Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Bill

Holly Lynch Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

Like other Members, let me start by commending the hon. Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson) for having so successfully navigated this important legislation to the Chamber today. I am pleased to support any and all measures to protect animals from abuse, and am thankful to her for giving us that opportunity today and for the comprehensive way in which she has made the case already.

Wild animal selfies, swimming with dolphins and riding elephants all feed into the collective human desire to experience new things and be close to animals. However, the wildlife tourism industry is responsible for the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of animals each year. Dolphins are forced to live in incredibly small tanks, as the hon. Lady outlined. Big cats can be drugged and declawed, and elephants are beaten and brutalised. Of course, it is easy to think of this as a problem far removed from the UK—something that is happening in another part of the world and a problem that is not ours to solve—but by advertising, promoting and selling these experiences, usually to unknowing consumers, UK-based travel companies are complicit in the cruelty.

There are many documented examples of the cruelty endured by animals used in the tourist trade. One of the most shocking instances came in 2016, when it was reported that police found 40 dead tiger cubs in a freezer during a raid at Thailand’s Tiger temple. Irresponsible breeding and poor conditions meant that the tigers had a much lower chance of living long, healthy lives than their wild counterparts. Each day at the Tiger temple, hundreds of tourists paid in excess of £40 to enter the park and pose with a tiger cub. In a country where the average wage is about £12 per day, we can see how animal tourism is big business. I am thankful that this attraction is no longer open to the public, but it is concerning that there are still about 2,000 captive tigers in Thailand, and that so- called “experiences” continue to be advertised and sold here in the UK That is just one country and one example, so I hope that this Bill will very much start to eradicate such practices.

Highly endangered baby and adult Asian elephants are beaten, stabbed and brutalised systematically across south-east Asia to “break the spirits” for easy use in tourism, yet these experiences are promoted by more than 1,250 UK based travel companies. Asian elephant numbers have collapsed and the species is nearing extinction, but appealing advertisements, often from well-known and influential companies, hide the cruelty from tourists who do not realise the enormous suffering endured by the animals involved. I know that the British public feel as strongly as we do. The fact that more than 1 million people signed a petition to urge the Government to protect the Asian elephant from the often daily cruelty they face at the hands of the tourist trade shows that there is most definitely an appetite for the measures before us.

Wildlife tourism is a diverse industry and it is important to note that there are some responsible operators and ethical activities available. I sincerely hope that today ushers in a new era of kinder, more responsible wildlife tourism where conservation underpins any such activities.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) who spoke so passionately with his experience of years working in the tourism sector. He raised some good points about further measures that could be considered where holiday providers might be facilitating experiences once holidaymakers are in-country. That is a very important point, which, I am sure, the Minister will be taking further with her colleagues in Government.

We welcome the fact that the Bill makes it clear what constitutes the advertising and sale of low-welfare animal activities and creates offences to that effect with a corresponding enforcement regime. As a nation of animal lovers, it is only right that Britain should lead the way on this, so, once again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Guildford and wish her all the very best of luck with the remainder of the passage of this Bill.

Disposable Barbecues

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Hannah Bardell (in the Chair)]

Before I call Holly Lynch to move the motion, I inform Members that we are due to have a vote at 5.10 pm. If you do not want an interruption partway through the debate, you might want to take that into consideration, but we will be very happy to come back if there is still more to be said.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential merits of banning disposable barbecues.

I very much hear what you have said, Ms Bardell, and it is my sincere pleasure to see you in the Chair.

West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service has already attended 75 wildfires this year, and those are just the fires that fulfil the criteria set out in the national operational guidance. To meet the criteria, the fires will all have involved a geographical area of at least 1 hectare, had a sustained flame length of more than 1.5 metres, required a committed resource of at least four fire and rescue appliances, and presented a serious threat to life, the environment, property and infrastructure. In addition, hundreds of incidents of smaller fires on our moorland that have fortunately been stopped either by early firefighting actions or by weather conditions. From the very outset, we can see the scale of the challenge that we face in West Yorkshire alone, and I am really pleased that colleagues from other parts of West Yorkshire have joined us for this debate.

There were two moor fires at Marsden moor only last week. Six fire crews had to battle against two enormous raging fires, both of which were a mile long. Several others have also made the headlines in recent weeks, and although the stats are for wildfires more generally, we know that a significant number are caused by careless and reckless use of disposable barbecues on our moorland.

During the space of a single weekend on 26 and 27 February, West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service had to respond to a fire caused by a barbecue that had been lit by a group in a campervan next to moorland on Marsden moor, near Huddersfield. The service also attended a fire caused by a barbecue on New Hey Road in Scammonden, and a third barbecue incident at Brun Clough car park. On 3 March, firefighters had to tackle a 538-square-foot blaze at Brimham Rocks, near Harrogate. The National Trust said that “precious moorland heather habitat” had been destroyed and issued a reminder that barbecues should not be used in the area.

We know that this a problem, and there are a number of reasons why our moorland is so precious and cannot continue to sustain this amount of damage. In Calderdale, I am afraid to say that managing flood risk is an ongoing and constant challenge. It was hit by devastating floods on Boxing day 2015 and during the 2020 February floods, with several incidents and near misses in between. Moorland fires substantially undermine the natural flood management that we need as a key part of our defences.

Nearly a quarter of England’s blanket bog habitat is located in Yorkshire, with about 50% of the country’s peatlands in the Pennines, so we feel the responsibility as custodians of the precious moorland and peatbogs, which also provide crucial carbon storage. That is an essential tool in the fight against climate change, but if the peatland is damaged by fire, it not only loses the ability to store carbon but starts to emit it, which why it is so crucial that we look after our moorland and work to restore it when it is damaged. Moorland also provides natural habitats and enhances biodiversity, with the suffering inflicted on wildlife as a consequence of such fires being one of the greatest tragedies of this problem.

The fires also put a tremendous strain on our emergency services. Although working out the cost for responding to such fires is not easy, the burden that falls on councils, the police, the Environment Agency, organisations such as the National Trust and, most of all, the fire service is enormous. After years of austerity, the frontline is already stretched to breaking point, and I was staggered to learn that fire and rescue services, which have to pull in national firefighting resources or support from neighbouring services in order to fight some of these massive moorland fires, can be expected to pick up the bill for having no choice but to call in those additional resources. I hope the Minister will work on that with her colleagues in other Departments; perhaps she could refer to it in her summing up.

I have set out the scale of the problem and it is clear that we could and should do more to prevent moorland fires. I appreciate that banning the sale of disposable barbecues sounds like a big step, and I fully accept that many users of disposable barbecues use them responsibly. However, I have been clear in outlining the scale of the problem and the devastation it causes, which warrants consideration of all the ways in which we can manage the risk, up to and including a ban on the sale of disposable barbecues. Indeed, ultimately those responsible users also have to pick up the cost of the response.

To further make the point, between 2019 and 2020 alone, 240 accidental fires in England were caused by barbecues, and those are just the fires where the source was identified. Therefore, we know that introducing a ban on disposable barbecues would start to bring down the number of moorland fires by hundreds every year.

Currently, the toolkit used by local authorities and the emergency services to prevent moorland fires is not robust enough. Sections 59 to 75 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 allow for council officers and the police to implement a public spaces protection order. A PSPO is designed to deal with a particular nuisance or problem in a specific area by imposing conditions on the use of that area.

In Calderdale, people are prohibited from lighting fires, barbecues or Chinese lanterns, and from using any article or object that causes a naked flame and which poses a risk of fire in certain restricted areas. Best practice is encouraged and people are still allowed to enjoy picnics on moorlands, as long as they do not use cooking equipment that requires a naked flame or that presents a risk of fire. Calderdale Council also runs a Be Moor Aware campaign with emergency service partners, which calls on the public to be vigilant and responsible when enjoying our great countryside. The existing available powers are being deployed and agencies are being proactive, but the fires persist. So, what else can be done?

I commend the many large businesses and retailers that are taking steps to end the sale of disposable barbecues. People might think that the lobby against a ban would come from retailers, who stand to lose out on sales, but when those retailers are themselves leading the way, we know that the situation requires the Government to play catch-up.

Last June, the Co-op stopped the sale of instant barbecues from UK stores within a mile radius of a national park. This month, Aldi became the first supermarket to remove disposable barbecues from sale in all stores. In addition to the benefits that I have outlined, Aldi estimates that that will eliminate 35 tonnes of single-use plastic every year. Waitrose has also just committed to ending the sale of all disposable barbecues and to removing them from all of its 331 supermarkets. It estimates that that will prevent the sale of about 70,000 disposable barbecues every year.

It is incredibly welcome that these major national retailers are taking steps to end the sale of disposable barbecues, and I certainly applaud them for doing so. It is unequivocally clear that they are the real trailblazers, with Government proving too slow to respond to the scale of the problem, the damage caused and the cost to communities.

We are only in early spring and, as I have said, this debate follows two significant fires this week alone, in addition to the 75 official wildfires, and hundreds of others, in West Yorkshire this year. I ask the Government to introduce robust measures that will protect our countryside. A ban would have an instant and transformative effect in protecting our moorland and would help to safeguard them and our communities in the years ahead.

Before closing, I pay tribute to all the emergency service workers and partner agencies involved in the response to the recent wildfires in West Yorkshire. In particular, I place on the record my thanks to Calderdale District Commander Laura Boocock and deputy Chief Fire Officer Dave Walton for giving their time and insight on the challenges they face on the frontline of this very serious problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Holly Lynch]

I thank all hon. Members for taking part in today’s debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) is quite right; it is about quality, not quantity, in Westminster Hall this afternoon.

I am grateful to the Minister for engaging with this issue. I very much look forward to understanding more about that research piece. I may follow up in writing, if I may, to get a better understanding of the timelines involved in that. Once we have that evidence base in that data, I will no doubt be coming back, again, to say, “Well, what do we do now with that data?” regarding further measures, and considering a ban if the data confirms what we suspect from anecdotal evidence—that we could be, and should be, doing more.

I also recognise that this is not the Minister’s direct responsibility, but there is the point about the cost that fire services have to cover if they have to pull in resources—national or neighbouring resources—in managing a significant fire. I may pick up on one or two of those points in writing, but I am grateful for the spirit in which the Minister has engaged with this problem, and I hope that all hon. Members will join me in campaigning to see what we can do beyond today’s debate.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved,  

That this House has considered the potential merits of banning disposable barbecues.

Moorland Burning

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you as Chair, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) on securing this important debate. Before moving on with my remarks, I will be the first to take up the offer of the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) to come and visit his moorland to compare and contrast the differences required in managing that with what is perhaps required in my part of the world, and he has already touched on some of those elements.

Nearly a quarter of England’s blanket bog habitat is located in Yorkshire—I am pleased to see the region well represented in the debate—with about 50% of the country’s peatlands in the Pennines. Its wellbeing is, therefore, crucial for us in Calderdale on a number of fronts. If we manage our moorland and peat bogs responsibly, as we have already heard, they lock in water, which protects us from flooding, and carbon, which helps us to mitigate the extreme weather that presents such a challenge to us in a steep-sided valley. Kept wet, they will also protect us from the damaging wildfires that we have already discussed.

We have suffered devastating floods twice in the last five years—first, in December 2015 and again in February this year. In addition, there have been several significant wildfires in the same period, so the integrity of the moorland in the upper catchment is essential if we are to manage the different risks.

We have had an ongoing challenge with burning, largely undertaken by those involved in the grouse shooting industry to engineer grouse breeding habitats. I am pleased that in July, Calderdale Council supported a ban on burning in an attempt to restore the peatlands, alleviate the pressures on our fire service, enhance biodiversity and contribute to the package of measures that we need to have in place to mitigate flood risk.

It is frustrating, however, that although the potential for carbon storage is enormous, the Committee on Climate Change has estimated that 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted each year from upland peat in England, the majority of which is due to burning on grouse moors. I welcome its recommendation that legislation to address that should be forthcoming before the end of the year.



Last year, I visited one such moorland restoration project above Dove Stone reservoir with the RSPB, which is restoring and cultivating nature’s great super sponge, sphagnum moss, and aiding natural flood management alongside the work on leaky dams and gullies. Like the RSPB, I am really keen to know when we might see the publication of the England peat strategy, as part of the delivery of the 25-year environment plan.

The Minister will be aware that where water run-off is increased and hastened due to burning, it washes peat into our reservoirs, which has to be cleaned out of the water supply. On a related point, I will take the opportunity to remind to the Minister that I have tabled an amendment to the Environment Bill—it is up for debate in Committee next week, if I am not mistaken—that would require the Secretary of State to make regulations to grant the Environment Agency additional powers to require water companies and other connected agencies to manage reservoirs to mitigate flood risk. I will write to the Minister on that point ahead of the Committee discussion next week.

I finish with a final plea to the Minister. Moorland restoration was one of several issues that we were hoping to discuss at the promised Yorkshire floods summit. Inevitably, given coronavirus, the summit was delayed. The Minister did seem genuinely taken aback to hear that West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire were surprised that it was a South Yorkshire-only summit that took place recently. I have the letter from the Secretary of State sent to me on 1 April this year, deferring a number of issues that I had raised until what was called the “Yorkshire roundtable” could be arranged. I very much hope that we can convene that further discussion without delay.

Flooding Preparedness: Yorkshire

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend is right to make that point, which will form the basis of the remarks I am about to make.

We need to acknowledge the scale of the problem. About 1,000 homes in South Yorkshire and 565 businesses were directly affected by November’s floods, but the impact of flooding goes far beyond the material and economic damage. It carries a human cost—lives disrupted, homes abandoned, futures made uncertain and full of hardship. This is a growing threat: a once-in-a-lifetime disaster in South Yorkshire was followed weeks later by further flooding in West Yorkshire. Calderdale, for example, has suffered three major floods in the last eight years. Hull was badly hit in 2007, and York—my hon. Friend’s constituency—was hit in 2000, 2015 and again earlier this year, as she just described. Other parts of the UK from Scotland to Cornwall have suffered from flooding.

We are lucky to be a rich country with the means to help people and to respond to this danger, but that requires us to recognise the challenges we face, to deploy our resources as we need to, and to confront the longer-term causes of the crisis. I deeply regret that this Government have so far failed to do that. It is not that they have done nothing—indeed, I acknowledge and appreciate the efforts the Minister and her Department have made; the Environment Agency in particular has done sterling work in Yorkshire—but it was only yesterday that the Government gave a date for the flooding summit we discussed with them back in November last year.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I congratulate and commend my hon. Friend on the leadership he has shown on this issue. I also commend him on having secured the South Yorkshire flood summit. If I am not mistaken, though, a Yorkshire-wide flood summit was promised, not least following the devastating flooding that we experienced in Calderdale, which he has mentioned, as well as in areas of North Yorkshire. Although I really welcome the progress my hon. Friend has made on the South Yorkshire summit, does he agree that we need the same conversation for the rest of the region?

[Dan Jarvis]

I absolutely do agree with my hon. Friend, who makes an important point. The original concept was that the flooding summit would cover the county of Yorkshire. I work closely with the Yorkshire Leaders Board and know that there is a real desire to work closely with the Government on this issue. I would appreciate the Minister clarifying precisely what the attendance of the summit will be. If it is just for South Yorkshire, what are the plans to ensure that the rest of Yorkshire gets the support that it needs from the Government?

To be fair to the Minister and to the Government, of course we understand the disruption that covid has caused. But the people of Yorkshire should not have had to wait all this time for this meeting. To quote Lord Stark from “Game of Thrones”—not from the other place—“Winter is coming”, and there is every possibility that floods could strike again. If they do, potentially amid a second wave of covid infections and challenges relating to the Brexit transition, the effects of that flooding will be ever more devastating.

It is not that the summit will be a silver bullet—of course, it is no substitute for the hard strategy and funding commitments that we need—but it will be an important way of focusing minds and bringing the Government and stakeholders together to co-ordinate a coherent long-term response. That is why I very much hope that the Prime Minister will accept the invitation, which I warmly extend to him again today, to take part in person. His presence would be an important sign to the people of Yorkshire that he recognises the scale of the threat and is working to address it.

As I said, the substance of the response is ultimately what matters, most immediately in relation to the ongoing aftermath of 2019, because 10 months on many people are still in temporary accommodation. Kilnhurst Primary School in Rotherham remains closed until the new year, with families facing additional stress on top of the difficulties caused by covid. We need to get communities the help that they need, and the Government must play their part. Councils have faced extraordinary costs at a time of hardship, and existing support has not filled the gap. Many of the people affected will face problems with insuring their homes, even when they move back into them.

The Blanc review is rightly considering this issue, and I trust that Ministers will act following its imminent completion, but we need to prevent the next flood, not just react to the last one, and that requires investment. In collaboration with local authorities throughout South Yorkshire, we have developed a detailed £271 million priority flood-resilience programme, to protect more than 10,300 homes and 2,800 businesses. The projected return on this investment, just in terms of avoided damage, is £1.7 billion, but funding for the plan remains in doubt. The grant in aid allocated to it under the Government’s medium-term plan has yet to be confirmed. Assuming that it is, and taking other sources into account, there is still a shortfall of £125 million.

As another flooding season begins, we do not have the resources that we need to protect our region. I ask the Government not just to confirm the current draft MTP, but to provide an exceptional boost above and beyond it to fully fund our proposals. That would follow the precedent of the £115 million in exceptional funding that Yorkshire received after the 2015 floods. I hope the Government will go beyond that and give local authorities the revenue—not just the capital—that they desperately need to get flood-prevention projects shovel ready.

This is not just about money; we need to fundamentally change not just the amount that we invest but the way that we do flood prevention. We need to shift away from engineering solutions towards natural flood management and a catchment-wide approach, which can reduce the threat of flooding at its sources, rather than shift it from one place to another. Our priority programme includes £2 million to support catchment-wide modelling as an essential step towards that approach. We warmly welcome the Environment Agency’s support for nature-based solutions in South Yorkshire and the draft NTP’s inclusion of almost £38 million for those schemes in the Don catchment.

We cannot, however, build our way out of this with concrete. Working with nature, rather than against it, will ultimately be much more effective and affordable, and will allow us to preserve and expand critical habitats such as wetlands, moors and forests. The pioneering work of the Environment Agency, with the Woodland Trust and others, shows just how effective this slowing the flow can be. I have partnered with the Woodland Trust as part of an ambitious wider programme to plant millions of trees in South Yorkshire, with flood prevention a key goal of a plan that will also help communities, wildlife and our climate. I hope that the Government will back the effort—I say that in good faith to the Minister—and adopt my amendment to the Environment Bill to require a dedicated tree strategy for England.

As floods like last year’s increasingly become common, natural flood management must be not just one tool among others, but the core of our strategy across the whole country. The Government need to make that shift as a matter of urgency. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has spoken in favour of natural flood management. He needs to ensure that it is rolled out quickly and comprehensively. That needs to come hand in hand with greater flexibility. I hope that the Minister will heed the Local Government Association’s call for a more flexible funding model for flood prevention and for capital and revenue funding to be devolved into a single place-based pot to allow greater local control. We must also further reform the Green Book to allow a wider set of values to carry weight in investment decisions and end the dominant focus on residential properties and property values.

Those flooded houses in Lang Avenue, Bentley, Fishlake and right across Yorkshire are connected to a much wider crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that climate change could increase the annual cost of flooding in the UK almost fifteenfold within 60 years in high-emission scenarios. A portion of the hundreds of millions of pounds we are asking the Government for is part of the cost of our collective inaction on climate change over the past decades. This is a small taste of just how false an economy that inaction was. The idea that it costs too much for us to decarbonise is madness. The only thing worse than not having acted then would be not to act now.

The Government have promised a green recovery from covid. We appreciate that intent, but so far they have not delivered anything resembling the transformational change that we should be aspiring to in this once-in-a-generation moment, a moment when massive public investment is not only possible but essential to save our economy. To take just one example, the £3 billion allocated nationally for building retrofits, one of the most obvious and essential ways to decarbonise, as well as to create skilled jobs, is roughly what we need for retrofitting South Yorkshire alone.

The Committee on Climate Change is unequivocal: we are not making adequate progress. The Government have agreed a 2050 target for net zero, but they are not yet doing what is needed to reach it. The challenge of course is real, but so far their actions do not reflect the catastrophic threat that we face. For my part, we have a plan for South Yorkshire to reach net zero by 2040 at the latest, and immediate proposals to plant millions of trees, transform our public transport and carry out £200 million of green infrastructure investment, but we need Government support if we are to make more than a fraction of those plans a reality.

To conclude, we have the opportunity to act now on flooding in Yorkshire, on natural flood prevention right across the UK and on global climate change. I ask the Government to respond to the threat highlighted so powerfully last November in a way that reflects its scale and its urgency and the fact that it is at once a local, national and global challenge, and at every one of those levels to make the investments now that will ultimately save us from paying a much greater price in the future.

Flooding

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a great relief to be called in a closing minutes of this debate. I will be echoing the sentiments aired by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker), in the time I have.

The first thing we need from the Government is flexibility around the resilience grant. A majority of those flooded in 2020 also flooded in 2015. The resilience grants announced as a package of measures nine days after Storm Ciara state that people who claimed a resilience grant four years ago will not be eligible this time. I understand that from Whitehall that might seem logical, but I am afraid it is incredibly short-sighted, given the reality in Calderdale. In some instances, resilience measures paid for by the 2015 grants were damaged in this flood and need replacing. It is also worth bearing in mind that advances in resilience measures have been made since 2015 and so enhanced protection could be possible. Surely there should also be an option for groups of properties to pool their grants to invest in further external flood defences, as was the case in Earby in Pendle, where the local authority made a claim on behalf of residents and used the money to fund flood defences for the whole community.

Secondly, I ask that Calderdale—along with the constituency of the hon. Member for Calder Valley—is granted tier 1 status based on national risk assessment criteria, in recognition of our ongoing management of flood risk. Calderdale is having to find in the region of £3 million from its annual budget every year to commit to ongoing flood mitigation work, and I am asking the Government to recognise this and match it. That would allow us to deliver enhanced ongoing maintenance work on clearing drains and gullies, and to have a dedicated flood response team. It would allow the council to work with the Environment Agency to deal with the massive issues of orphaned assets and of culverts, which, as we have heard repeatedly, are in a state of disrepair. It would also support efforts to manage the really significant emotional and mental stresses of those living with the risk of flooding.

We also need match funding for the Community Foundation for Calderdale’s flood appeal. In 2015, the Government did match fund the money raised by the Community Foundation. We have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock), who is frustrated that the Government are not going further when they are match funding the moneys raised in South Yorkshire. We have not even had the commitments in Calderdale to match fund the work done by the Community Foundation. It has been incredibly proactive and innovative in coming up with the Flood Save and Watermark schemes in Calderdale, but the only way the Community Foundation will be able to help everybody, on the back of what we have faced in this crisis, is if the Government step up and match fund that fundraising.

Another part of the jigsaw is the use of reservoirs as a means of mitigating flood risk. I will be tabling amendments to the Environment Bill on this issue, and I am glad to hear that they will have cross-party support from the Back Benches. I hope that the Secretary of State will look favourably on those amendments as we seek to use reservoirs as a means of mitigating flood risk, which will be incredibly important for residents in Calderdale.

Environment Bill

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Ways and Means resolution & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Wednesday 26th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow such a passionate speech from the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson).

It will probably not surprise Members to learn that I shall be focusing my comments on part 5 of the Bill, largely because extreme weather is starting to pose an almost existential crisis to us in parts of Calderdale. The water levels that we saw in 2015, and again earlier this month, presented an immediate threat to life, and a more long-term challenge to the viability of communities alongside the river and the canal.

An ongoing challenge for us in flood-affected communities throughout the north, in particular, is that the legislation and regulation that underpin the role of water companies are heavily weighted towards mitigating drought risk. The climate change adaptation work reflected in both the 25-year environment plan and the Bill, while recognising flood risk, does not provide the same level of seriousness in legislation relating to the risks of both flooding and drought, and I should like to see a rebalancing of those challenges.

In July last year I presented a ten-minute rule Bill, the Reservoirs (Flood Risk) Bill, which—in a nutshell—sought to give the Environment Agency additional powers to require water companies to manage reservoirs to mitigate flood risk. The Bill followed years of conversations between the Environment Agency, Yorkshire Water and Calderdale Council about the role of the six Yorkshire Water reservoirs in the upper catchment in the Calder Valley. In the winter of 2017-18, Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency started a trial to manage the Hebden Water reservoirs down to 90% of their usual top storage level, with the aim of assessing the potential of utilising the reservoirs as a more long-term flood risk management option. Maintaining the reservoirs at 90% instead of the usual percentage created an extra 10% capacity to hold more water in the upper catchment during periods of heavy rainfall. Although the reservoirs were placed under nothing like the pressure during the trial period that they experienced during Boxing day 2015’s Storm Eva or more recently Storms Ciara and Dennis, the report was able to conclude:

“The lower reservoir levels did provide a significant impact on peak flows in Hebden Water for largest events observed during this period”.

The report was clear that the scheme had a positive impact on flood mitigation, and that a managed and collaborative approach would be complementary to ongoing flood protection work in the area. This approach is not just happening in Calderdale; similar conversations are happening right across the country, including at Thirlmere reservoir in Cumbria, at reservoirs in the upper Don Valley and at Watergrove reservoir in Rochdale.

The Environment Bill recognises that climate change and extreme weather will place additional pressures on water availability, and although it legislates for a requirement on water companies to work regionally to publish joint proposals to mitigate drought risk, it does not seem to place the same expectations on water companies to mitigate flood risk. Drought risk and flood risk seem to be perpetually at odds with each other throughout legislation, although both are expected to occur with increased frequency. So while I very much welcome a more regional approach, I would like to see a rebalancing of both those risks, alongside the investment in infrastructure that would give whole regions the flexibility to move water with ease and to manage the risk, making us more resilient to too much water as well as not enough.

In relation to the role of reservoirs, I will be looking to table amendments to part 5 of the Bill that would set out the transfer of powers to the Environment Agency and the framework in which such arrangements between the EA and water companies, in consultation with local authorities and communities, would work together to put localised plans in place for managing down pre-designated reservoir levels during periods of heightened risk.

As we know, this is just one piece of the enormous jigsaw that needs to come together if we are to bring the ongoing risks that we face in Calderdale under control. Given the vast scale of the moorland in the upper catchment, natural flood management schemes will be instrumental if we are to hold and slow water before it reaches homes and businesses down the valley. Last summer, I visited Dove Stone nature reserve in High Peak with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, where a comprehensive peatland restoration project is under way. We were planting sphagnum moss, which not only helps to manage flood risk by locking in water but promotes biodiversity, prevents wildfires and stores carbon.

Slow the Flow in Calderdale promotes natural flood management, and with a group of volunteers with an impressive collective skillset, it has been working with the National Trust, the Environment Agency and Calderdale Council since 2016 to use the natural environment to build leaky dams, stuff gullies and promote sustainable drainage and natural attenuation schemes. This work disrupts the flow of water as it makes its way down the valley, forcing it to spread out and slow down, and holds as much water up in the crags for as long as possible.

The really impressive thing about Slow the Flow is its determination to measure its outcomes, its desire to take an evidence-based approach to what it does and to crunch the numbers to demonstrate the real value of its work. Its work on attenuation ponds, which are designed to hold water in the event of heavy rainfall, suggests that if the 43 attenuation ponds identified as possible sites by Calderdale Council were delivered at a cost of £600,000 for 29,000 metres cubed of water storage—bear with me—this would equate to £21 per cubic metre of storage, compared with the £1,270 per cubic metre cost of the storage delivered by the hard flood defences in Mytholmroyd. The truth is that we need both, but we can see how cost-effective natural flood management is. It is 61 times more cost-effective per cubic metre of water storage.

I therefore very much welcome the local nature recovery strategy in the Bill, building on the notion of natural capital and acknowledging the very real, tangible benefits for people and communities if we can store and slow water in the upper catchment. However, I would like to see the Bill include hard and ambitious targets for recovering moorland and peatlands in particular, and not only for flood alleviation purposes; nature-based solutions will play a critical role in mitigating climate change. Peatland currently covers 12% of the UK’s total land and contains more carbon than the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined. However, it is currently in poor condition. If we look after and manage our peatlands, we can continue to lock in that carbon and absorb more, but if degradation continues we risk not only missing that opportunity but releasing the carbon already stored.

I will briefly turn to the issue of Cobra meetings, because I have been at the deep end of flood crises in Calderdale twice during my time in office. While we cannot legislate for Cobra meetings as part of this process, I have just seen the Secretary of State’s comments to the “Ministers Reflect” series last year. When asked whether Cobra meetings make a difference, he replied:

“Yes, they do, because Cobra is designed to try give everybody a kind of proverbial kick up the backside and get things moving.”

Can I ask for that approach once again in relation to the damage that we have sustained in Calderdale?

Flooding

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point, and I am of course more than willing to meet him, other residents and local authority leaders in Calder Valley. I have also undertaken to hold a summit in Yorkshire to discuss flood concerns more generally. There are a number of important projects in the Calder Valley, including at Hebden Bridge and Brighouse. Some of them have concluded, while others have not yet been completed, for reasons that I know he is aware of.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

Cobra met twice on Boxing day in 2015 and again on 27 December. It was instrumental in unlocking the funding and resources we needed to recover in the Calder Valley. Whatever was stepped up this time was absolutely not comparable in providing the practical help we needed very quickly in Calderdale on this occasion. Can the Secretary of State tell me when the guidance on grants for resilience will be made available to local authorities? Will he confirm that those grants will be available for those who flooded in 2015 and claimed then, but have since flooded again?

[George Eustice]

We will, during the course of this week, be issuing local authorities with more detailed guidance on the flood resilience fund. Our view at the moment is not to give it to people who have already claimed it, since they have already invested to make their homes more resilient.

Flood Response

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Theresa Villiers]

I would certainly encourage all local authorities to engage with residents affected by flooding in particular areas and with the various schemes that are available.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I cannot begin to convey the sense of absolute devastation across Calderdale that, for so many residents, we are in the same position again, having been flooded in the Boxing day floods in 2015. To update the Secretary of State, we are now looking at 400 residential properties flooded, 400 businesses, eight schools and two care homes, and two bridges have sustained damage. I have written to her today with a number of asks. Will she agree to meet me and representatives from Calderdale Council to go through those in detail so that we can start the recovery? Will she commit to making available the flood grants that came so quickly after those 2015 Boxing day floods, so that we can start that process straight away?

[Theresa Villiers]

I want to extend my sympathies to all the hon. Member’s constituents—it has been devastating for many of them—and I would be very happy to meet her and representatives from her constituency to discuss what has happened and how we can help in the future.