Future Flood Prevention

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Neil Parish

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We have tried to ensure that the report is not party political. Under the last Labour Government, the spending on flooding went down in dry times and up in wet times. The same thing happened under the coalition. We can argue about the figures, but they very much follow that same pattern. The report recommends learning from what has happened and putting in the proper resilience measures.

As I said, the report discussed the Dutch system. The idea would be to set up a regional flood and coastal board and then involve local authorities and local drainage boards, where they exist, and then landowners and businesses in order to have a broad catchment basis. As such, the Government should completely overhaul flood risk management, to include a new English rivers and coastal authority that is accountable for the delivery of flood protection. The Netherlands has a flood commissioner who is answerable to the Dutch Parliament and at a local level, which provides real focus. We may not need a full management system like that of the Dutch, but we can learn many things from it, such as how to alter the system through the Environment Agency and others to make it more answerable to Parliament, local authorities, drainage boards and landowners. I am convinced that, until we get a system that works from the top down and from the bottom up, we will not make the best use of our resources, because they will always be pressed. The commissioner would be able to hold those carrying out flood prevention work to account for their performance, because we have to get the best value for money.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

The report states that firefighters provide a vital “first-line service” to flooded areas. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government should go further towards making that a statutory duty? That has been asked for throughout the past 12 years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) said. Why can we not do this? Scotland has done it, Northern Ireland has done it, and I think Wales is about to do it. Surely it must happen.

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. I think the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who is behind her, will be making some good points about the fire service. The Committee took evidence from the fire services, and their work on flooding and the time they put in are not always recognised. The Environment Agency has large pumps that can move huge volumes of water over short distances, but the fire services can pump out people’s properties and deal with things on the ground. That is not recognised enough within the system, and there is work to be done on that. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s reply to that point. By overhauling the way we manage the whole system, we can go a long way to minimising the devastating toll of flooding on local areas and local people.

Unfortunately, the Government’s response, which was published last month, was a little disappointing. It was not up to standard and addressed our key recommendations in only a cursory manner. We then asked for more information from Ministers in time for this debate, and my hon. Friend the Minister wrote to the Committee on 16 February. We welcome her commitment to record and report, from 2018-19 onwards, on how many schemes include natural flood management. That will be important, because we must ensure that more such management is carried out. We welcome that step, but we also welcome the commitment to refresh the national flood and coastal erosion management strategy for England, which we hope will reflect many of our inquiry’s findings.

The report recommended some actions and, to be fair to the Government, DEFRA has made progress on some of those issues, including on catchment scale approaches and embedding natural flood management more firmly in flood management plans. Local partnerships have also made progress on co-ordinating action in some river basins. I think the Government agree with the Select Committee that not all flood areas fit neatly into local authority boundaries and that we need to introduce catchment areas to hold the water. We will need to speed up the water in some areas to get it out to sea, and in other areas we will need to slow the water down by introducing leaky dams to hold the water. Some areas will need to be dredged or desilted—whatever language we want to use—to get the water flowing more quickly.