Mr. Jerry Grant:

Broadly speaking, it is going to take €1 billion to solve the drinking water issues, some of which the EU has drawn attention to and started proceedings on, and approximately €1.25 billion for wastewater. That is why those figures are represented in our plan to 2021. We hold out the prospect that if we do everything we have committed to do by 2021, we would be broadly compliant on those issues on which we are currently being challenged by Europe. On Deputy Cowen's query on metering, we have concluded and wound up the contracts at 884,000 meters out of an initial target of 1.05 million and, as stated previously, have delivered 58% meter coverage. Of the balance, many of those could not be found and were complex. That speaks to the point that any further metering gets progressively more difficult and no country can have 100% metering. There always is a default position where there are unmetered properties. We could address that over time.

On district metering specifically, it is something we will have established right across the network as part of the leakage management programme. A good deal has been done already. Over the period from 2000 to 2010, approximately €130 million was spent on district meter establishment. These are meters into defined areas of roughly 1,500 premises. It is very important that I make the point that these do not find leakage on premises. It is not possible from district meters to conclude anything about individual premises. There are typically approximately 1,500 premises within a district meter area. It gives a very good idea of leakage as a whole. Follow-up operational activity may well find high usage in a particular premises or a leak on a premises but that is the ad hocprocess of going around. One has to have a default position. If there was a charging regime for those, it would have to be a default position, except in those cases where, through the normal work of leak detection, one finds somebody using a lot of water and then can follow up on it. There is a process for that already.