Well, Llywydd, I believe that the position may have moved ahead a little today. I am relying simply on a newspaper report of the end of this morning. The Guardian is reporting that the Environment Agency has turned down the Thames Water plan and instructed it to return to the drawing board and to come forward with a better plan, including the plan to extract water from Wales via the River Severn. The Guardian reports that the Environment Agency has told Thames Water that it is not convinced that this is a viable solution and that it will not be prepared to endorse the plan that Thames Water has advanced so far. And it's for the many reasons that the leader of Plaid Cymru set out in his question. Thames Water, instead of producing a plan that relied on remarkable ideas, it seemed to me, extracting water from the Thames itself and replacing it with sewage-polluted water, and taking water from Lake Vyrnwy, that it should do two things. First of all, it should focus on reducing demand for water. We have, in the United Kingdom, some of the highest daily usages of water per head of the population of anywhere. We use on average 141 litres per day. In Belgium, a country just across the channel, the average is 95 litres a day. So, the first thing that Thames Water should be doing is to come forward with credible plans to reduce the use of water, a precious resource that we don't regard preciously enough. And then, as the Environment Agency is being reported as saying, it needs to fix the leaks in its own system—leaks which, if they were to be fixed, would almost match entirely its plan for extracting water out of the Severn and backfilling that through drawing water out of Welsh resources. It looks as though some outbreak of sense may have occurred, and that would be very welcome.

As to what would have happened had the plan gone ahead, then, of course, there are rights for Welsh Ministers in all of this—rights to intervene, rights in relation to the approval of any plan, and Welsh Ministers here would have exercised those rights very much with the points that the leader of Plaid Cymru has made in mind.