Flood Prevention: Farmers

Earl of Devon Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, my thanks go to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for calling this debate—he is an excellent servant of the rural countryside. Inspired by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, yesterday, I will seek to extemporise today, so I hope noble Lords will excuse me if I am not as fluid as the title of our debate. I hope not to get lost, however, as I will take noble Lords around my own experience of farming, hopefully to illustrate some of the issues that are raised by this topic.

I live at a place called Powderham. It is a medieval settlement, “the village on the marsh”, and we are therefore very used to issues of flooding. During my tenure, we have dealt with many such issues. We are based on the junction of the River Exe estuary and the River Kenn, and one of the tributaries of the Kenn is called the Slittercombe, which runs through the village of Kenton. This time last year, on a Sunday, we suffered the most dramatic rainfall ever experienced and a flood surge of some four to five feet rushed through the village of Kenton, flooding about 20 houses and the village primary school, which sits in a building that has been there for over 400 years. The primary school will never return to that building. It is currently resident in the Powderham Castle estate office and hopefully will have its own home soon on some playing fields up the hill and away from this danger.

This is a tragedy. The landscape above the village of Kenton holds the Slittercombe. That watershed is only about three miles long. Powderham farms a considerable amount of that watershed and all of the valley bottom is grassed. The steep banks alongside the valley bottom are subject to high-level stewardship and are managed under the EJ5 regime, where you have grass on the steep hills to prevent erosion and flood issues. Despite this, we had this most dramatic incident, and I do not think that anything we could have done on the farmland could have prevented it. It really is a desperate issue for the school.

The upper reaches of that valley, however, are the Haldon forest, which is of course inundated with deer—our nation is inundated with deer. The deer eat all the understory, so there is nothing on the ground in the woodlands and nothing to soak up the water that falls in the woods. In the higher ground on the valley, there is a considerable amount of farming for energy. That is maize growing, which is possibly the worst thing to be doing on a steep hillside. The land that is not growing maize tends to be growing horticultural vegetables—which, again, is a terrible thing to do on a steep hillside. But those farmers are not fortunate, like the Powderham estate, to be able to get a countryside stewardship scheme and are therefore desperate for the profits necessary, so they farm in that way.

Coming down the valley, we get to the River Kenn, which has long been a major tributary into the Exe. It is a managed landscape that has been canalised and managed for watercourses over many centuries. Of course, many of those watercourses are now failing and getting old and flooding is beginning to appear, so the fertile land within the valley is getting more and more boggy. There is an ongoing land management discussion among neighbouring farmers up the Kenn valley, seeking to find how to manage the land in a contiguous sense to better improve the outcomes. Of course, the only thing that the farmers have been able to agree on is carbon markets, because issues such as flood prevention and biodiversity are so complicated. I think that, as farmers begin to seek to work together, we really need to provide them with options that are not just the sale of carbon credits, which is the only marketplace that seems to be functioning at the moment.

As you go further down the valley, you reach the Powderham and Exminster marshes. This is an area of land that anyone who has taken the train down to Cornwall will be familiar with, because it is where the Great Western Railway first hits the water of the River Exe estuary. There is a large embankment that runs up from Powderham church to the Turf locks that is currently almost inundated. Both Network Rail and the Environment Agency are taking desperate measures to try to prevent the entirety of the Exminster marshes flooding. Among the difficulties we are seeing there is that animals—mammals—are undermining the banks and obviously, with climate change and sea level rise, those Powderham banks will not be fit for purpose. The Environment Agency, as we have already heard, does not really have the budget to do the work necessary to restore those banks and it is a terrible challenge.

The other threat that is coming is the beaver. The River Otter is obviously ground zero for the release of beavers, and if you get beavers burrowing into the Powderham banks and blocking all the drainage across the Exminster marshes, I dread to think what will happen to that very productive farmland that is the source of famously early Devon spring lamb and many different heritage productions. How we manage beavers following their release into the wild is an important issue that I hope the Minister will consider.

Then there is the broader Exe estuary. We have a project under way with Natural England, the National Trust, the Environment Agency and others to work out how to manage the whole lower Exe, which is silting up remarkably. The river is becoming almost impassable in some respects. The Exe, as I mentioned yesterday in our debate about water companies, used to be “the river of fish” in Roman times. We no longer see any fish, and that is largely due to run-off. As I say, the river is silting up due to run-off and management of the land. It is also the essential flood defence for Exeter. The city is growing rapidly and the management of the river is essential for the appropriate expansion of that city.

To follow up on a matter that the Minister and I debated yesterday, it is essential that we work out a way for the water companies to work really closely with the farming community to enable our urban centres to expand, survive and have healthy, fresh water. I pray in aid the south-west peatland project I mentioned yesterday and this ability of the water companies, as we review the water industry, to work closely with agriculture.