Commentary on provisions of the Act Section 10: Requirement for Ofwat to have regard to climate change etc
This section amends section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 to require Ofwat when exercising its powers and duties to have regard to the Secretary of State's duty to meet specified environmental targets. This includes the net zero emissions target in section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008 and duties in section 5 of the Environment Act 2021 (when regulating companies wholly or mainly in England).
	This new duty requires Ofwat to consider, when making relevant regulatory decisions, how the water industry can contribute towards meeting these environmental targets.
	Section 11: Charges in respect of Environment Agency and NRBW functions
	This section amends section 41(1) of the Environment Act 1995 in order to extend existing powers to make charging schemes to recover costs from water companies (as defined in the section). The schemes are produced by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Body for Wales to enable them to recover their costs of performing functions in relation to the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016, water abstraction and impounding, drought orders and drought permits under Chapters 2 and 3 of Part 2 of the Water Resources Act 1991, and pollution incident reduction plans and implementation reports under sections 205A and 205B of the Water Industry Act 1991.
	The effect of the section is to extend the existing legislation to allow the recovery of costs by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Body for Wales incurred in performing water industry enforcement functions.  This includes allowing fees to be charged to water companies for enforcement relating to unauthorised assets, or in suspected breach of a permit, and duties relating to pollution incident reduction plans. This section enables fees to be charged to water undertakers and sewerage undertakers; and to water licensees and sewerage licensees only in relation to their licensed activities, excluding their other unrelated wider business activities.