Independent Water Commission

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I would just say to my noble friend that we have discussed this on a number of occasions, including with officials in the department. I am sure that we will continue to discuss it.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister have the White Paper consider, and perhaps consider for the Bill, the idea of setting minimum annual investment requirements? I do not know much about Ofwat, but I know a bit about Ofgem. During the time when I was on a power company board, our annual bids to spend our money on improving our network were cut down by an average of about £1 billion a year. So long as the regulators feel that they are under pressure to keep costs to the consumer down, that is what will happen. It seems to me that Parliament and the Government need to take responsibility for setting a requirement on replacing the crumbling infrastructure. That should be at least discussed in the White Paper, and I hope it will find a place in the Bill.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an extremely good point. Part of the reason why we have got into this mess is the focus on keeping bills low. People do not want to pay high bills, but if you are constantly putting pressure on that and not investing in the infrastructure, that is when you end up with a lot of these problems. That is why in PR24 we gave the most investment ever—to try to turn around some of the problems. The noble Lord makes a good point about what we need to look at going forward, in order to ensure that we do not have these sorts of problems in the future. He is absolutely right that this needs to be part of what we look at following the White Paper. I would be very happy if he has any ideas to share with me following his experience with Ofgem. That would be very interesting.