Flood Management

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this debate and I echo his thanks to all concerned in the recent floods which particularly affected North Yorkshire, rural areas in Cumbria, and parts of Leeds and Lancashire. I refer to my interests in the register, in particular that I am a vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities. I would like to answer the right reverend Prelate’s question directly by saying that to tackle the long-term strategy, we should simply work more with nature. I shall draw on the example of a project that I was particularly closely associated with while in another place as the Member of Parliament for the constituency that includes Pickering.

I believe that the Pickering pilot project was a partnership approach that could be used in other places, particularly those that feed into catchment areas around Leeds, Cumbria, Lancashire and York. We have to accept that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so we have to adopt a mix-and-match attitude to land management. We should drain where drainage is appropriate, dredge where dredging is appropriate, desilt and clear away weeds where that is appropriate. Working with nature is less capital intensive and less physically engineered. It allows water either to slow down, as we did in the Pickering scheme, or speed up so that it moves away from flooded areas, whichever is appropriate. In adopting a full catchment management system, or in the case of Pickering a sub-catchment management system, that is precisely what we did. We took a smaller reservoir, which was less engineered and therefore less costly, and I am delighted to say that the scheme really stood the test of the recent floods in North Yorkshire.

Farmers have a role to play in this by temporarily storing water on their land but hopefully without falling foul of the reservoir safety Act. I believe that the European Commissioner in Brussels, Phil Hogan, is keen to reward farmers through the new system of basic farm payments for the public good that farmers provide by retaining water upstream and taking it away from areas downstream, be they farmland, towns and villages, or even cities like Leeds and York, thus keeping them safe.

The key is to work with nature and to adopt a full capital management system. As regards funding, perhaps I may say that there is no bottomless pit. We have to lever in private sector funding. The Pickering approach was exemplary. It was a partnership approach involving the county council, Ryedale District Council, the town council of Pickering, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission, all planting new trees and cutting down existing ones, creating dams and, indeed, taking 200 years to create a new peat bog. I believe that Pickering shows the way forward. It does so also by merging the total spending budget and having a capital spend that is the equal of £2.3 billion and matching that with maintenance. I think that that answers the right reverend Prelate’s question.