Water Industry (Specified Infrastructure Projects) (English Undertakers) (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, this is my first opportunity in the House to congratulate the Minister on his appointment and I do so very warmly. I welcome these regulations, but I will ask two questions and raise one wider concern about them. First, as the Minister said, the Thames tideway tunnel—which predates these regulations—is the model on which the new system is based. Will the Minister update the House on what is happening with the tunnel? The record of the structuring and letting of the contract for it was a success. It got a lower cost of capital because it was a self-contained project with the risks clearly enumerated, separating it from Thames Water.

My second question is about the Abingdon reservoir, to which the Minister referred. As noble Lords will be aware, this not only is the first reservoir that has been proposed in the last generation but has a long history of great controversy. In particular, when it was last proposed 20 years ago, Ofwat essentially—if I can mix my metaphors—pulled the plug on it by ruling that it did not meet its own planning requirements for water supply. All the work that had gone in to preparing the case for the reservoir therefore came to nought. What is Ofwat’s attitude to the new proposal for the Abingdon reservoir? Is it likely to go ahead?

Speaking as a former chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, which did a lot of work on water resilience, I have one broader comment to make. The Minister did not refer to the commission’s 2018 report, Preparing for a Drier Future, which set out the background to these wider plans. It called on the Government to put in place additional supply and demand reduction measures, equivalent to at least 4,000 million litres a day, and to have plans in place by the end of 2019—last year—for at least 1,300 million litres a day provided through a national natural water network and additional supply infrastructure, as well as measures to halve leakages and progressing further with compulsory metering, to which the Minister referred. How far have the Government gone towards meeting the target of at least 1,300 million litres a day of additional supply being commissioned through a natural water network and additional supply infrastructure? If we have not yet got those proposals sufficiently in place, what measures will the Government take to meet that target, over and above the ones that the Minister has just announced?