Mr. Chris Jones:

I will share our experience of water conservation in Wales. As the Senator may know from the material that we have submitted, Welsh Water is slightly unusual because it is a private and non-shareholder company. Our corporate purpose is to further the interests of our customers and water conservation plays a key role. We work in partnership with our customers to conserve water. One of the reasons that we set our company up in this way 16 years ago was because we thought we would get better buy-in and support from our customers. We hoped they would see that our purpose was fully aligned with theirs and it is part of our mission to encourage our customers to understand the value of water and the role that they can play in conserving water.

As we mentioned in our material, all children in Wales at key stage two will have a day's education with Welsh Water on one of our sites. The excursion is very popular with teachers. It is an opportunity for children to visit one of our education centres and learn the important skill of conserving water. We have a mocked-up African village where children can get a sense of what it is like to live in a Third World country where one must walk to a river to collect water and then bring it back to the village. We encourage our customers to help us and to value and preserve our water resources.

In response to the second part of the Senator's question, none of our activities would be powerful if we were not seen to do everything that we can to conserve water. The terminology that we tend to use is "leakage". We analyse how much water we lose through our supply system. It has been a major effort of focus for our company for the past couple of decades. I am pleased to say that leakage has never been better under control than it is today. Our leakage level is around 40% of where it was a couple of decades ago. We have substantially reduced it. Key to our success, as Mr. Millican has referred to, is control of the network. We have multiple metering points in the network and a smart network to analyse all the data in real time. We have computer algorithms that constantly look out for unexplained changes, fluctuations or variations in flows through the network as they suggest a leak has opened up. We have further to go with this technology but we are looking at reducing leakage by 4% or 5% over this period. We have made huge strides so we can legitimately talk to our customers about ways that they can help us and help the environment by conserving water.