6. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Water Quality

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:06 pm on 15 November 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:06, 15 November 2022

Thank you, Jane. We have discussions with Dŵr Cymru, and indeed Hafren Dyfrdwy, all the time. We have a very close working relationship with NRW and our water authorities, for obvious reasons, and as I was just saying in response to John, we're currently conducting a number of reviews about who has what responsibility to do what in this area. We've got a co-operation agreement investigation going on, and we've got three others also being looked at, to make sure that the regulation that we have in place is effective and efficient, and I think it probably is obvious. You don't have four reviews if something is effective and efficient, and clearly it isn't, so we hope that the reviews will give us a place to hang our hat in terms of reform of that system.

I also speak to Ofwat and the UK Government very regularly about this. How the water companies remunerate their employees is not a matter for the Welsh Government. What is a matter for us is to make sure that Ofwat, under direction from the UK Government as well as ourselves, puts in place a financial plan that allows those companies to have the right staff in the right place, including enforcement staff, but much more importantly to have the right kind of capital investment to correct the kinds of problems that we've got that we've just been discussing in the whole of this event, particularly the combined storm overflows and the misconnection of housing estates, and indeed, actually, commercial premises as well, although nobody has mentioned that, because those are really big issues. And it is absolutely fundamental, particularly for Dŵr Cymru, that that financial plan allows a not-for-profit company, because the previous plan did not; it disadvantaged them because they weren't paying dividends to shareholders. So, we really need that to be taken on board, and we do have those conversations very frequently.