Member

I turn now to Amendment 8 in my name, which is in the same group but on a rather different subject. Along with failing to notice the financial jiggery-pokery, the other major failing in the arrangements was the extent to which—so long as water was plentiful, clean and cheap—environmental issues and pollution took a distant back seat in the regulation of the water industry. The lesson here is that civil society, not the regulator, repeatedly raised—sometimes in co-operation with the media—the issue of river and beach pollution. I noticed on Monday’s news that local campaigners—again, not the regulator—have now brought to public attention that developers have apparently been discharging sewage from construction projects directly into the Thames. The regulator’s response? That it is not a matter for them.