Winter Floods 2013-14

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Sir Edward, I welcome you to the Chair and wish you a very happy new year. I welcome the Minister and other colleagues as well.

I am delighted to have this opportunity, on behalf of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to debate our report on the winter floods 2013-14 and the Government response to it. In the major event of 2013-14, we can see indications of how the climate is changing. Extreme weather events, such as those in 2012-13 in Yorkshire and the Humber region, and other places, were followed even more dramatically by the events of 2013-14.

We have had a number of significant contributions to the question of reducing the impact of climate change on these flood events. Notably, Sir Michael Pitt, in his 2007 review, looked to achieve a one-stop shop to respond to flood events and considered how to end the automatic right to connect. He recognised that surface water flooding was perhaps the most dramatic new form of flooding in that year alone. We then had the Flood and Water Management Act 2010.

I want to focus on the Committee’s key conclusions and recommendations. First, I recognise the damage done by the widespread flooding last year, particularly in southern England, which cost small businesses alone an estimated £1 billion, not to mention the adverse effects, which took their toll on local residents and rural communities. Certainly, the Committee commends the widespread help and the immediate relief effort provided by the emergency services and others, particularly in the Somerset levels and across the southern half of the country, in response to these floods.

Our key recommendations are as follows. We must be seen to work—particularly the Environment Agency and other the partners involved, including local authorities—with local knowledge. We recognise the role of riparian owners in making good the damage that is done and preventing flood events, and the role of internal drainage boards. It is important that I say at this stage that I am an honorary vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities. I pay great tribute to its work in low-lying flood areas such as my own in north Yorkshire, and in East Anglia, the Somerset levels and elsewhere. I commend the work of the coalition Government in seeking to introduce internal drainage boards where they do not currently exist.

In a key recommendation, the Committee firmly believes that we should end the arbitrary split between capital and revenue expenditure and move to a total expenditure. I recognise that this would mean amending Treasury accounting rules, and as most of the recommendations in our report demonstrate, and as reflected in the Government’s response, we are perhaps looking to the next five-year strategic spending review. However, we would like to put down a marker now.

Ofwat and Ofgem have recognised that utility companies such as water companies have moved to a total expenditure approach. It was unacceptable and most frustrating that, as the waters were rising and causing increasing damage in Somerset—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) agrees—there was an argument about the size of a pump from Holland to be used to keep the water at bay. Was the pump sufficiently large that the expenditure would constitute capital expenditure or was it deemed to be smaller, therefore falling under what we call revenue or maintenance expenditure? We would like to see an end to that type of argument.

We highly recommend that we revert to a programme of regular maintenance and dredging. A stitch in time saves nine. The most frequently used figures show that for every £1 spent on maintenance and dredging, £8-worth of savings are made in future.

We would also like funding to be more closely matched between maintenance and capital—I will explore that in a little more detail—and the amount in the maintenance and revenue budget in the next spending review should be announced more than one year ahead. The Committee welcomes the Government’s six-year spending forecast, but we believe that, as far as possible, that should also be reflected in the revenue and maintenance spending.

One fact to record is that not one flood defence failed in the winter floods of 2013-14. It cannot be in the interest of any future Government, or in the public interest, for any existing flood defence to fail. That is why it is so important that the maintenance of these capital pieces of kit, not just the regular maintenance and dredging, is protected.

We have said in previous reports that we should not rely on public partners alone, and that is reflected in this report. I personally applaud the Government’s approach to partnership funding. We entirely accept, looking critically and constructively at flood expenditure, that it is a little bit like the health service: there will never be enough money to go round. I note that there are several flood warnings today, particularly for the East Anglia region: Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. There will always be areas vulnerable to flooding. It is a matter of debate how many houses will be protected under present plans. It is important that we open up to partnership funding and private partners. I welcome and applaud the investment through United Utilities and other water companies in this regard. If we can encourage water companies to invest in upstream flood defences, that will be excellent.

This is the moment to recognise the Pickering “Slowing the Flow” project, which is largely a public partnership approach. Slowing the flow by planting trees upstream, soaking up the excess water, creating bunds and having a softer, more natural flood defence, as set out in the Government’s own natural environment White Paper, shows that there is a lot more we can do. The money will go much further on those projects than on very expensive, hard, physical flood defences, which are capital intensive. Obviously, we will need a number of those, but we need to consider more imaginative processes as well.

The Government have committed £2.3 billion of capital spending up to 2021, but as I have mentioned we must not be seen to neglect the maintenance of flood defences and watercourses if homes, businesses and farmland are to gain better protection against future flooding risk.

The Association of British Insurers has said that, over the last four years, revenue expenditure is down 18% and maintenance expenditure down 40%. That 40% figure relates to dredging and repairing existing walls. We join it in urging the Government to seek a closer match between revenue and maintenance budgets and capital expenditure. The Committee has repeatedly urged the Government, and do so again today, to increase revenue funding in line with funding for new capital schemes so that the necessary maintenance, including dredging and watercourse maintenance, can be carried out to minimise flood risk.

Our understanding is that funding for maintenance remains absolutely at a bare minimum, and that has to be addressed in the next spending review. As I said, it is important to announce maintenance funding more than one year ahead so that everyone knows what the programme is. We must not neglect the costly one-off capital investment that is needed to repair existing flood defence walls. In June last year, the Committee advised Ministers that more fully funded plans are needed to address the backlog of maintenance and to maintain the growing number of man-made flood defences. Regular work to dredge and keep rivers clear can be an essential flood maintenance measure, yet we heard from the Environment Agency in taking evidence for the report that that is exactly what gets squeezed when flood defence budgets are tight. The outgoing chair of the Environment Agency, Lord Smith, told the Committee that the main lesson he had learned from the winter floods while at the Environment Agency was

“to push as hard as we possibly can for keeping and increasing maintenance expenditure alongside capital expenditure, and making sure that Government is aware of the degree of priority that has to be given to that.”

That is the message I think he would like to bring to the House’s attention this afternoon. In the Association of Drainage Authorities’ evidence, it said:

“Fully funded plans should be drawn up to address the backlog of maintenance needed across the country.”

It said that measures to prevent flooding, such as regular maintenance, are less costly and more predictable in the long run.

I will focus on the work of riparian owners. When the pilot schemes have been completed, we would like to see them rolled out nationally. We applaud the public sector agreements the Government have negotiated with the internal drainage boards. The Committee is keen to see internal drainage boards maintain more flood defences. It is important to recognise that internal drainage boards, including the one in my area of the vale of Pickering—I met with it two or three years ago—raise thousands of pounds through a precept. It passes the money on in large measure to the Environment Agency, and it goes into a central pot for regular maintenance. That money never comes back to the vale of Pickering to do the essential maintenance that is required.

The pilot schemes are absolutely essential in ensuring that where the money exists and is being raised locally, such as in the vale of Pickering and other internal drainage board areas, it can be kept and used, utilising local knowledge and the engineering skills that they can buy in. We recognise that local knowledge is the key and that flood risk management priorities must reflect local circumstances. We urge the Government to end, as far as possible, any confusion over maintenance responsibilities—as we conclude in our report—through a widespread education campaign, so that maintenance activity is carried out by internal drainage boards and local landowners, particularly where they are riparian landowners as well.

I repeat that we need to rely more on natural flood defences, the planting of trees and other softer flood defences. We need urgently to ask the Treasury to look favourably on ending the arbitrary division between maintenance and revenue expenditure and capital expenditure. If we can urge the Treasury to amend the accounting rules for areas such as yours, Sir Edward, and mine that are prone to all forms of flooding—coastal, fluvial, river, surface water and groundwater flooding—that one change alone would revolutionise flood defence spending.

I end with a couple of questions to the Minister. The Government are looking to secure £600 million of partnership funding and external funding while achieving 10% efficiency savings over the next six years. It would be interesting to hear how that matches up. It is important that, after the Committee’s debates and the evidence we took, the staffing in the Environment Agency on flood defences has been protected, which is a welcome development. Those staff—many of them were not wearing Environment Agency jackets or uniforms, so local people did not know they were there—and the emergency services played a crucial role in cleaning up in the immediate aftermath of the winter floods. Will the Minister explain what the impact on the six-year investment programme will be if the conditions of partnership funding and external funding and the 10% efficiency savings are not met?

Will the Government look favourably on allocating revenue funding in future for more than one year at a time? Revenue funding has only been allocated to 2015, but we have a six-year commitment on capital funding. That is not helpful to those in the firing line for maintaining flood defences. The Committee recognises that there are only finite funds and that there is a need to balance competing demands on a finite budget, but the avoidance of flood through defences should, as far as possible, take priority over cost-cutting.

The natural environment White Paper was an excellent document, and the Government and the Department could do a lot of work to build on it, looking at softer flood defences and other issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), if I may call him that—we served on the Committee together—has done a lot of work on the natural capital aspects of the White Paper. The Government are committed to a green, low-carbon economy, and the planting of trees and other softer flood defence options are all part of that strategy.

We commend the report and its recommendations in totality. We recognise that the Government have finite funds and that we should look to other partners as well. As an MP representing one of the most rural communities, I recommend that agricultural land be recognised as worthy of flood defences, and we press the Government further on that. The National Farmers Union gave us the staggering figure of the amount of farming and food production land lost each year through flooding. When I was an Essex MEP, there was a rather alarming proposal on managed retreat that sent the heebie-jeebies through the farming community, so I do not know that we necessarily want to go there. If our food security is coming under increasing pressure, we should protect farmland as far as possible. We set great store on regular dredging and maintenance. The fundamental arguments on merging maintenance and revenue funding, announcing maintenance funding further in advance and removing the arbitrary division between capital and revenue expenditure by going, if Ofwat and Ofgem allow it, to a total expenditure budget would go some way towards protecting farmland. Local farmers and local landowners who, through council tax, are contributing to the funds raised by district councils, county councils and the precept to the internal drainage boards probably feel they are contributing more than anyone else to flood defence. It is important to recognise the contributions being made locally.

The Flood and Water Management Act 2010 is pretty much up and running in my area. I applaud North Yorkshire county council’s work in setting out its flood management risk assessment and for having the foresight to get somebody who used to work for Yorkshire Water to set it up. I hope that can be replicated by other local authorities.

I commend our conclusions to the House. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate them, and I look forward to the debate and the Minister’s response.

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[Mr Heath]

I am most grateful, Sir Edward. Having been encouraged to go on for as long as I like, I probably will not, now. I am sorry to have reminded you of that, but I did feel that an hour was probably sufficient to allow hon. Members to say what they wanted.

I come to the issues that still need to be dealt with. One of them is insurance, which was mentioned, although I think in slightly the wrong way, by the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane). Flood Re is coming along and, even though I did not have personal experience of working on it in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I know how much hard work was put in by Ministers at DEFRA and the Treasury and everyone else over a long period to try to secure agreement with the insurance industry to get it in place. However, until it is operational, there is a difficulty, in that people’s insurance premiums are increasing substantially.

The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), went to my constituency and met local authority members and others recently to discuss insurance; I am grateful to him for that. It particularly irks people to see their premiums going up just as protections have been built. They are therefore paying much higher premiums even though their risk has reduced substantially since last year owing to the work and investment put in by the Government. That cannot be right, but that is, I am afraid, something that has been reported to me too many times. I hope that that will be dealt with.

On the second issue, the Government and their agencies get a partial tick. The Environment Agency has very much improved its relationship and information flow with local communities. It was not good; indeed, most people felt that the management did not really understand their issues. I must say that that was no reflection on local officers, who did an extraordinary job and were recognised for having done so, but there was a “them and us” feeling, which has not entirely vanished.

I will give two examples from a recent visit I made to Aller. First, there was a degree of falling out between the Environment Agency and landowners about appropriate compensation for work done on their land. It would appear that the Environment Agency had a rather high-handed attitude to such work, though that probably came from its lawyers rather than the officers directly involved.

Secondly—this worried me even more—while the floods were still in progress, ballast was put in place, at short notice, to help protect the sides of a watercourse. However, the ballast had just been dumped. The landowner had said, “If you put that there like that, it won’t be there come next winter,” and they were right; it all washed away. That is just silly and a waste of money. The message to be taken from that is to listen to the people who really know the countryside and understand what happens on land that they own and see every day of the week. I hope that the Somerset rivers authority will help to that end.

We then have the upstream issues, which, again, the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd mentioned. I do not think we yet have a comprehensive and sustainable view on how we mitigate flooding by river catchment planning and by, for instance, using pillar two money to encourage planting on higher ground and changes in agricultural practice where appropriate—all the things that will help farmers on slightly higher ground to farm water to a point at which they reduce the flow and, therefore, slow the ingress of water into what used to be the great mere, the Somerset moors and levels, so that it can be removed in an orderly way. I would like to see much more attention given to that.

Indeed, on urban drainage, we have the sustainable drainage systems, but I am not yet convinced that planning is based on real understanding of concepts of water management. That goes both ways.

[Miss McIntosh]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning SUDS. Does he not think that if we stopped building in inappropriate places and ensured that planning permission for future developments was given only once SUDS were in place, that would go some way towards creating greater resilience to future floods?

[Mr Heath]

I do. We need a much more aggressive statement of concern from the Environment Agency and, where appropriate, the water companies, that says that there is an issue that the planning authority must address, and the planning authorities would need to respond to that.

The problem is really not that difficult to understand. When the floods were at their worst, I went down a flooded road, Aller Drove, and the one thing that really struck me was that a lot of the houses there were bungalows that had been built in the past 30 or 40 years on what is more than a floodplain—it is an inland sea, on reclaimed land that is below the level of the river that runs alongside them. The same thing can be seen in Moorland village in the neighbouring constituency of Bridgwater and West Somerset. That is nonsense. Even our iron-age predecessors knew how to do that properly. There are archaeological remains in Somerset, in the village of Meare. It is very famous—the Glastonbury lake village. The lake village was completely built on stilts, because people there knew what would happen every winter, and knew that building on the ground was rather futile.

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[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful for your guidance, Mr Walker. I am happy to engage with the Minister— we have engaged in many debates on such issues—but he has to acknowledge that, after coming into office in 2010, his Government specifically removed flooding from the Department’s priorities. He can only accept that that meant that the country was less well prepared for last year’s floods and is now critically less well prepared for the future. I am interested to see whether the Minister will pick this up in his remarks, but we now have a 10% risk of a flood that is 10 times greater than the flooding of 2013-14 and four times more damaging than the widespread flooding of 2007. The Minister knows that that issue must be addressed, and unfortunately the Government have not even begun to address it. Last year’s floods have passed, and the broken promises to flooded communities have been forgotten. The Government think they have got away with it.

I will briefly address the Government’s responsibility for the impact of the 2013 floods, but my comments will focus on how policy should have changed since the floods and how policy has not changed. Among the Government’s blunders, the 2013-14 floods stand out as an example of the real pain that incompetent Governments can cause to communities and businesses—I acknowledge that the Minister touched on that. For the communities and businesses affected, the floods were not simply a natural disaster. The Government slashed investment in flood protection when they entered office, and with that they broke the promise they made before the election to deliver on the findings of the Pitt review of the 2007 floods.

[Miss McIntosh]

The Committee obviously greatly misses the hon. Gentleman. From the evidence we have heard I am having great difficulty reaching the same conclusion of a 10% increase in the risk of flooding. On what is he basing that conclusion?

[Barry Gardiner]

I am happy to advise the hon. Lady that I am basing my conclusion on the reports and work of the adaptation sub-committee and the Committee on Climate Change. If she is interested, I will happily send her the references.

The Government not only cut the budget for new defences; they decided to stop maintaining existing defences properly, and they cut the budget by 20%. Why? Because they cannot cut a ribbon on an essential maintenance project—they need new projects for that. The decision to remove flooding from the Department’s list of priorities was never just about the previous Secretary of State’s illiterate theories on climate change; the larger issue is the Government’s rejection of the responsibility to protect people from risks that are beyond their control. It was interesting to hear comments earlier in the debate about the need for the Government to step in and about Flood Re, which I echo. Both coalition parties supported the Pitt review strategy that the previous Labour Government were delivering before 2010, but both parties abandoned it straight after the election because they felt they could get away with it. They crossed their fingers and hoped that no one would notice the unbuilt defences, the collapsing sea walls, the eroded riverbanks and the clogged up culverts. Forty-six of the Pitt review’s 92 recommendations have not been implemented.

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[Barry Gardiner]

The hon. Gentleman has a very selective memory, because the floods were not only in Somerset. In fact, more houses were flooded on the Thames estuary than in Somerset, so he must be selective in his memory. My point is that, after 2007, the previous Government undertook a huge programme and established the Pitt review. Both the hon. Gentleman’s party and the Conservative party said they would continue to implement the review, but neither did so when they got into government. He cannot say other than that because it is the truth, as he knows. I would be happy to give way to him once again if he wants to deny it on the record, but it is the truth, and I am afraid he really has to accept that.

Flooding not only destroys property, it makes homes unliveable for months and sometimes years. Flooding ruins businesses and destroys crops and livestock. We learned from the 2007 floods that those affected by flooding display between a twofold and a fivefold increase in stress and depression. The effect of flooding on people’s lives is enormous and long lasting, which is why prevention is so important, but the Government chose to cancel new flood defences, slash maintenance and sack front-line flooding staff.

The Government like to talk about competence, but we all remember the chaotic infighting between the previous Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government when so much of the country was under water. We all remember the failure to recognise the emergency until it hit the south-east. The Chair of the Select Committee alluded to the argument over the size of the pump and the capital expenditure and revenue dispute, which delayed action at the time. I agree with her call to consider this in terms of total expenditure, and I hope that change will eventually come. Her Committee makes an important point on that in its report.

We all remember the Prime Minister’s cruelly disingenuous promise that money is no object, and it is difficult to decide whether the original statement or the retraction of it in November marked a lower point. Will the Minister confirm how much of the flood support package for home owners and businesses has been received by those affected? Thankfully, many people were protected because, as the Committee on Climate Change has pointed out, the previous Government implemented 46 of the Pitt review’s key findings to increase our resilience to flood emergencies. We established the flood forecasting centre in 2008 as a joint venture between the Environment Agency and the Met Office. As the December 2013 tidal surge hit, the Environment Agency issued 160,000 flood warnings, and an estimated 18,000 people were evacuated from homes in coastal areas. At one stage during the surge, 64 areas had the highest warning level in place, reflecting a danger to life.

What lessons were learned? What has changed since the floods of last year? Many thousands of people were forced to leave their homes last winter. Transport was disrupted for weeks, in some cases months. Businesses were wrecked, and many closed and never reopened. After the flood, the Government promised that they had reviewed their approach to flooding and that the autumn statement would contain a proper long-term flood risk strategy. Well, the National Audit Office and the Committee on Climate Change reviewed that investment programme and found that nothing has changed. Three quarters of flood defences in England have not been maintained according to their identified needs in 2014-15. The Government’s investment plans will see the number of properties at significant risk rise by 80,000 every five years.

The budget for the ongoing maintenance of flood defences was cut by 20% in the 2010 spending review and has not been restored. The failure to maintain flood defences to the required standard has increased the risk of high-consequence flood defences, such as sea walls, failing. The failure of such defences would put lives as well as livelihoods at risk. I need to impress on the Minister that that is not simply my view but that of the National Audit Office and the Committee on Climate Change, and he really needs to take notice of it.

The failure to maintain flood defences to the required standard has led to a huge increase in flood risk. The Government have put the headline first. Of the

“over 1,400 schemes going ahead across the country”

announced by the Chancellor, only 310 are fully funded, and only 97 of those 310 are new. Some 1,119 of the 1,400 schemes may never receive full funding, because they are eligible for only 20% grant in aid funding—the rest has to be made up by partnership funding. The black hole in the Government’s funding announcements could be as large as £830 million.

The Government say their plans will reduce flood risk by 5%—true, but disingenuous, and the Minister knows that very well. The Government have put a cheap headline ahead of reducing risk for the most vulnerable. Instead of focusing on reducing risk for high and medium-risk households, they have focused on moving households at low risk into the lowest risk category. That is completely irresponsible. Limited capital investment should be protecting homes at high risk, which is a one in 30 risk, or at medium risk, which is a one in 75 to a one in 100 risk, rather than being used to provide additional protection to those at low risk, which is a risk of one in 1,000 or more. That is how the Minister gets his 5%, but it is meaningless—it is wrong.

This decision will put more homes, lives and livelihoods at significant risk. In a sign of just how far the Government are willing to go to get their headline, they chose to exclude consideration of risk to life from their analysis. If the Minister wants to deny that, let him challenge me now, but the evidence is there in the impact assessment: the Government have left out of it any assessment of risk to life. How could a Minister ask their civil servants to prepare such an assessment for them?

Does the Minister agree with the Committee on Climate Change and the National Audit Office that the number of properties at risk of flooding is increasing? If not, will he give us his figure for the predicted net change in the number of properties at high and medium risk over the next five to 10 years? Will he confirm that although his 5% net reduction figure is true, it is also true that the number of properties at high and medium risk has increased? Will he have the good grace at least to blush when he acknowledges that?

Will the Minister confirm that the long-term investment strategy assumes, against the evidence, that development on the floodplain will stop after 2014-15? The Committee on Climate Change says that 20,000 new properties are built on the floodplain each year, including 4,000 a year in areas of significant flood risk. Does the Minister disagree?

The Government’s strategy says:

“We have tested our findings against a range of possible climate change projections using the latest scenarios.”

However, if we read further, we find that the strategy assumes minimal climate change. The assumptions section on page 18—I challenge the Minister to read it—states:

“The main assumptions in this ‘baseline’ result are that the climate will change in line with the medium rate of change in UKCP09”—

UK Climate Projections 2009—

“and that no allowance is made for development in the flood plain.”

[Miss McIntosh]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s argument carefully, although it is for the Minister to respond from the Government’s point of view—good luck! However, what would the Labour party do were it to form a Government? That is the missing link.

[Barry Gardiner]

The hon. Lady and I have worked in partnership for many years, but I did not expect her to be my straight man in quite that wonderful fashion—I was just coming to that point, so I thank her very much.

The point I want to press is that, instead of planning for the worst, the Government are ignoring the inconvenient truth: they are ignoring the risks and abandoning the most vulnerable.

The Chair of the Select Committee asks what the Labour alternative is. The Government scrapped our approach to flooding and climate change, which was based on the findings of the Pitt review into the 2007 floods. They abandoned our focus on reducing flood risk. They abandoned our commitment to invest to protect the most vulnerable and to reduce the cost of flooding to well-being and the economy. We will deliver on the findings of the Pitt review—the other 46 recommendations, which have still not been implemented. However, a Labour Government will go further. We will introduce a new national adaptation plan based on the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendations, because that is the only way to ensure that all sectors of the economy and all communities are prepared for climate change. We will end the confusion and chaos in flood investment by establishing a national infrastructure commission to identify our long-term infrastructure needs and get cross-party support to meet them.

I conclude as I began: the risk of flooding has increased, and the risk of a catastrophic flood is increasing. The Government failed the country last winter. Now, they have tied themselves to a plan that risks catastrophic failure in the future. The Prime Minister was tested in last year’s floods, and he failed that test. Shortly, the electors of our country will have the opportunity to ensure that, when the next floods come, he is no longer in charge and in a position to fail again.

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[Miss McIntosh]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Walker, and congratulate you on your richly deserved honour in the new year’s list.

It has been an excellent and, for the most part, good-natured debate, although my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome almost lost his usual good humour. There were common strands throughout the debate, including the need for greater transparency regarding flood defences. We have made a good case for merging the capital and revenue expenditure into a total budget. A Library note, which I am sure the hon. Member for Brent North could access, shows that nearly every aspect of Pitt has been covered, although as hon. Friends said we still do not know exactly who is responsible for the drains and for maintaining them. In addition, ending the automatic right to connect is not yet in place.

The loss and invasion felt by flood victims is very real, but it does invoke the very best community spirit in response. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to use his good offices to ensure that the Bellwin formula applies in cases such as that of north Yorkshire. For example, 100% of costs should be recovered in respect of bridges and roads and the properties flooded in Yorkshire and the Humber during the previous year.

On Flood Re, we should look closely at leaseholders and urge the Competition and Markets Authority review to cover affordability of all leaseholder properties.

I welcome today’s debate, and I am sure the Government and the Opposition will keep the matter under review. Future financing is for the next Parliament and the next Government to determine, but this has been a particularly appropriate, timely and positive contribution to the discussion.

Question put and agreed to.