Flood Detection and Prevention: Technological Assistance

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for bringing the actions of Rotherham council to our attention. He is absolutely right that the whole of south Yorkshire has been subject to severe flooding. As he said, sometimes, as in places such as Rotherham, basic and simple solutions are the best.

To address his wider point, we are working closely with local government to ensure that lessons from recent flooding and innovations that we are seeing across the country can be adapted at scale. The purpose of the Government’s Floods Resilience Taskforce is to improve co-ordination across the whole system and translate local experience into national practice. Recently, the taskforce met in Manchester to consider how case studies from local partners in areas such as Greater Manchester—and from devolved Governments, such as Northern Ireland, in the case of the meeting the other day—including innovation in forecasting, community resilience and emergency response, can be replicated more widely. Local partners are directly engaged through regional flooding coastal committees through local resilience forums, which ensures that local knowledge, such as in Rotherham, as cited by the right reverend Prelate, on innovations to reduce flood risk through natural flood management and sustainable draining systems, informs national decisions on how best to roll out new technologies and share best practice across regions.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that some of the most natural, sustainable and environmentally beneficial projects are those such as Slowing the Flow at Pickering, which has prevented Pickering flooding in recent years? Will he use his good offices to ensure that farmers will be reimbursed through environmental land management schemes, and that upland farmers in particular will benefit from flood prevention money as a public good to the community, especially common land graziers and others who farm on common land?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right to point to the potential for natural flood management to improve the environment in a holistic way while providing sustainable flood defences. That can be through a variety of approaches, including restoring riverbeds, changing the way in which land is managed, as the noble Baroness says, to absorb more water, or creating salt marshes in coastal areas to absorb wave energy. That is why this Government have pledged to invest at least £300 million in natural flood management over the next 10 years—the highest figure to date for the floods programme—as well as work for other programmes, including environmental land management schemes, to ensure that farmers are properly part of the flood defence picture.