Found: entitled Waging War (Parliament’s Role and Responsibility) Bill ( Bill 34), was adopted by Michael Meacher

20 years ago my predecessor Michael Meacher, as then Environment Secretary took to the waters at Blackpool. Celebrating the improvement under a @uklabour government. Today warnings issued for 83 beaches across the country. It’s a disgrace. 🌊#sewagescandal Things must change. https://t.co/ApoK4uVjuv https://t.co/STXoFUshnQ

<p>Well, Chair, thanks to Jack Sargeant for those further questions, and I want to congratulate him particularly on the work that he has done on the floor of the Senedd, and through the Petitions Committee, on this issue. If there's further work to be done by the committee, I will try and find a copy for the committee of a report that I wrote with Jane Davidson, a former colleague of ours, in 1995. So, that is nearly 30 years ago. It was called 'Token Gesture?', and it was an inquiry into the very early stages of prepayment meters, which, at that stage, were also being introduced in the water industry. And Dŵr Cymru, as it was at the time, were a leading advocate of the use of prepayment or trickle-flow meters, as they were called. If you didn't pay your water bill, your water got cut off, and you were to be offered a trickle of water, sufficient to allow you to fill a kettle in about an hour. It was an absolute disgrace, and we worked very hard with Michael Meacher, the Minister responsible for water policy in the 1997 Labour Government, and that's how you are not disconnected from water if you run into problems with your water bill. So, there's a long history in Wales of campaigning on these issues, and it's great to see it continuing today.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I did raise prepayment meters with the Prime Minister in the first meeting I had with him, very shortly after his appointment, and I do want to acknowledge the fact that I think those conversations have had some impact on the actions we saw in the spring statement. So, I think he did take those points seriously, and I think we can continue to try and make the case with the UK Government.</p>
<p>There are things we can do in Wales, and, as Jack said, Chair, both Mick Antoniw and Jane Hutt have been particularly engaged on this issue: Mick, in dealing with the problems in the justice system—there was a Welsh court involved in mass issuing of warrants that allowed companies to break into people's houses; that is now at an end—and Jane has met absolutely regularly with the companies themselves, and with Ofgem. Her next meeting with Ofgem is on the twenty-seventh of this month, the start of next week.</p>
<p>What I want to focus on is what I think is the scourge of self-disconnection, the notion that people choose to go without electricity or gas in order to help them with the way they deal with their week. If a company cuts somebody off, if a company makes the decision to disconnect you, they have to report that, and they have to include that in their annual report. I believe they should have to report self-disconnection figures in exactly the same way. One of the reasons why all of this has not received the public attention it has is that it's a problem that doesn't appear in those public ways; it's suppressed. It's the privatisation of poverty into the lives of individuals, rather than it being a public policy responsibility of the suppliers. We need companies to report publicly and regularly on the number of people who find themselves unable to pay for those lifeline supplies through prepayment meters. And I think if those figures were regularly in the public domain there would be a level of attention on it that would shift the policy dial on this issue, and that's one, alongside a series of other issues, that the Minister for Social Justice is pursuing in those conversations. Some companies have made some offers about better publication of that data. They have it. They know what it is. They should put it in the public domain.&nbsp;</p>