Speeches by Kirkham.

“I wanted to ask about social tariffs because I asked about this at a previous session and it concerned me. You said you gave a lot of support to your customers. I was looking at Ofwat’s PR24 determinations and they state that you are expecting to increase the social tariff provision from 2% of households to 5%, but tha…”

“Even if you increase it by the amount you are talking about—up to 5%—it is still just over half the average. Why so low? Why so few?”

“So the amount has gone up for each customer rather than the percentage of households rising to the average, is that right?”

“In terms of the incident I was talking about in Mylor, in the end they contacted me because they had sent many, many questions and they had not been able to get any response at all, so it still obviously is not where it should be.”

“What will the impacts be on places like St Agnes and Porthluney that are not part of the initial programme to look at those storm overflows? How long will it take for those places?”

“Could you give us a timeframe? In terms of somewhere like St Agnes, which is not on the initial programme, how long do you think it will be until they are not having sewage disposed of on their beach?”

“There will always be problems with agriculture and other things; that is true.”

“But you need to focus on what you can do about that.”

“From your point of view, in terms of St Agnes, when will you be looking at the CSOs there?”

“Are you happy to help residents sample? At Mylor Creek, for example, which is having sewage spills at the moment, a lot of the residents want help to go down and take samples themselves. Is that something that you would be prepared to do?”

“You are offering that support. I want to move very quickly on to supply before I run out of time. In July, there were residents in St Eval without supply for two weeks. I had the same in my constituency in the Roseland as well. I think the hospital was even impacted by that. Over previous years, we have had problems wi…”

“Get them back online more quickly. It took a while to do that.”

“We have heard that bugs and outages are really impacting those systems. You are finding that as well, are you?”

“Is there a rough timeline for that group to come back with a report?”

“But you can see my point: it is beaches all across Cornwall, and it is getting worse not better. It is really impacting on our economy as well as the health of the people who live in Cornwall. I had to pass that on today. It is very important that you understand from the people of Cornwall how much it is impacting.”

“Do you feel that it is getting better now or are you still waiting for that improvement to come?”

“I have one more question about customer satisfaction. South West Water is very low on customer satisfaction levels, having been 12th out of 13 for the last three years, and Bristol is better. What are you doing about those low rates? How do you intend to improve them? Will you be learning from Bristol and improving, or…”

“I want to carry on with that a little. I am from Cornwall, which relies really heavily on our beaches particularly, for tourism, for our economy, for health, and yet South West Water has the worst performance among sewage companies for pollution incidents last year—hugely worse than other ones. We have surfers getting …”

“What will the impacts be on places like St Agnes and Porthluney that are not part of the initial programme to look at those storm overflows? How long will it take for those places?”

“I can hear the whole of Cornwall almost screaming at me that it is getting worse. Last year, it got a lot worse than it had been previously. How come it is getting worse? How come there are these CSOs disposing on to beaches when it has not even been raining? What can we do about that quickly?”