Speeches by Tufnell.

“You are confident this kind of incident will not happen again?”

“I am conscious of time, but there is reporting from the Wye and I want to detail some other specific instances. In the Wye in 2023, it was estimated that 23% of phosphorus in the Wye came from your own wastewater treatment works. To give you credit where credit is due, this is reporting from your organisation. In Octob…”

“I have talked about The Cleddau Project and mentioned the Windrush Against Sewage Pollution campaign and the work they have done. I was wondering whether you want to take the opportunity to commend them for their extensive continuing work in order to improve the water quality right across Wales.”

“I have two final questions. The first is about transparency. You said at the beginning to the Chair that transparency is incredibly important, but very recently in December ’24, it was reported that you were facing a large fine for not properly monitoring discharges from sewage and water treatment works. NRW—Natural Re…”

“You have touched on customer satisfaction and how important that is. I appreciate that you are comparing it with your competitors at a positive level, but the point that is quite concerning is the score is declining. Do you think that is in relation to your environmental performance and that it is affecting your custom…”

“There is one bit that I missed out in my questioning, so if you will forgive me. The Cardigan plant spill that we talked about, according to Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, the number of days is something like 1,146 days from the start of 2018 to 2023. If you could just cover this off, why was that allowed to go on …”

“Why did you not do that before it took place? Why was there not a more proactive approach?”

“But before 2018—before the spills took place—why was there not a more proactive approach in order to prevent that from happening in the first place?”

“No, that is fine. Thank you for indulging me, Chair.”

“Let us build on this point of resilience and particularly around the drought in 2022. About 3% of your infrastructure captures the rainfall—correct me if I am wrong. What did you learn about the resilience of Welsh Water in 2022 with that drought, and how has it affected your water security strategy?”

“On that leakage point, it has risen by 15% since 2019, which I think is one of the worst performers in the industry. What steps are you going to be taking in order to get that back on track?”

“I am glad you have mentioned Ofwat because in December last year, the chief executive of Ofwat—who has given evidence before this Committee—said it was indefensible that for five years, you misled customers and regulators on your record for tackling leakage and saving water. You have talked about transparencies to this…”

“Finally on this water security point, there has been an increase in water consumption by over 3% when you compare that to the baseline. To what extent do you take responsibility for that?”

“The three-year average target for 2023-24 was 130 litres per head per day.”

“But there is a big discrepancy between the target and what you are actually achieving.”

“The chief executive of Pembrokeshire County Council, for example, is on £212,000. He is operating with a significant budget and has nearly 6,000 people working for him. The chief executive of Cardiff Council has a budget of £1.9 billion and is paid £229,000. When you compare that to the level in 2021 of £891,000, you c…”

“In terms of the public perception and the level of impact on people across not only my constituency but across Wales, the environmental degradation, and the importance of bringing the public back on side in respect of water quality, public health and resilience of the system, do you think you as a company—especially wh…”

“I would like to just ask one final question on pay. In 2021, Peter, your total remuneration was £892,000, and last year, you took a bonus of £91,000. If you take into consideration what we have talked about today around water security, environmental performance, and water quality with the public health element to it, d…”

“You have touched on the environmental performance being one of your key metrics and of real importance to Welsh Water as a company. It has been reported that there has been an increasing amount of pollution incidents over the last four years. In the last reporting year, there were seven serious pollution incidents. You…”

“I would like to just touch upon the sewer overflows and the spills per storm overflow. It gets quite complicated because the measurements that NRW provide are different in respect of the industry, so the figures are difficult to compare. You can correct me if these figures are wrong: I have 53.5 spills per storm overfl…”