Speeches by Reed.

“We are engaging regularly with the EA over the state of the weather. Of course, we have not had rain for quite a long time this early in the year. That is worrying. We are not at the point where there is a drought yet, but water companies are required to have drought plans that they refresh every five years. Those plan…”

“I will bring in my colleague here in a moment, who I am sure will have a more detailed response to give you than I do. Of course, I had the opportunity to meet some of the businesses in the beautiful town of Rye when you invited me down there, and to hear their frustration at the extent of the water outages, the lack o…”

“Thames is a private company, and it is for it to sort out its own finances. As you will be aware, because it is in the public domain, it is currently in conversations with its creditors about new sources of equity and the status of those creditors’ debt. It is for it to manage those conversations. Government are closel…”

“I agree with you. The Committee has its own authority and powers, and will deal with that in the way that the Committee feels is appropriate. As for what the Government are doing, we have enacted the Water (Special Measures) Bill. I took those actions within seven days of the election, including ringfencing customers’ …”

“They will not be doing that. I was very clear in public that the Government would take any action necessary to prevent them trying to circumvent the ban that we have now put in law. They have now withdrawn their proposal to make those payments.”

“It is fair to say that the situation in the water sector had become intolerable. The system was failing everyone. It was failing customers. It was failing the environment. It was failing investors as well. That is why I have asked Sir Jon Cunliffe to lead a piece of work—and we are due to see the interim report later t…”

“Yes, those are in scope.”

“Sorry, David will comment on that. On your points, Baroness Batters has a small team that she is working with, and they are doing a lot of outreach work into the sector. It is hard to think of anyone who is better networked in the farming sector than Baroness Batters. Six months is enough time to get a piece of work do…”

“I will invite Emily to comment on the Natural England point. Is that in your remit?”

“You make some very fair points there, and I am happy to have conversations with my colleagues in MHCLG who are leading on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. As I was saying in my earlier comments about the land use framework, we want to support agricultural land being able to produce as much food as it can, and then…”

“Your point on unfair contracts is exactly the point that I was making about milk. It is not fair that the producer of origin should be forced into a contract, where, if there is a spike in costs, as happened, say, with the energy increases, the producer bears the cost of that and it is not shared fairly. I do agree wit…”

“There are lots of problems in the supply chain, and it is unfair to point to just one part of it. Supermarkets want to support the producers of origin, because they need those producers to be successful businesses if they are going to keep supplying the products that the supermarkets want to sell. There are problems in…”

“A key part of making farms more profitable is making sure that the supply chains are fair, and the Groceries Code Adjudicator has an important role to play in that. I am going to ask my colleague Emily to say something more about this, but, in the way we are working through these issues, we have already secured agreeme…”

“Yes, absolutely. We lack the kind of water infrastructure that this country needs to secure water supplies into the future. At the end of the price review period, we secured investment that will be worth £104 billion over five years, which includes funding for new reservoirs as well as other infrastructure. We get more…”

“The piece of work that Baroness Batters is doing is akin to the piece of work that Sir Jon Cunliffe is doing on water, or that Dan Corry did for me on regulatory reform and streamlining regulation so that it is more effective. I have found the best people I could find to lead a piece of work. They are all engaging outw…”

“To an extent, that is right. Having operated in both sectors, I do not think that you can entirely transfer one sector to the other, either way round. They both have strengths. They can both learn from each other. I do not think that one is right and one is wrong. What I want to see through the public sector, and parti…”

“The metric is quite a simple one. It is their profitability. Coming from a private sector background myself, that is one of the big differences between the private sector and the public sector. The public sector is quite complex. It tries to do many things and has many measures, and that is the way that it needs to be.…”

“Thank you very much for raising profitability. I was in private business myself for 16 years. If the business I was in did not make a profit, that business would not survive. It is extraordinary that so much of the farming sector has been allowed to get into a position where it tells me it is not making profit. If that…”

“I am not aware of any such discussions, no. You will have to let me know if you hear anything more.”

“In the long term that is probably right, but the arguments have been made. They have been established. The Chancellor has set out the tax proposals in the Budget and they will come into force. My focus is on supporting farming to become profitable. I have set up a farming profitability unit under Baroness Batters, the …”