Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I fully support these long overdue amendments. I have a holiday home in a very beautiful part of the country and there are many others around it. It has been suggested that if someone ever excavated some of the fields in the vicinity, pipes — some going to livestock but many to holiday and other homes — might surface which were never approved by anybody.

Water is inherently a scarce resource. There is only a question of relative scarcity. If the glorious weather in April is a prelude to a glorious summer of three or four months, the problems we now face will be significantly greater.

I am glad we are doing this and hope it can be enforced and policed in a reasonably sensible and humane way because, as I keep saying, water is a scarce resource. There is a sensible debate to be had which does not necessarily involve going down the British route of privatisation and brutal charging or retaining the status quo where vast quantities of expensively treated water is used to flush our toilets, for instance, when other types of water would do just as well.