Water White Paper Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Tony Baldry
Main Page: Tony Baldry (Conservative - Banbury)Department Debates - View all Tony Baldry's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Mr Speaker
Order. What are required now are short questions and short answers, because we must move on. That is the way it has to be done.
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
Birmingham has a greater length of canals than Venice, and the country as a whole has an extensive canal network, so what assessment has my hon. Friend made of its potential to link those parts of the country with above-average rainfall with those parts that need more water?
Richard Benyon
I have looked very carefully at that issue, and as my hon. Friend will know we are in the process of a very exciting change in how we manage our waterways, in transferring British Waterways to the charitable sector. There remains the opportunity to use our canals to move water around, but the sad truth is that water is an extremely heavy substance, and it is very carbon-intensive to move it very far. The economic assessments that I have seen state that to move water much more than 30 miles is uneconomic, but through a range of different measures we start to see that, with interconnectors, we can incentivise water companies to use a variety of means to move water from neighbouring areas to theirs. Then, we can start moving a trickle of water from areas of high rainfall to areas of low rainfall.