Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will lift the restrictions on universal metering outside water stressed areas.

While good progress has been made in water efficiency policy development, we had to delay publication of the response to the 2019 public consultation on Water conservation: measures to reduce personal water use to prioritise work on the response to covid-19. Defra plans to publish the consultation response, which will set out our ambition and a package of policies to reduce household water consumption, in summer 2021.