Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. As all Members have said, there's been a lot of media coverage recently about water quality and sewage discharges into waterways, and, as Alun pointed out in his submission, the UK Government has legislated to set targets for water companies in England to reduce these. But there is a widespread perception that this is the main cause of poor water quality, but, actually, as most people have acknowledged in the Chamber today, numerous factors contribute to poor water quality, including agricultural pollution, private drainage misconnections, septic tank overflows and a variety of other issues.

I've recently met with—in fact, it was Monday evening that I met with—Ofwat, and they've told me that 35 water bodies have been identified where intermittent sewage discharges are partially contributing to the reason for not achieving good ecological status under the Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) (England and Wales) Regulations 2017, and they are also failing for other reasons. So, Ofwat is going to be conducting a review of how many of the combined sewage outlets were discharged, and, if so, were they discharged in combination with a storm event or another river spate event and, if so, why, and, if not, why not. So, it will be very interesting to see the outcome of Ofwat's review of whether or not water companies are using correctly the powers that they have in order to use the discharge properly. And just to remind people that the storm overflows at waste water treatment works—there are a lot of acronyms in this, so I'm trying to say them all out—perform an essential role to prevent the works from becoming overwhelmed during periods of heavy rain, which would have the effect of the sewage backing up into domestic properties. So, let's just be clear how important it is that that doesn't happen and the public health issues that that would then incur.

So, Welsh Water does have—. We have two water companies in Wales, just to be clear, and both of them have all of the rights and responsibilities under our environment Act and our future generations Act, some of which is being duplicated in England. But also, some of the—. Alun directly asked me why we didn't go in with the English legislation, and the answer is because we have a much more holistic understanding of what's causing spates in rivers, including some of the catchment area issues, and we're very focused on having as much natural flood protection and natural sewage protection as possible, and not just developing concrete channels to channel the water away towards the sea and so on. So, I'm very keen that we develop solutions that suit the ecology and particular river circumstances in Wales. 

But, just to be clear, Dŵr Cymru obviously has the vast majority of the infrastructure in Wales, and they've installed event duration monitoring on 99 per cent of their storm overflow assets and the remainder will have them installed by the end of this year, by next year. All relevant data is available on the website, so you can see exactly what's happened with those. They are required to provide a summary of spill data from their monitors to NRW on an annual basis, and they provide real-time storm overflow alerts all year around at key bathing sites. So, already, in conjunction with Surfers Against Sewage, Dŵr Cymru allows registered users, through the Surfers Against Sewage safer seas campaign, to get real-time information on when a storm overflow begins to operate, how long it operates for and when it stops. So, anyone who wants to go bathing in the rivers can pick that information up, and it is really useful to have that if you're into wild water swimming, and I should declare an interest and say I definitely am into that. So, I have an acute understanding of the need to understand what exactly is happening. 

And just to be clear, that should not happen unless the river is in spate, so in the middle of a big storm like a few of the ones we've had over the last few weeks. And that river would not be suitable for swimming in if it was in spate. You would not want to see people trying to go wild water swimming in a river that's in spate, that's coming up above its banks and so on. So, those are the circumstances, and only then should the storm overflows be being used. So, that's what the Ofwat investigation is going to be looking at to see whether those two things are in conjunction.

We also work closely with NRW to monitor and, where necessary, improve water quality of rivers across Wales. Dirprwy Lywydd, we have a very large number of things that we're doing, which I will run over my time if I try to read out, but included in them are the nutrient management boards that we have set up for various rivers, the SAC rivers, in Wales. We do have a piece of work going on with NRW to understand exactly how many incidents they attend—they attend the great majority of pollution incidents—how much the unit cost for that is, and what we can do to improve that so that all incidents reported by the public are attended. But, even when attending and an instant sample has been taken, it has not always been possible to identify the offender of the pollution incident, even where we've got relevant samples collected immediately. So, it is important to make sure that we have a whole series of measures in place to make sure that pollution incidents don't occur in the first place, as well as that we have sewers that are fit for purpose.

The other thing to say is that we have a large number of other things that we're looking to do. So, I know that the Conservatives are very keen to see this water quality done, and I welcome that, but of course one of the things that we're doing is including our underwater drainage system work in this, where we're getting all our new housing developments to put in that underwater drainage. The whole purpose of that is to prevent those sewers from overflowing back into the sewers that were built in Victorian times and not built for the numbers of houses that are on them. So, again, as my colleague Lee Waters said a number of times earlier in questions, you can't separate these things out. We have a climate emergency, it is causing extreme weather events, the extreme weather events need to be coped with inside our sewage system, inside our housing developments, inside our commercial developments, and at the waste water treatment works.

So, Alun, I'm going to be bringing forward legislation later on. I'm very happy to work with you on it to make sure that we do legislate for our sustainable drainage and waste water management systems and that we put those drainage and waste water management plans and we put those on a statutory footing. I absolutely intend to do that during this Senedd term. But the issue is that we have to do that inside the holistic framework that we need to control both pollution incidents and sewage outflow incidents along our rivers, to make sure that we capture both of those, and that—forgive the terrible cliché—upstream of that, inside the housing and commercial developments that we put in place, we have the right drainage and sewage solutions in place for those in the first place, so we're not overloading the system in the first place. Diolch.