Mr. Chris Jones:

Building on that, the Welsh context is very similar. The public water supply network is now of a generally very high quality. Of 350,000 tests every year, 99.998% meet the full EU standards. That is a very high level of compliance. It is not the same on private systems, which have a lower level of achievement of those standards. There is always the question as to whether it is economical to bring those onto the public system. There is not much happening on the water supply side at the moment, but the waste water side is equally important. Where there are septic tanks or small rural networks, there is a legislative provision there that a community can apply to the environmental regulator to put a duty on us to connect them up to the public network, and then there is a cost-benefit analysis as to whether the environmental benefit of that is worth the often substantial cost of joining them to the public sewer network. Clearly these are quite rural, isolated communities, otherwise they would be on the public network anyway. That is a process that communities can go through. The trouble in our experience has been that often individual properties within that community will not take up that option and will continue to use their own septic tanks. We can end up putting in a lot of infrastructure to little benefit.