Independent Water Commission

Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, we have 16 minutes, and I am sure that we can all get in. Let us hear from these Benches and then the Opposition Benches.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former water company director—one involved in clean water only, not wastewater. In the speech made on Monday by the Secretary of State, he made it clear as a priority that the customer would come first in all these considerations. The customer matters more than everybody else in terms of the environmental effects and, in particular, in the pricing of this utility. There is a price review going on. Can the Minister confirm that the role of the ombudsman, certainly in the pricing review, will give priority to pricing because of the incredible increases recently in water bills? In particular, will standing charges be looked at thoroughly because, in many cases of low consumption, the standing charge has become an enormous impediment in an awful lot of people’s water bills?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My right honourable friend said in his speech down the other end that the new regulator

“will stand firmly on the side of customers, investors and the environment and prevent the abuses of the past”.

That basically demonstrates that we need to look at the big picture about what went wrong in the past and what we need to do to rectify it in the future. I am sure that we can look at the noble Lord’s suggestions as we move forward to ensure that we have regulation and pricing that are fit for purpose.