Ms Maria Graham:

I think it would be fair to say that there have been a number of answers to parliamentary questions by the Department that indicated that Article 9 required us to set out in the first river basin management plans how we were going to comply with the provisions and in those river basin management plans, we indicated that we were bringing in charging.

We did not seek to use the derogation in those river basin management plans. It is a separate question whether we could have used it or not, but we did not use it. Subsequently, the Water Services Act 2014 was brought in and established a charging regime. We then moved to the second cycle plans. I do not think that the Department has previously said that we thought we could rely on a derogation under article 9(4).