Storms: Weather Resilience

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

Question

11:39

Asked by

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on infrastructure, homes and farmland of the recent storms, and what steps they intend to take to increase resilience to future weather events.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and refer to my interest as vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests as set out in the register. I know the whole House will extend our sympathies to those impacted by Storm Henk. To date, 2,185 properties have flooded, and over 81,000 properties have been protected due to the Government’s investment in flood defences. The Government’s 2020 policy statement sets out five ambitious policies and multiple actions to improve future resilience to flooding. Between 2021 and 2027, the Government will have doubled investment in flood and coastal erosion schemes across England to a record £5.2 billion.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that we should be doing more between floods? I pay tribute to the Environment Agency and drainage boards for the important work they do in regularly maintaining existing flood defences and dredging watercourses. Will he seek to end the arbitrary division of funding between capital expenditure and maintenance funding that is hampering this work, as advocated in the December report from the National Audit Office? Further, will he confirm that the farming recovery grants will reward farmers for loss of crops and for the fact that their land is effectively being used not for food production but to defend downstream communities from future floods?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I entirely join my noble friend in saying what fantastic work the Environment Agency has done in reaction to these floods, along with the ongoing work it does in between to make sure that we are more resilient to them. Its annual maintenance programme activities are prioritised and timetabled using information from inspections, maintenance standards, levels of flood risk and legal and statutory obligations. Local teams work with partners, including drainage boards, on maintenance and dredging programmes. In 2022-23, the agency spent over £200 million on maintaining flood risk assets. In 2021, we announced an additional £22 million per year from 2022-25 for the maintenance of flood defences, and details can be found in our Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Report.

My noble friend also talked about farming. The flood recovery fund will pay for the uninsured costs of preparing arable land for planting crops or reseeding grass where it has been damaged, and our agricultural transition plan has a range of measures which will support farmers in these matters.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, in the interest of helping this Government, who appear to have run out of good ideas on almost every topic, what about banning new building on flood plains?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I really want to know what the noble Baroness means by that. Does she mean that there should be no more houses built in York, Leeds, London or Exeter? It is not what you build; it is how you build and how resilient the buildings are to flooding. I entirely accept and agree with her that some appalling decisions were taken over the last half century, and houses have flooded because they should never have been built there. But we cannot ban the building of properties; we just have to make them resilient to flooding.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I remind my noble friend that when his department produced its five-year plan, in the usual range of these, the Climate Change Committee said that it was not adequate. In the light of these floods, will he look at that plan to see whether some changes should take place? The Government have done a great deal, but clearly, this will get worse and we need to look at it again.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is right that these problems are going to get worse: what we are suffering at the moment is almost certainly the impact of an El Niño effect, which has meant a warmer, wetter start to our winter. This will, we hope, be followed by a dryer but perhaps colder end to it, and we can look to the future. The Government are absolutely looking to the future, and he was right in his leadership of the Climate Change Committee to make sure that all departments are being resilient to the effects of climate change. I will just say that we have achieved much more than some of our closest neighbours. We are going to reduce greenhouse gases by 65% by 2030; the European Union has a target of 55%. We are doing a lot to address this, both globally and domestically.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to pick up on an issue arising from yesterday’s Statement. In May last year, the EFRA Committee published a report on rural mental health, which found that extreme weather events and animal health crises left farmers, workers and vets dealing with mental health trauma with little support. It called on the Government to provide dedicated emergency funding to enable local areas to quickly access more resources to respond to rural communities’ mental health needs, both during and, crucially, after crisis events. Can the noble Lord explain why the Government disagree and have refused to allocate this funding?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

If the noble Baroness looks at our rural proofing annual report, she will see a firm commitment in it to issues relating to mental health in rural areas. She is absolutely right that events such as this trigger severe problems for people whose homes are flooded, or who lose their business or a large part of it, and we are seeing that in the farming community. The Government are providing a range of mental health support measures for people in these communities, and I applaud the work the NFU and others are doing, with the Government, to make sure that we are accessing those in need and providing them with the support they require.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, the NFU tells me that a review of the flood defence grant in aid funding is vital. The weighting towards people and property means that rural areas are unable to compete for funding, as they will never score highly enough to receive any grant. Are the Government considering altering the formula so that farmers get a fair share of this money?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

That is a very good question. The first thing we have done is to introduce partnership funding. At the time, the Opposition referred to it as a flood tax, but it has meant that a whole load of schemes that would never have got the go-ahead, because they did not have the value for money of schemes which defended more homes, did go ahead and have therefore been built. Approximately 40% of schemes and 45% of investment better protects properties in rural communities; and since 2015 we have protected over 700,000 acres of agricultural land, along with thousands of businesses and communities, through schemes.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister and others have naturally focused on the macro schemes that are designed to reduce the major impacts of flooding, but does he agree that micro-level interventions can have a significant impact, such as not using nonporous hard surfaces to concrete over front gardens to create hardstanding for motor vehicles? What advice are the Government giving on the appropriate use of porous materials when people want to create hardstanding at their homes?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are giving money for property-level flood resilience, and that would entirely fall within this. Software is also now available. For example, I looked some years ago at Bristol, where they had created millions of data points around the city at which they could apply different weather events and see how just a kerb being raised at a certain point, or a wall being extended, can protect a number of properties from flooding. So the noble Baroness is absolutely right: we need to look at the micro as well as the macro effect.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register. The Minister mentioned damage to farmland. Obviously, most arable farmers will have the chance to re-drill their crops in the spring and many will benefit from the farming recovery grant. However, in the Fens, covering Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, a number of horticultural producers have suffered substantial damage to existing crops. They may well not be covered, so what advice can he give them?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is right: these floods will undoubtedly affect our food security. Lincolnshire and the Fens is a very important area. Internal drainage boards and managing water levels are an important part of this. I cannot say that the level of rain we experienced was unprecedented, and it certainly was not unexpected. We are going to have more of these events, and we have to be better at managing them.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Somerset Levels have flooded every winter for the last 20 or 30 years, which often stops the railway and roads. I am told it is because the Environment Agency has prevented proper dredging of the rivers, which would allow the rainwater to run away into the sea. Is this not clearly easy to do, and a quick fix that would stop this happening every year?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

People are very often free with advice. I went down to Somerset when there were floods there and somebody said to me, “All you have to do is dredge this river, cut this dyke through, and the water will flow.” I pointed out to him that that might clear the water from his farm, but it would go into people’s houses in Bridgwater. He said to me, “You are confusing me with someone who is concerned about the people who live in Bridgwater.” These things are never simple, and the noble Lord may be right.