The Independent Water Commission should assess how effectively the regulators audit companies, monitor the water environment, and enforce breaches of licences and permits. It should consider whether regulators are leveraging enough fees from the sector to ensure robust, fair and quick monitoring and enforcement of environmental protections. To bring about greater trust in the regulatory system, the Commission should consider whether public standards for monitoring are needed, including a full understanding of asset conditions, a clear and agreed set of performance metrics, and an agreed rate of inspections. As part of this, the Commission’s proposals should ensure that data on water is as open as possible, with regulators gaining automatic access to data held by water companies that is core to their regulatory functions. The Commission should consider whether more investigations should be made into category 3 and 4 pollution incidents. An evaluation of the “self-reporting” system is needed, which may need to be significantly overhauled or replaced to rebuild trust. (Recommendation, Paragraph 59)