Mr. Chris Jones:

We have a mix. We have a central control centre and call centre so anybody ringing in or on live chat or whatever would go into a central area. That gives us efficiency and a good understanding of what is going on across the network. We generally have local hubs as well, where case management officers would then pick up that customer's issue and liaise with him or her directly, and in particular provide the information to anybody who is actually visiting the customer at their property and therefore has got the full history of the issue and so on. It is a mixture of centralised and local. The point is that there are good communications through the systems between all those points of contact.

The sewer network is a massive issue for us in Wales. We have a combined sewer network generally, much of which goes back to the period of industrialisation, certainly in south Wales and north-east Wales, the post-industrial areas. Those systems have not had the investment over decades that they need to maintain steady quality. We have done a lot of work and research on the implications of climate change and changing land use patterns, particularly on more impermeable areas in our towns and cities, such as people paving over their front garden for car parking, for example, and those sorts of issues. The amount of run-off is increasing and due to changing weather patterns, the amount of storm events is increasing.

We took a decision about seven or eight years ago that we needed to put in place what we call in the jargon a sustainable urban drainage strategy for the long term. We have come up with an approach called rainscape, which is about going into neighbourhoods and separating out the combined sewer network so that the rainwater and stormwater element is separate but retained within the local environment where it goes into planting areas, greens and things like that. It is absorbed into the local environment rather than going into the combined sewer network and causing problems of spills because the system is overcharged and cannot cope with the volume. That is something we have been doing successfully for the past five or six years, but we see this as being a generational investment programme. Ultimately, we will go into every urban community in Wales and apply the rainscape approach, so that the drainage system can cope with the sorts of climatic experience we expect in 20 or 30 years' time. On the back of that, there are really positive benefits as well to the wider community in terms of how it makes it a much greener environment, much better for biodiversity, quality of life and so on. It is disruptive of the local community and one has to work closely with it, but we have had extremely good support where we have been pioneering this sort of work.