Mr. Douglas Millican:

On the issue of charges relative to consumption, we do not have any evidence of what we would call excessive consumption. To a large extent that is borne out of the fact that we are in business to serve our customers and if our customers need to use water for a particular purpose, we are there to support them and to supply them. We sent out many messages on encouraging efficient use of water but, fundamentally, we are there to serve what our customers need.

On the subject of regulation, regulation plays a key role in the success of the system in Scotland, that is, water quality regulation, environmental protection regulation and economic regulation. There is no doubt that we would not have achieved what we have achieved to date without effective, robust regulation.

On septic tank numbers, I cannot quote precise numbers for the Deputy but we would be talking in the tens of thousands of septic tanks across Scotland. We will empty some of those and private contractors empty others.

On the wastewater system, there has been a huge amount of progress on that, in large part driven by the need to comply with various European Union directives, principally the urban wastewater treatment directive. We have invested vast sums of money and when we look at it now, in terms of the cost of the system, it costs us more to run our wastewater activities than our water activities so if a customer looks at their bill they will see they are paying more for their wastewater service than for their water service.