Lord Deben (Con)

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments, particularly those placed before us by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. To the last speaker I have to say that there is a fundamental difference between chairing a committee to produce a report and running a business, which is what the water company has to be. She is absolutely right, however, that this Bill does not properly address the fundamental problem that we have two regulators and they have failed to produce a co-ordinated programme for the water industry. I speak as somebody who knows a bit about it because, until 10 or 11 years ago, I was chairman of a water-only water company—so do not blame me about sewage as I never had anything to do with that. However, I do therefore know a bit about water companies. It was always impossible to meet the requirements of both the Environment Agency and Ofwat. Ofwat was under pressure from the Government to keep bills down and the Environment Agency, perfectly rightly, was saying that we should do more for the environment. As chairman of a water-only company, I was interested in doing something about the pollution of the water sources right from the beginning instead of having to clean them up, which is a very stupid way of dealing with it. Ofwat, however, would never allow one to do those things, whereas the Environment Agency was much more sympathetic.