Mr. Chris Jones:

At the risk of being geeky about it, percentages can be misleading in this area in terms of different supply networks and, of course, it is a percentage of the water which has been conserved. If customers are encouraged to conserve less, then the leakages as a proportion goes up. We tend to focus on leakage per kilometre of main and, on that basis, we have roughly halved our leakage over the last couple of decades but that is a substantial cost. To be clear, we do not see this as an either-or question. There is a role for meters in customers' properties, which is related to charging in our case. That does not help one control metering on the network which is a separate thing from our point of view. That is where we have a substantial budget. I cannot say how much it has cost us to put that in place but I am sure it would cost over £10 million to install that many meters along with the required telemetry and so on because one would need to monitor this 24-7.