Scottish Water is regulated.
Incumbents will be subject to enforceable licence conditions, market codes and charging rules which will ensure that they operate fairly in the competitive markets. I question why the amendments do not require licensees to be under the same or a similar duty because both licensees and incumbents operate within the retail market and some licensees are associates of incumbents.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I welcome the fact that the Water Bill places the Government’s strategic priorities and objectives on a clearer statutory footing and requires Ofwat to carry out its functions in accordance with it. New Section 2A(3) to be inserted by Clause 24 makes it clear that, “In formulating a statement” the Government “must have regard to” Ofwat’s duties, but only,
“may have regard to social and environmental matters”.
The government briefing note on sustainable development and the resilience duty that was issued last month confirms that the Government are strongly committed to sustainable development, balancing the equally important needs of society with those of economic growth and environmental protection. Before lunch we debated how this is articulated in the duties for Ofwat, but it is equally important that it is articulated clearly in the duties placed on future Governments. That is why I believe that the word “may” should be changed to “must”, so that Governments must take into account social and environmental matters when formulating future policy steers.
Statements of strategic priorities will replace the existing social and environmental guidance currently issued to Ofwat. In future, the Secretary of State will issue a single consolidated statement setting out social, environmental and economic policy priorities. My noble friend the Minister kindly confirmed in a letter to me on 17 January that the Government intend to continue to provide guidance on social and environmental matters within that single consolidated policy statement. Given that the Government have said that they will provide guidance on such matters, I feel that the use of the word “may” insufficiently reflects that commitment and the need for future Governments to take account of these matters when formulating the crucial strategic policy that will guide Ofwat. I beg to move.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I support these amendments. New Section 2A(3) to be inserted by Clause 24 seems to differentiate between Ofwat’s duties regarding strategic priorities and social and environmental matters. We attach “must” to the former and “may” to the latter, but the Secretary of State ought to have regard to both. This is not the usual theological argument between “may” and “must”. Those of us who have been around the block on this legislation have come across that argument a number of times and have completely failed to understand parliamentary counsel’s advice. The provision clearly differentiates the status of the two duties. It does not differentiate and downgrade the social and environmental objectives for Ofwat, which some noble Lords might think would be sensible, as Ofwat is primarily an economic regulator. This is for the Secretary of State. It is the Secretary of State’s duty to balance all these issues out. He should therefore have regard to both duties and if it is “must” for the former it should be “must” for the latter. The provision does not say, “give priority to”; nor does it say, “If you have regard to these duties, you do not necessarily need to carry out exactly what they prescribe”. However, it is the duty of the Minister to balance all these things out. If the legislation gives less status to one than to the other, the outcome of the balancing seems to be predictive.
I do not think that is right. All parts of the policy need to be looked at. I think “must” is probably the appropriate modal verb but both duties need to be in the same form. They are both important and the Secretary of State, whoever that might be, needs to have regard to both. I therefore support the intention of the amendment.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Parminter for her amendment. She notes that Clause 24 on setting strategic priorities and objectives for Ofwat requires that the Secretary of State “must” have regard to Ofwat’s duties but “may” have regard to social and environmental matters. She would like to change “may” to “must”. I am also familiar with the debates to which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty refers, having delivered a “must” to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, yesterday at Third Reading of the Children and Families Bill.
The Government are keen to hear and understand my noble friend’s concerns. However, we think that the new power to set strategic priorities and objectives for Ofwat will ensure that social and environmental matters will continue to be addressed. The purpose of Clause 24 is to strengthen and clarify the existing guidance-giving powers. It enables the Secretary of State to issue a single consolidated statement setting out social, environmental and economic policy priorities in the round to help Ofwat to balance all the relevant considerations appropriately when making regulatory decisions.
The Government’s principles of economic regulation require that Ofwat regulates within a clear framework of policies and duties set by the Government. Under the new power, Ofwat must carry out its relevant functions in accordance with the statement. The new powers stipulate that, in issuing the guidance to Ofwat, the Secretary of State must have regard to all Ofwat’s duties. These are set out in Section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 and include protecting the interests of consumers, promoting economy and efficiency by companies in their work and, as we have already discussed, contributing to the achievement of sustainable development. These duties encompass the regulator’s essential purposes and it is right that, in giving a steer on policies and objectives, the Government should be bound by them. We note that the duties clearly embrace both social and environmental matters. In addition, the new powers under Clause 24 stipulate that when formulating a statement the Secretary of State may have regard to social and environmental matters. We hope that this serves to provide additional reassurance that such matters will continue to be addressed through the strategic priorities and objectives. As a further check, Clause 24 also requires that we consult widely on the statement of strategic priorities and objectives. Following this, the statement will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. When we consulted on the existing strategic policy statement last year, the social and environmental content received a warm welcome from both environmental NGOs and consumer groups. I thank my noble friend Lady Parminter for her own tribute to this.
We have great sympathy with my noble friend’s objectives but we are not persuaded that such a change to the Bill is required. I therefore ask her to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Whitty
“National Affordability Scheme
(1) The Secretary of State must, by order, introduce a National Affordability Scheme for water.
(2) The National Affordability Scheme must include an eligibility criteria, determined by the Secretary of State, in consultation with—
(a) the Water Services Regulation Authority; and(b) the Consumer Council for Water.(3) An order under this section—
(a) shall be made by statutory instrument, and(b) may not be made unless a draft of the order has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, Amendment 119 deals with the affordability question. As my noble friend said on the last amendment, roughly 11% of household consumers of water have problems paying their water bill, amounting to 2 million households. As the Minister said, at present there are two fairly crude systems of pricing water for households. One is based on the seriously outdated—or putative—rateable value of your house and the other is metered by volume. The Minister drew comfort from the fact that this does not lead to complicated tariffs, as there are for the energy sector. To some extent I agree with him—we do not want to overcomplicate this—but in neither the metered nor the non-metered sector for residential consumers is any regard paid to the circumstances of the household or the affordability of the bill. The existing formulae do not allow for that.
Until very recently, and absolutely until the 2010 Act, Ofwat took the view that we should not have varied tariffs, social tariffs or any tariffs that departed from those two basic approaches. It has been very resistant to introducing social tariffs until recently. The 2010 Act provided the option for companies to make social tariffs available to consumers. The Water Sure scheme is a more broadly based scheme, available across companies, for those on benefits with large families and those who have medical needs. The take-up of the option to introduce social tariffs has been hitherto pretty limited—only three companies have so far introduced them. If the Minister has any more recent figures I would be grateful for them, but my understanding is that about 70,000 people have taken up Water Sure and rather fewer have taken up the social tariffs available from individual companies. That is, at best, fewer than 150,000 out of the 2 million potential beneficiaries of a social tariff approach. The Government of course have also recognised the very particular situation with South West Water, but that is based on government expenditure, not on the structure of tariffs.
The industry now tells us that in a couple of years’ time all companies will have social tariffs and that those social tariffs will benefit low-income, vulnerable households. I hope that by the date we stipulate here, 2015, there will be social tariffs right across the board. However, first Ofwat and then the companies have been very slow in pushing this option. The take-up indicates that its availability is not well known and that the ease with which people take up social tariffs is pretty limited. We need to provide an incentive, or a push, on this front over the next year or so in order that all companies take it up and that the take-up among consumers is wide, in order to provide, if you like, a safety net. We recognise the desirability of companies taking notice of the configuration of their own consumers and the particularities of their region, and therefore it is better that companies are left to decide their own schemes which will suit their own circumstances. But they must have widespread eligibility, and be easily taken up and understood. At the present rate of progress it looks unlikely that anything like the potential 2 million households that would be helped by social tariffs will be on them by 2015. We need a national approach to this that will set minimum standards.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for Amendment 119, which would insert a new clause into the Bill to place a requirement on the Government to introduce by secondary legislation what is described as a national affordability scheme, with eligibility criteria set by government.
Keeping bills affordable while ensuring continued investment in essential water and sewerage services are the driving principles behind this Bill. I thank the noble Lord for giving us the opportunity to debate these important points. However, while I am in full agreement with him that we must consider the impacts of bills on hard-pressed households, I am not persuaded by his proposal.
First, the concept of a scheme with nationally mandated eligibility criteria simply ignores the reality of the water industry, which is structured on a regional basis. Different water company regions have different customer bases. Average incomes and the cost of living vary substantially from region to region, as do the costs of supplying water and sewerage services. A top-down, centralist approach could take no account of these regional variables. A centrally mandated set of eligibility criteria would have a completely different impact on households living in otherwise identical circumstances, depending on which region they happened to be in.
This is why the Government’s approach is focused on company social tariffs. We have issued statutory guidance that requires the companies to work with their customers to develop local solutions. These must be tailored to local circumstances and acceptable to customers who foot the bill. Companies have been able to introduce social tariffs since April 2013—for slightly less than a year. In the past year, three have done so. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, feels that the pace of change is too slow, but by 2015-16 the majority of water companies will have a social tariff in place.
Legislating for this change will not make it happen any faster. Given the requirements to develop nationally mandated eligibility criteria, it could actually slow the pace at which social tariffs are rolled out. That could delay the point at which some hard- pressed households receive the help that they need. As the noble Lord said, I have mentioned before that all incumbent water and sewerage companies have already developed packages to help customers with affordability problems. These include customer assistance funds, support tariffs, debt advice and water efficiency measures. Social tariffs have provided a valuable additional tool.
The second important point in relation to this proposal is that it remains far from clear how it is intended to fund this scheme. This is not a minor point of detail; it is the key point, which needs to be addressed. In discussions in another place, there were two suggestions for how such a scheme could be funded. Broadly speaking, these can be characterised as either some form of cross-subsidy from ineligible customers, or some form of tax on profits. These are materially different approaches with very different implications, so it is right to seek to get to the bottom of what is being proposed.
A nationally mandated affordability scheme funded by cross-subsidy would be a tax on all water customers ineligible for help. This would be a very blunt instrument. We must not forget that a great many households that are ineligible for help with their water bills are nevertheless living on very modest incomes. It would be hard on them to argue that they should have to foot the bill without being properly engaged in the development of a locally appropriate scheme.
Alternatively, some have proposed that a national affordability scheme could be funded by some form of windfall tax on company profits. In a price-capped sector such as water, this would be an odd thing to do. The recent publication of water companies’ business plans has demonstrated how the price review can work to claw back benefits for customers. By taking account of lower financing costs, Ofwat estimates that the next price review could significantly reduce pressure on all customers’ bills by between £120 million and £750 million a year. Most water companies are proposing flat or declining customer bills from 2015 to 2020. This is in advance of Ofwat’s efficiency challenge. The spectre of a tax on profits would seriously undermine the regulatory stability on which this system is founded, unnerving investors and pushing up costs for all customers.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that it is vital that those who are struggling to pay get help. However, I believe that the current approach of regional affordability measures meets the realities of the sector. I therefore ask the noble Lord to consider withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, on this amendment, the noble Lord has misunderstood the nature of the proposition and downplayed the nature of the problem. He says that all companies will have social tariffs in a couple of years. I hope that that is true and that it means that the majority—even pretty well all—of the 2 million people who have affordability problems will have been helped by those schemes.
Lord De Mauley
I ought to interject. I did not say that all companies within a couple of years would have social tariffs. I said that the majority of water companies will have a social tariff in place by 2015-16. All incumbent water and sewerage companies have already developed packages to help customers with affordability problems. I went on to say that these include customer assistance funds, support tariffs, debt advice and water efficiency measures.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, that is even less reassuring than what I thought the Minister said in the first place.
The Minister’s criticisms fall into two categories. The first is that this is a top-down proposition. It is not: it is a framework for companies to introduce social tariffs and other measures that help affordability within their own structures, subject to some minimum standards. It is not an imposition from the centre of exactly how to do that. It is, however, a failsafe if they fail to do it. The reality is that both the regulator and the companies have hitherto been quite resistant to such propositions. The noble Lord is right to say that, strictly speaking, 2013 was the first point at which they could consider them, but that was because of the three-year delay since the 2010 Bill and, before the 2010 Bill, deep resistance within the industry to any such concept. Therefore, we have form here and it is not sensible to be complacent that in 18 months’ time the companies will have sorted all this out. I do not believe they will. That is why they need a push and a framework that sets minimum standards of eligibility and operation.
The Minister’s second criticism concerns the funding of this proposition. He said that it could be funded out of a tax on profits. I have not proposed a tax on profits and I think the noble Lord’s brief misunderstands what was said in another place about this. It is fairly evident to me—and my noble friend Lord Hanworth has pointed this out on many occasions—that actually most water companies could afford to be a bit more generous to their consumers in relation to profits, dividends and the tax that they currently pay, but that is not in any sense an advocacy of a windfall tax, so let us get that out of the way. The other funding proposal is by cross-subsidy. In one sense, social tariffs are by definition a cross-subsidy. Therefore, if the Minister hopes that all companies will come up with social tariffs or equivalent schemes, the objection is just as valid to his proposition as it is to mine. Therefore, there is no additional cross-subsidy compared with the preferred outcome of the Government on this.
Lord De Mauley
I thought I had made the point that we accepted that there will be some sort of cross-subsidy but that, in our view, it would be better if that was organised on a regional basis because one could take into account regional circumstances.
Lord Whitty
Yes, but my proposition allows for that. It gives a push to companies to develop their social tariff schemes on a regional basis provided they meet minimum standards. I am not precisely defining what the national affordability scheme should consist of; it is up to the Minister and his department to come up with the appropriate forms in discussion with the DWP and other government departments and agencies that work in this field with vulnerable and low-income households. I am not attempting to lay that down. Therefore, this is not a top-down approach. It allows for some diversity of delivery.
The Minister’s objections to this proposition really do not stand up on either count. I hear what he says. I suspect that the department is pretty immovable on this but it is certainly an issue to which I intend to return. For the moment, I withdraw my amendment.
Lord Whitty
“Provision of information to water companies
(1) The Water Industry Act 1991 is amended as follows.
(2) After section 207 (provision of false information) there is inserted—
“207A Provision of information to water companies: landlords
Where a water company does not have information about a resident in a property that is using water, if the occupants of that property are tenants, the landlord must, on request, provide to the water company contact details for the tenants.”.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, Amendment 120 relates to a different issue, that of debt—I think I am on the right one. I am on the right one but I do not have the right notes. However, I know what I am talking about.
Uncollected debt is a serious problem in the water industry. Every water company has a problem with uncollected debt. This arises from two groups: families such as those we were just talking about, who really cannot afford to pay their bills; and individuals and families—and sometimes businesses—who, frankly, will not pay their bills, or cannot be found and made to pay their bills. Both these issues need to be tackled. My previous amendment relates to the former; Amendments 120 and 122 relate to the latter, and the lack of activity on the part of some companies to rectify this position.
There is a disproportionate number of unpaid bills in the private rented sector. Even so, it is noticeable that there is a differential performance by water companies in collecting that debt which is not directly correlated to the level of private rented accommodation in their areas of operation; in other words, some are much better at it than others.
Lord Spicer (Con)
My Lords, I ask the noble Lord whether his amendment covers the reverse—a situation where a customer is owed money through, for example, a standing order. If at the end of the year a customer has not accumulated the same amount of expenses as the standing order, is that covered by the amendment?
Lord Whitty
My Lords, this is an issue, particularly for metered customers who have an estimated bill, for both companies and the residential sector. However, my amendment does not cover that. If the noble Lord wishes to bring forward an amendment, I am sure that the Government would look on it with favour.
Lord Spicer
The noble Lord’s amendment covers the question of debt being carried through the regulatory system of prices. Therefore, does it not affect the reverse: namely, credit?
Baroness Parminter
I rise to support the intention of Amendment 120, if not the intention of Amendment 122, which is grouped with it. The issue of bad debt and the implications of what that means for the affordability of all our bills is an important one.
At Second Reading I asked the Minister why the Government, unlike the Welsh Government, are not implementing the bad debt provisions in the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. If they were to do so, it would help company debt recovery and bring down household bills. The response I received was that the Government were wedded to the idea of a voluntary scheme, with a database that the water companies were helping to fund, which would be brought in, probably via regulations, in the next month or so. I may be wrong, but I suspect that, with only an intervening 10 days between Second Reading and now, that is the answer that we will get again and that the Government will not wish to support these amendments.
Therefore I ask the Government, if they are determined to stick with the voluntary approach, whether they will set a reasonable review period to evaluate whether or not the voluntary scheme for landlords is effective. All the evidence to date, from the voluntary schemes of companies such as Northumbrian Water and others, shows that they do not work. It seems to be a reasonable request, if the Government are not prepared to move ahead with a mandatory scheme, for them to give an indication to the House of a reasonable review period, so that if the scheme is found to be ineffective—as most of your Lordships believe it will be—the regulations can be changed to make it compulsory.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, in relation to Amendment 122, the information the Minister has given us and his response to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, indicate that Ofwat thinks it has the powers already. The power was given to the Secretary of State to stipulate that Ofwat can do that; it was always going to be the regulator who did it, under my amendments. If the regulator thinks that, because of the flexibility provided by the move to totex control—rather than everything being bound up in capital propositions—it can effectively both incentivise and penalise companies with poor debt collection records, then clearly Amendment 122 would not be needed. I think we need to return to this a couple of years down the line. Therefore, I will certainly not press Amendment 122.
On Amendment 120, however, it seems to me that the Government cannot have it both ways. Either there is a problem or there is not. They say that the evidence was weak and they hope that a voluntary approach will work. Certainly informally the companies say that this is a serious problem in the private rented sector. Most literature on the subject says there is a particular problem in the private rented sector and—if memory serves me right—the evidence to the committee chaired by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, said it was a real problem in the private rented sector. That was seven years ago, so we are not getting very far along the line.
I hope that the Government will at some point revisit the triggering of the powers that they already have to introduce secondary legislation. If they do that, then there is clearly no need for Amendment 120, but I hope they will check fairly quickly whether the voluntary registration in which they are engaged is yielding results, because they have the powers to act and I am still pretty bemused as to why they have not done so. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Moynihan
My Lords, briefly, I support the amendment proposed, although again I anticipate that the Minister is not going to be able to accept it. I would like to echo the comments made by my noble friend Lord Selborne about the briefing notes, which have been outstandingly helpful. In a latter edition, there was a very helpful road map which draws together some of these key issues. In the spirit of being helpful to my noble friend on the Front Bench, if the Minister is not in a position to accept the amendment on the face of the Bill, I hope that he will encourage his officials to give prominence to that road map on the website, and therefore in part meet the suggestion in my noble friend’s amendment.
My second point is that this is a matter of wider significance in Government. I hope that the Minister agrees that this is a subject that the Cabinet Office should look at carefully, not just in the context of water but in the wider context of the utilities. There is a necessity for clarity for those who do not spend many hours sitting on your Lordships’ Benches going through the detail of these Bills but who nevertheless have an equal, if not a greater, interest in the key elements of the legislation before Parliament.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on producing such an important amendment. I suspect that it is beyond the Minister’s pay grade to agree that, in accepting the amendment, we would at one and the same time get Parliament to rationalise the way in which we legislate, get Ministers to ensure regulators co-ordinate with each other and get departments to make their activities comprehensible to the public. Nevertheless, these are welcome ambitions. The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, added some rationalisation of the quangos as well. I am afraid that all this is indicative of the way in which we do business. From listening to the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, both at an earlier stage and today, I understand that this is not a new problem—I have noticed that the Water Industry Act 1991 is seven pages longer than the Bill we are considering.
However, to be serious about this, one of the great failings of Parliament has been the failure to produce consolidated legislation in any field. After 15 or 16 years in this House, I still fail to understand why Parliament has not devised a procedure for pulling together consolidation of Acts in all areas, so the noble Baroness’s amendment has wider implications. Whether the amendment should sit in the Bill I will leave to the Minister but, much more narrowly, the proposition that for each subject matter there should be a single website address which links to all the different bits of regulation, authorities and other government interventions, is very good. It is one which has been talked about in Whitehall but hardly delivered at all. The one point where Defra could probably take this amendment on board in the context of water is regarding that single website. I think practitioners, companies and consumers would be very pleased to see such a development. I congratulate the noble Baroness, but we will see what the Minister says.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her Amendment 122A, which would introduce a new statutory duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that the bodies involved in regulation of the water industry work to minimise bureaucracy. It would also require a definition of all the statutory bodies concerned with water to be published on a single website. I strongly support her in her desire to minimise bureaucracy, duplication of effort and waste. I am quite sure that I railed against it and for the consolidation of legislation when I was in opposition, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is enjoying doing today. These issues are not exclusive to this sector. Indeed, this Government have an energetic and far-reaching programme of reform designed to slash red tape wherever possible. I would argue that we have made some considerable progress with that.
My department has been one of the trailblazers in Whitehall in transforming our approach to regulation. For example, through our Smarter Environmental Regulation Review, in which I have been closely involved, we are attacking unnecessary complexity, inconsistency and duplication of environmental regulation. We are also rationalising environmental guidance and data reporting to make it easier to comply with legal obligations. My department has also carried out a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of all the regulations for which we are responsible. Through the Red Tape Challenge initiative, we have reviewed more than 1,200 regulations and by the end of this Parliament we expect to be delivering savings to business of more than £250 million each year. I hope that this provides my noble friend with some assurance that the Secretary of State already has bureaucracy squarely within his sights.
On the specific changes being made by the Bill, first and foremost I should emphasise that it does not create any new public bodies. The existing regulatory landscape remains unchanged in that regard. I am grateful for this opportunity to clarify the current framework for regulation in the water sector. In England, the water industry is regulated by three separate, independent bodies: Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency. Ofwat is the economic regulator responsible for ensuring that water and sewerage companies provide consumers with a good quality service and value for money. This includes setting price limits to ensure that customers receive a fair deal, while ensuring that the companies are able to attract low-cost investment in our essential services.
The Government commissioned an independent review of Ofwat and consumer representation in the water sector in 2011. Undertaken by experienced regulator David Gray, the review concluded that regulation in the water sector has worked well since privatisation and that major changes to the statutory and institutional framework were not required. The Ofwat review made a range of recommendations about the ways in which the regulator could reduce the regulatory burden it places on the industry. In response, Ofwat put in place a programme of internal reform and substantially reduced reporting and other burdens. It has since revised its approach to the price review—something we talked about earlier today—in order to ensure that companies focus on their customers’ priorities rather than looking to the regulator for guidance.
The Environment Agency regulates the impact of the water industry on our environment and promotes sustainable development. It regulates water abstraction as well as the treatment and discharge of wastewater back into the environment. It also helps water companies with their long-term water resource management and drought-planning functions. The Government have introduced a process whereby all public bodies are subject to triennial review to scrutinise how the Government deliver their objectives as effectively and efficiently as possible, achieving the best possible value for taxpayers and the public. The Environment Agency was reviewed under this process in 2013. The review looked at how it could work in leaner, smarter ways to enable and drive sustainable growth, making best use of the resources available to it.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate is responsible for ensuring that companies provide safe, wholesome drinking water that meets standards set down in law. Although not a regulatory body, the Consumer Council for Water also plays an important role by representing water and sewerage customers.
My noble friend referred to the market operator. In our debates on Tuesday, we clarified that this is neither a public body nor a regulator but a straightforward administrative entity that will be run by the industry for the industry, within the context of the regulations laid down by Ofwat. In fact, the market operator will serve to minimise bureaucracy by providing a single set of administrative systems for switching customers, which would otherwise need to be duplicated by every company operating in the market. In our debates on this matter on Tuesday my noble friend Lord Selborne noted that such bodies are a common feature of regulated utility industries.
I hope that I have gone some way to clarify the roles and responsibilities within the water sector. As with any sector, we are always looking for ways we can do things better and more efficiently. As I have said, we are active in challenging red tape and bureaucracy. We have the Red Tape Challenge process, which has already scrutinised all the regulations affecting the water industry. We have established the principles for economic regulation to guide the high-level institutional design of the regulatory frameworks by the Government. These reinforce the Government’s role in establishing the policy direction and appropriate guidance, leaving regulators to regulate independently. A new regulators’ code also takes effect in April that will apply to non-economic regulators such as the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate. It is the latest step in the Government’s drive to put businesses’ need for clarity, transparency and minimum bureaucracy at the heart of the regulatory system.
There are more examples of the provisions already in place to ensure the roles and responsibilities of regulators and other public bodies are clear, and that unnecessary bureaucratic burdens are identified and removed. One of the more relevant of these is the shared duty of the Secretary of State and Ofwat under Section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 to have regard to the principles of best regulatory practice. The Act already specifies that their respective regulatory activities should be undertaken in a way that is transparent, accountable, proportionate, consistent and targeted only at cases in which action is needed.
Lastly, I know that my noble friend is keen to see information about the various bodies concerned with water on a single website. I am therefore pleased to be able to confirm to her that all of Defra’s agencies will move across to the gov.uk website by the end of March this year. I also thank my noble friend Lord Moynihan for his welcome for the notes and the road map, which is indeed on the website. Although I fully concur with the spirit in which my noble friend’s amendment has been tabled, I ask her to withdraw it as it would effectively duplicate existing provisions.
Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will speak also to Amendment 124. These amendments deal with the water resource management plans. Water resource management plans, to colleagues who are not familiar with them, are the 25-year plans which each water company is required to produce, which then have to be approved by the Environment Agency. Those plans are fairly strategic. A lot of thought and work goes into them and there is a lot of consultation on them—but it is not always clear what they are used for thereafter. One presumes that the companies follow them for their own strategic decisions. To a limited extent Ofwat follows them in terms of the allowance for capital expenditure that is required in the price review. However, that covers only five years, and Ofwat, try as it might, cannot always see 25 years ahead as regards the changing capital and management requirements that will be needed.
The legislation on this, which is marginally changed by Clause 27, refers only to those plans being authorised,
“for the supply of water to consumers”,
which is of course the key issue. However, it is also important that the plans allow various regulatory, environmental, water quality and resilience requirements to be met. For example, water framework directive timetables and objectives and various ecological requirements have to be met. Following the Government’s inclusion of resilience as a primary duty of Ofwat, companies will undoubtedly have to meet requirements under the resilience criteria by a certain date. The amendment seeks to broaden what the plans deliver in public policy terms and therefore includes a requirement to meet environmental, quality and resilience standards.
Amendment 124 deals with an issue at which I hinted earlier—namely, that once the relevant plans are in place, the environmental regulator and the economic regulator need to pay attention to them. At the moment, following a change of direction or policy on the part of either Ofwat or the Environment Agency, decisions can be taken which do not accord with the plans. Theoretically, the relevant company then has to change the plans but probably does not do so until it has to revise them in five or six years’ time. Amendment 124 suggests that the Bill requires the relevant regulator to have regard to those plans when conducting price reviews, and that the Environment Agency must do so when conducting its regulatory and enforcement activity. If that is not done, the plans will gather dust on the shelf, will be referred to occasionally by the companies themselves but will be used rarely by those who are supposed to be in charge of regulating the sector.
I may exaggerate the position slightly, in that these are important documents and are regarded as such, but they are not quite given the importance that they deserve at either the company or the regulator end. These amendments seek to change that position. I beg to move.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for tabling these amendments. As noble Lords know, the noble Lord introduced the Water Act 2003 to Parliament, which made the planning processes a statutory requirement. We recognise that he seeks to ensure that the water resources management framework has greater bite and that the relevant plans will have the desired effect. I hope to show him that these plans are supported by other policy measures.
Water resources management plans must show how incumbent water companies intend to maintain a sustainable water supply demand balance over a period of at least 25 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said. They must do this within the framework of environmental protection that is set out in legislation. The noble Lord seems to be concerned that they may not have that necessary effect.
Within this context, new Section 37A allows the Secretary of State to issue directions to the incumbent water companies on any relevant matter for which they must plan. In addition to this, water resources management planning guidance sets out the expectations of government and the regulators in relation to the water environment—for example, that the options chosen must not lead to any deterioration in the status of the water environment.
The companies have their own statutory environmental duties. For example, when exercising their functions, companies must have regard to the environmental sites protected by the habitats regulations. They must also have regard to the Environment Agency’s relevant river basin management plans. In addition, both the Environment Agency and Natural England are statutory consultees on the draft plans, and the Environment Agency provides the Secretary of State with technical advice on the plans. Following consultation on the plans, the Secretary of State has power to direct an incumbent water company to change its plan if he is not satisfied—
Baroness Northover
I am sure that my noble friend shares everyone’s concern that the Government should take responsibility for ensuring that we do our very best to protect the environment. We need only to look at the challenges that we are facing at the moment to realise the importance of that, and it is in our common interest to do so. Here we have a semi-monopoly in an area that is vital to everyone. It is extremely important, therefore, that we balance all the necessary pressures. However, I am sure that my noble friend Lord De Mauley will be happy to talk further with my noble friend to explain the philosophy behind the Bill.
Coming back to my comments on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I was setting out the other areas that help support his ultimate aims, which were, as I understood them, that these 25-year plans should have positive environmental effects. I was showing how other measures, too, help underpin and strengthen those plans.
As regards Amendment 124, both Ofwat and the Environment Agency already have general duties regarding incumbent water companies’ maintenance of their water supply systems. Ofwat and the Environment Agency consult extensively with incumbent water companies through the water resources management planning processes. For the current water resources management planning round, joint government, Ofwat and Environment Agency guidance was issued to companies to help them prepare their plans. This guidance also set out the role of each regulator in the process.
The Environment Agency, as well as having responsibilities to protect and improve the environment, and promote sustainable development, also has duties such as those set out in Section 15 of the Water Resources Act 1991 to have particular regard to incumbent water companies’ duties. Ofwat has primary duties to ensure that the companies can both finance and properly carry out their functions. The current round of water resources planning and business planning processes have seen much closer joint working between Ofwat and the Environment Agency than may have occurred in the past. I hope that that point is helpful to the noble Lord. To ensure that the outcomes of the water resources management planning process are reflected through the price review process, the Government have made it clear that they expect Ofwat to use its role as a statutory consultee to identify at an early stage any proposals within a water resource management plan that would be inconsistent with its approach to the price determination process.
I have set out a number of these other areas in order to reassure the noble Lord about how the 25-year plan fits into this issue. I heard his concern about whether these provisions had any effect, but all are consistent with what he has been saying about trying to ensure that the water companies operate within a sustainable framework. I hope that my exposition has reassured him and that he will be happy to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am happy with those reassurances, in particular on underlining the need for the regulators to work more closely together and on the plans themselves. I think I am probably the only person alive—I am certainly the only person in this House—who has served on the boards of both Ofwat and the Environment Agency, albeit for only a very short time on the board of Ofwat. Although relations had thawed somewhat by that time, they are actually more constructive today, which is very important when looking at these long-term plans. I thank the noble Baroness for her reassurances.
In a sense, my amendments were provoked by new Section 37AA(2) which states that a direction about adjusting the plans or addressing them can be given,
“only where the Secretary of State considers it appropriate”,
in relation to the supply of water. However, there are other outcomes, and the noble Baroness has given me a reassurance that they will be dealt with elsewhere. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
My Lords, Amendment 134 and the other two amendments in this group deal with the issue of collective consumer rights. We are now into the consumer field. The water industry or service has pretty standard terms. Tariffs, whether by volume in the metered sector, or by rateable value in the non-metered sector, are pretty standard. Charging schemes and means of payment are also usually pretty standard. The nature of the service—the supply of water—is fairly straightforward. However, there are wider services in terms of advice, and emergency services when a customer is cut off or there are leakages. If something goes wrong on all these fronts, more than one consumer is likely to be affected.
The Bill introduces a degree of choice, but only in a relatively limited field. It leads to the possibility of switching, but in general people will be faced with standard terms and a standard service. Failure to provide the service or the misallocation of costs or mis-selling of prices is likely to affect a significant number of people. However, the consumer rights in this field and the procedures which are written into this and more general legislation are almost entirely written in terms of individuals.
Amendment 134 allows group complaints. If a whole village complains about the way its water has been cut off, the complaint would not need to be dealt with property by property. If a whole tranche of customers feels aggrieved by the prices they are being charged or the overcharging of prices, the amendment allows them all, either on an opt-in or opt-out basis, to bring complaints. The noble Lord, Lord Spicer, raised an example a few minutes ago in relation to the overcharging of people who have agreed to pay by direct debit in advance on a metered tariff.
The Government have recently introduced the Consumer Rights Bill in the other place. That legislation does something that I have been advocating for a considerable time—it introduces a degree of collective rights and collective redress generally across the consumer field. However, it only relates to abuse of competition law; it does not relate to mis-selling or unfair contract terms. But it is at least a start. I have argued on most Bills, whether on banking services, the energy industry or more generally, that we should have more collective provision in terms of enforcement rights. That should also be recognised in this legislation as regards water.
Amendments 134 and 135 provide the basis for dealing with such a complaint in the first instance and for redress to be granted on a collective basis. In other words, everybody who suffers from unfair treatment should be allowed to have equivalent redress, however many pounds that would be in compensation. Noble Lords will be aware of how this has got out of hand in another sector, where every PPI claim has had to be pursued by individuals or claims companies. We know the effects of that. Had the complainants woken up to this a lot earlier, they could have proposed a collective redress system. This is less likely to arise in water because it is a less complex industry, but, by definition, that means that where it does go wrong more people are likely to be involved. It is therefore important that this is written into the Bill.
My third amendment in this group deals with the Consumer Council for Water, whose role is written into various parts of the Bill and preceding legislation, but not in the context of being consulted on water charging systems. The 1991 Act preceded the creation of CCWater—which was created by the 2003 Act—and provided a number of consumer rights or protections. Most subsequent legislation has adjusted to the fact that CCWater now exists, but not in relation to the provisions on charging schemes. I am therefore suggesting, in Amendment 136, that CCW should be specifically consulted on charging schemes. The amendment would correct the omission.
It is important that we upgrade the ability of consumers in this field, which is still a regionally monopolistic one. Where there is monopoly, there is often abuse of consumers; the possibilities are there in this field, and sometimes they are a reality. I therefore think we should provide both for a role for CCWater and for consumers in general to be able to act on a collective basis. I beg to move.
Lord Spicer
My Lords, this is pretty standard stuff: first you legislate to weaken competition, which is the true protector of the consumer; then you legislate for consumer rights. That way lies socialism.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for spelling that out. I should explain to the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, that we are discussing a consumer redress scheme that is being proposed for the first time by this Government. I suspect that they did not have in mind that they were setting off down the road to socialism, but there we are.
I was suggesting that we need to make it explicit that there is collective ability here, because there are a lot of these schemes where there is no such collective ability. Certainly, the complaint goes first to the company. If there is a failure to resolve that at company level, there are systems involving CCWater for taking it further. Ultimately it could appear either through the new ADR system that the Government intend to develop, which is not yet a full ombudsman, or it could still end up in the courts. In the courts, it would still have to be an individual system.
I may not need to specify it in relation to the redress system, but there remains an issue in relation to potential collective claims. However, it was very helpful that the noble Baroness put on the record that under the scheme that is envisaged and being consulted on now, collective claims, collective complaints and collective redress could all apply; I am very grateful for that.
My second amendment concerns the role of CCWater. I should point out that we are not actually asking CCWater to be an adjudicator. The amendment is supported by CCWater, as I understand it. It is just that in this particular area of charging schemes, it is not written in as a consultee, whereas in other areas it is. It is true that in practice most companies—the noble Baroness says all; I will take her word for it—consult CCWater. It would have been quite useful for that to have been in the Bill. However, for the moment, I will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
“General duties with respect to water industry
In pursuit of its duty under section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 (general duties with respect to water industry) the Authority must take into account all information provided by section (Duties of undertakers to furnish the Secretary of State with information: annual review); and may consider such information when determining whether reopening a review of prices would further the consumer objective, set out in section 2(2A)(a) of the 1991 Act.”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, rather late in the day we are approaching a rather important issue, which concerns the powers of Ofwat to reopen a price review within five years if circumstances change or if information received from companies on their performance raises serious issues. Considering Ofwat’s role in a more dynamic market, this seems very important.
At present, we set the price maxima for five years. Companies can reopen the five-year settlement if circumstances change; for example, if they need to expend more capital than was allowed for in the price review, they can go back in. Thames Water went back in to see Ofwat about additional money for the super-sewer. It was knocked back by Ofwat but it had the right to ask. I imagine that companies do not do it more often because if the company reopens the price settlement, Ofwat has the right to reopen it as well. It is not a big feature but I am arguing that there should be an equivalence.
Ofwat does not have the power to initiate a reopening. It uses informal powers, and has been quite successful in negotiating with some companies over the current five-year period for reductions in prices because of changed circumstances—mainly reflecting the fact that the cost of capital was significantly less in practice than had been allowed for when the price review was concluded. In reality, as my noble friend Lord Hanworth has pointed out more than once, that allowance for capital has permitted a significant degree of profit enhancement and dividend enhancement by companies, and it is important that Ofwat keeps an eye on this.
Amendment 137 would allow Ofwat to reopen the settlement if it thought that the way in which it was operating was no long appropriate to the economic circumstances, or that the company’s own behaviour gave it cause to reopen it because the terms of the settlement were no longer appropriate. Amendment 146 would provide some background for this. It would require water undertakers to provide information to Ofwat on a regular, annual basis on their financial affairs. This could be dealt with separately from the other amendment, but we have grouped them together for these purposes and there is an interrelationship. If this is a different provision from the very detailed cost breakdown that Ofwat now requires from companies in advance of the price review every five years, and if we move to a more competitive market, the details of that form of regulation may not have to be so onerous over time.
This amendment looks at how companies perform during the price period. It will provide a big picture of how the financial operation as a whole is working out. As we have constantly reiterated, there is a problem in this industry of a vertically integrated regional monopoly, with higher levels of gearing, dividends—they have been at over 90% of income over the past few years—and rates of return on assets, in a relatively low-risk industry, paying relatively low levels of taxation. There are issues about the totality of the finances of the sector that a regulator ought to be free to query. It certainly should have information on it. Your Lordships may have heard a recent programme about this on the BBC’s “File on 4”. I did not agree with all of it, but it pointed out, for example, that some of these companies have at least seven levels of executive decisions before reaching the real decision-makers at ownership level. That applied to Thames Water in particular.
It is important that Ofwat can challenge the way in which these companies conduct their financial affairs. Amendment 146 would provide it with the information for doing so and Amendment 137 would allow it to reopen the price settlement if it saw that there were serious and endemic concerns about the way in which a company was operating, or about changes in the cost of capital or the level of corporate internal transfer pricing and so forth. It is important that Ofwat understands the total system and it is important that it has the ability to reopen the settlement. Of late, water companies have received fairly bad publicity because of their overall financial structure. At the moment, the regulatory system cannot really address that and does not have the information needed in order to address it. This is a gap in Ofwat’s powers that needs to be filled. I beg to move.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, we should look very carefully at this proposal for an increase in regulation. Water and sewerage are long-term matters and the great need is to have investment in resilience, with the right and proper regulatory framework. Ofwat seems to have got tougher in recent times. It is right to have a five-year timescale or we will not get the investment that is needed for resilience. The entrepreneurs involved will assume that if profits go up, perhaps because they have improved efficiency, they will immediately get a call from Ofwat reopening the five-year settlement, triggered perhaps by articles in tabloid newspapers—the sort of thing that will not be good for investment in this vital industry.
Lord De Mauley
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for his amendments. I shall deal with the amendments in reverse order, Amendment 146 followed by Amendment 137, as to some extent the latter builds on the former.
The new clause introduced by Amendment 146 would give water companies a duty to report every year to Ofwat and the Secretary of State about their performance, investment, tax, corporate structure and dividends. If obtaining these data is the noble Lord’s concern, I can confirm that all this information is already freely available in the public domain. The effect of the amendment would be simply to duplicate existing reporting requirements. The cost of the additional administrative burden on water companies would ultimately be met by customers. All companies—not just water companies—are already required to report on many of these matters in their annual reports and accounts. Any additional water sector-specific reporting requirements are a matter for the regulator, which is ardent in pursuing them.
The noble Lord raises some important issues about the way in which the sector is run, regulated and structured. I believe that the regulator is already taking action to address these issues. Let us be clear about the direction of regulation in the water sector. Ofwat is already taking vigorous action to improve standards of corporate governance across the sector. It is putting pressure on water companies to strengthen audit arrangements, board member appointments and governance generally. Ofwat recently published the outcome of a consultation on principles relating to board leadership, transparency and corporate governance. The principles set out clear standards for what the sector must do and set a clear timetable for their introduction across the sector. The response from water companies has been positive and I welcome that.
Ofwat has also launched a similar consultation relating to holding companies, seeking to apply basic principles to holding company boards across the sector on issues such as risk, transparency and long-term planning. I believe that the proposed annual review would place an additional burden on companies for very little gain, so I share the concerns about it expressed by my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Moynihan.
Amendment 137 builds on the clause which would be inserted by Amendment 146. It would place a new duty on Ofwat to take into account the proposed annual report by water companies to the Secretary of State. It would then give Ofwat a further power to consider this information when determining whether to reopen a price review. Ofwat already has the power to reopen a price review under the substantial beneficial effects clause of the water company’s licence or by making an interim determination. If a water company is profiting from factors outside its immediate management control that were not anticipated at the time of the price determination, Ofwat can reopen its five-year price settlement. So Ofwat has the powers necessary to revisit price determinations. However, given the importance of regulatory stability in keeping prices down for customers, it rightly utilises these with caution and considers carefully whether there would be benefit to customers.
We are at risk of talking about things as they were, not things as they are or will be. Ofwat is changing the way in which it regulates. It is seeking to change the culture of the water sector and to facilitate companies taking greater ownership of and accountability for delivery to customers, now and in the long term. Therefore, I am not persuaded that these further powers and duties are necessary and I hope that I can persuade the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I would not disagree with the Minister and the noble Baroness that Ofwat is toughening up its stance, including on issues of governance within the sector. I think that I am at one with the Government in hoping that we move away from the detailed, costs-checking form of regulation of the industry towards a more broad-based one which will be helped by a degree of competition within the industry.
The Minister is right that Ofwat has emergency or overriding powers. The fact of the matter is that it has not used them and would have to meet some fairly stringent criteria so to do.
The Minister rightly admonishes me for looking backwards rather than forwards, but we have to look backwards to the immediate past. We have had two five-year price reviews. At the beginning of those reviews, the cost of capital, which is a huge part of the actual expenditure of the industry, was seriously overestimated over a period of 10 years, and prices set accordingly. During that period, the capital value of water companies went up substantially; the dividend payments went up substantially and a number of them were taken over, sometimes two or three times. Somebody made a significant amount of money out of that; it was not because of the increased efficiency of the industry, although the industry did make some efficiencies. It was a fortuitousness similar to when Ofwat, with what it thought was the best information at the time, set the allowance for capital; that allowed a much bigger profit than one had assumed at that time.
Under its existing powers, Ofwat did not judge, nor did successive Secretaries of State seek to nudge them to intervene. If the public knew that the system of regulation did not allow them to do so, they would be pretty appalled. I therefore think we need to do something. The Minister might not like my particular proposals—and they certainly are not perfect—but Ofwat needs to know what the unforeseen financial consequences are of the companies’ operations. It needs to have some ability to intervene on behalf of consumers—business as well as individual consumers—if it thinks that something has gone seriously wrong. At the moment, those powers are not sufficient.
I would like to see a measure like this on the statute book; I would not envisage that Ofwat would very often use it, but the experience of the past 10 years—it may well be exactly the opposite experience in the next 10 years as far as the cost of capital is concerned—leads me to think that there is a gap somewhere in Ofwat’s powers. We need to address that somewhere in this Bill and I am sorry that the Minister is not prepared to take it away and look at it in this context. I will withdraw the amendment, but this is something to which we might need to return in a slightly different form. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will not detain the Committee too long on this one. When I saw this provision, it jumped out of the page at me because the Bill seems to delete the requirement to provide mapping of flood vulnerability. Having now checked the impact assessment and checked with the Environment Agency, I see that it is clear that the particular clause is not inappropriate in the circumstances, but I thought I would use this opportunity to ask the Minister to tell us, perhaps in writing, what maps are now statutorily required for flood risks.
This issue will arise significantly when we come to discuss, as we will do in the next day of Committee, Flood Re and the properties that are to be covered by that system. The issue also arises in terms of resilience and, for other bodies, in terms of planning decisions, as well as in issues for the insurance industry that go wider than the Flood Re system. While the section that is to be deleted may be redundant, it is important that we ensure that the resources that the Government give the Environment Agency and other bodies are sufficient to provide detailed, robust and accessible maps defining the flood risk around the country.
There is some urgency to the issue because I know that there are, to put it neutrally, constraints on the Environment Agency’s resources in this area. The agency is, probably rightly, trying to focus what resources it has on front-line services. However, if you focus on front-line services in a diminishing budget, you inevitably cut backroom services, some of which are in this area of mapping and prediction—which is done by the Environment Agency but often in conjunction with the Met Office—of where flood risk is likely to arise in future. As I said, I do not expect a detailed argument from tonight’s discussion, but I would like, before we proceed further with the Bill, an indication of what mapping is required and what resources are there to carry it out. I beg to move.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, briefly, I support my noble friend Lord Whitty in his challenge to the Government and, to some extent, the Environment Agency. At the moment, my home down in Dorset is technically under a flood alert. I can look at maps on the Environment Agency’s website and the detailed data on river levels at the station near to my home which, during this sort of scenario, are updated every few hours. In conjunction with looking at the Met Office website—because I am an experienced watcher of these things—I can predict pretty accurately whether we will flood. I am willing to put on record that I do not think we will flood over the next 24 hours. We put our floodgates up—some of them, but not all of them—but that is mostly because we could not be bothered to take them down from the last time.
This whole business is obviously very worrying for householders. I pay tribute to the Environment Agency for making all the data available so that people like me can, assuming we are online and confident enough to use those tools, make that judgment. However, it is really important that those resources are sustained and, as technology and resource allows, are improved as more and more householders, given climate change, worry more and more about their resilience for flooding.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, when I heard the earlier debate about consolidation and clarifying legislation, I thought that this was a case in point. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, rightly spotted that, too. This amendment allows me to put something on record. The issue is about duplicate records. Our plan is to repeal Section 195 on the basis that a single record is all that is required. The Environment Agency is not aware of any request having been made for the inspection of the duplicate record required by Section 195. Of course, it will continue to maintain its primary and comprehensive sets of data, including maps. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that public access to this information can be obtained under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, or for that matter under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is a small efficiency and cost saving to the Environment Agency, without detriment to necessary data collection, maintenance or public access. I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, with details of the data held by the Environment Agency. On that basis, I hope he will be happy to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
I thank the noble Baroness for that and her determination to write to me setting it out. The importance of this is that these maps are there but will change. They will change as a result of development activities, because of climate change and our experience of floods that are supposed to happen once in every 200 years in the Somerset Levels—to return to that topic—but have happened in two years. It is vital that mapping resources are there and accessible to everybody, as they clearly already are to my noble friend Lord Knight. Not everybody has that level of accessibility. We need it, and we need to be assured that the resources can be updated and improved as information changes.
I thank the noble Baroness and the Minister for their patience this afternoon. We will meet again shortly, dealing with floods, in particular. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Winter Floods
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, particularly the announcement on Bellwin, which will be a great relief to the authorities and communities affected. I also thank him for his support for the people who are struggling to cope, in Somerset in particular, with the extraordinary and devastating events in that part of our country.
As noble Lords know, until two years ago I was a member of the board of the Environment Agency. I know the area; I live about 20 miles away. It is an extraordinarily complex system to manage. When an emergency occurs, it is the Environment Agency, the emergency services and local people who act together to try to minimise the effect, but it is a colossal effect and all our support should go out to the farms, families and villages that are in such serious difficulty.
Of course, as the noble Lord said, the problems are not just in Somerset. As it happens, while your Lordships were amusing yourselves with the European Union (Referendum) Bill last Friday, I was on the train to Plymouth, and a beautiful railway line it is—or was. It had been known that the line was vulnerable. There is now a serious problem as to how we restore communications with the far south-west of our country.
While it is important to recognise the efforts of the emergency services, it is also important to learn lessons. It appears that central government were taken a little by surprise on this occasion. It is an unusual event and therefore may not be in the normal contingency plans of central government. Nevertheless, the expectation of the population—certainly the expectation of the people of Somerset and other affected areas—was that the response would have been quicker than it was. In Questions, the noble Lord, Lord King, said that the level of pumping is the highest ever. It undoubtedly is. However, getting the pumps in was quite difficult, as the standing pumps were overwhelmed by the event. Whoever does it, the response must start a lot earlier than it did on this occasion.
Obviously there are issues behind this. The noble Lord has quoted some figures for expenditure on flood defences. The fact is that when the Government came in, for the first year they cut expenditure on flood defences—via the Environment Agency and in total—by £100 million. They have now restored some of that cut, but it has led to a hiatus. I would like the Minister to explain whether concentrating the resources of the Environment Agency on front-line activity at the moment—rightly so—has hit its ability to prioritise and to put in place a strategy for flood defences in the medium term. I think that there are serious concerns in that respect. Despite the Government’s claims, the resources available to the Environment Agency have not been made up by the funding from elsewhere—the £148 million to which the Government referred—as not all of it has been delivered, some of it is double-counted, and it is mainly from other public authorities. Therefore, there is an issue of public expenditure as well.
We need more priority given to flood defences of all sorts. By that I do not mean just pouring concrete, but catchment management. If anything, the Somerset Levels show very clearly how important catchment management is. It is not only a question of dredging; in my view, dredging will make relatively little impact, as the water must go somewhere. Dredging may be part of a solution, but it transfers the water somewhere else that may be more vulnerable, with more businesses and people involved. The catchment as a whole needs looking at, from the top of the hills, where there has been deforestation and inappropriate land use, right down through the streams into the sea. In an area that is below sea water, with a tidal river, these problems are particularly difficult. It requires a long-term plan and it is not yet entirely clear that we have a long-term plan.
I welcome the Bellwin scheme and the efforts that are now being made to deal with the immediate situation. However, the immediate situation includes a lot of people who are in ancillary distress. It would be helpful if the Minister could indicate, for example, when he expects the electricity supply to be restored to all of those who have been hit. When does he expect the restoration of the rail services west of Exeter beyond Dawlish? Six weeks sounds a bit optimistic, I must say. We must recognise that while we are rightly worried about the hundreds of people affected in the Somerset Levels, some 1.3 million people are cut off from their main means of communication to Plymouth and Cornwall—an area that is greatly lacking in communications in the first place. I hope that we can have some urgency on that. It may require more drastic changes to the railways in that area. There is serious damage in Dawlish itself, which is an emergency equal to that in Somerset.
This has happened before. After the 2007 floods, the previous Government commissioned a report from Sir Michael Pitt. He made a lot of recommendations, some of which have been implemented. However, the Government have stopped producing progress reports on half of them. I would like the Minister to indicate when we will go back to those recommendations or any modification of them. In particular, could he refer to the recommendations relating to reducing the risk of flooding and the 10 recommendations, not yet acted on, concerning being rescued and cared for during an emergency?
There is also a superstructure issue. We have had 20-odd meetings of COBRA. However, Sir Michael Pitt proposed a national resilience forum. Although it is not necessary to have a Cabinet committee telling the Prime Minister how to run the Government, a national resilience forum is a good idea. It was being discussed towards the end of the previous Government. We would like to see progress in relation to that.
In immediate terms, I return to the issue of the long-term plan for the Somerset Levels. A number of assertions have been made, or have reportedly been made. However, the area needs to know what its future is. This emergency has hit a relatively poor part of the country pretty hard. Changes may be needed. The area is also one of great beauty and of significant economic importance to the agricultural and tourist sectors in that area. We must know how quickly a clear, long-term plan can be put in place.
I thank the Minister for the Statement. As the Prime Minister is now in charge of these issues, I suspect that he could do without the interruption to the Water Bill. I was to some extent expecting the Leader of the House to take this Statement. Nevertheless I welcome the contribution of the Minister and would like to hear his answers.