From his experience of just 500 meters, my hon. Friend might consider how busy I have been with 48,000 of them.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will agree that it should not be necessary for me to keep troubling the Prime Minister about this. Since my hon. Friend the Member for Wells wrote to me, I have been to see the chairman of the Social Security Advisory Committee, who has drawn attention to the need for some additional adjustment to social security benefits to assist low-income families with their Bills. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will tell me where his officials have got to with the study. I urge him to consider recommending a local adjustment to the housing benefit structure to meet the problem if the study shows that it is warranted.

There appears to be an on-going concern with the non-domestic metering of church property and village halls. Such properties used to receive water at a reduced rate, and the transfer to the full non-domestic tariff has been quite a problem for their already stretched finances. That needs serious consideration. I have been unable to obtain any conclusive help from Ministers or the water companies on this point. For my constituents and the various church authorities, it is still very much a live issue.

I should like to use this Adjournment Debate to draw the attention of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to an anomaly in the law. There is no ability to reduce or waive the infrastructure charges. That is particularly unhelpful for first-time sewage schemes. There is no method available to require households to connect to new sewage schemes, yet those who do not are often the first people to complain about pollution of streams and rivers. That anomaly must be addressed, and I believe that I have the support of the National Rivers Authority in saying that. I make that point in the hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will take it up and ensure that his Department addresses it in due course when it is considering environmental legislation.

I can tell my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of one domestic property that has since decided to disconnect from the first-time sewage scheme in order to save the charges. That is irresponsible. The ability not to connect, or even to disconnect, runs contrary to the excellent environmental programme in which the Government are engaged to clean up our beaches and estuaries. It is quite wrong that this should still be a voluntary matter, especially when the borough and district councils and the water company have invested so much in new sewage schemes.

Last week, Southern Water announced that it would not fit any more meters on the island, and that it is drawing the line at 48,000 out of a total of 53,000 homes. At the beginning of the trial, I had an avalanche of correspondence from constituents who did not want their property to be metered. Now I regularly receive letters urging me to obtain meters for my constituents.

I have two secretaries on the island, one with a metered property and the other with an unmetered property. The latter pays £125 a year for her water, based on a rateable value of £180. The former pays £108 for her metered water supply and her house had a rateable value of £240. Those figures show why an increasing number of my constituents want to know why they cannot have meters fitted.

I urge my hon. Friend to find a modest sum to enable the water company to offer meters to customers, allowing an element of customer choice to the remaining 5,000 dwellings. I appreciate that these dwellings are largely the uneconomic properties and that it is uneconomical to meter subdivided flats in large buildings, but I hope that the Minister will agree that 5,000 homes are too many to be left unmetered. I realise that it would never be possible to cover 100 per cent. of the properties on the island, but given our strong island community spirit—we are all in the same boat—the number not yet fitted with meters should be significantly reduced. I believe that we need another 1,000 to 1,500 meters.

My only other plea tonight is that the review of the community charge and the abolition of rateable values should not impede the installation of water meters in the parts of the United Kingdom where water is often in short supply. This method of charging for water puts a precious resource in its proper perspective, and we must make progress with it for the sake of future generations of people and wildlife. I hope to hear that my hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment and Countryside will shortly accede to my request to visit the island to see the scheme for himself.