Importation and Sale of Foie Gras

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Giles Watling]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I raise the matter here today precisely because I do not think enough action has taken place since that previous debate.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. There is a Division in the House. We will suspend for 15 minutes for the first vote. If there are subsequent votes, it will be 10 minutes. Then, as soon as the mover of the motion and the Minister are here, we can proceed, so I ask hon. Members to go quickly as possible, please.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow]

Am I allowed to take an intervention, Mr Pritchard? I am not sure whether I have time.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Yes, you have time.

[Rebecca Pow]

I will be generous and take another intervention.

Marine Management Organisation

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

I will call Giles Watling to move the motion and will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as he will know is the convention for these shorter, 30-minute debates.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the Marine Management Organisation.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to stand up for coastal communities, particularly my own in Clacton—a place that I have been a part of and lived in for over 55 years and have represented both locally and nationally since 2007. I have seen at first hand what works in our environment and what does not. Our extraordinary coastline has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. It is home to a Ramsar site and is a site of special scientific interest; it is a salt marsh, with superb beaches, cliffs and backwaters.

Recently, I tabled a private Member’s Bill that seeks to put in place a pilot to devolve many functions of the Marine Management Organisation to local authorities. The MMO is a group that I have increasingly come to see as not fit for purpose. It lacks experience and is flippant in respect of the needs of local communities. Indeed, I have been told that we once had turn up to look at a marine development in the backwaters two officials from the MMO who seemed to be surprised about tidal range and direction.

More recently, the Naze Protection Society waited 13 weeks for a licence from the MMO to undertake vital coastal works that involved protecting a sewage farm from incursion by the sea. Every tide that came and went and every storm that happened made those works more difficult and more expensive. The Naze Protection Society contacted me in desperation, as it had the money, the materials and the contractors standing by but was held up for want of a simple licence from the MMO. I made a couple of calls to the Minister and the Secretary of State, and the licence was issued almost immediately. It should not take a call to an MP to get this simple stuff done.

In my opinion, the MMO is failing. For that reason, I have worked with my excellent local authority, Tendring District Council, which has offered to put in place a pilot that it will run, absorbing and discharging the licensing and management duties. I want to see that happen for three core reasons, which also illustrate why I felt this debate was needed. First, it seems rather odd to me that we allow the MMO so much centralised power. We have seen planning and licensing become core parts of local authorities’ action plans. Councils are accountable and, by their very nature, have a deep understanding of local issues and the local scene. We need to look to a slimmer MMO, more devolution and a non-executive directors board of experts with real-life experience, holding the MMO to account.

Secondly, we should really be moving past all these organisations with people who just seem to collect non-executive directorships. We have spoken a lot in this place about how expensive distant and unaccountable quangos can be.

Microchipping of Pets

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

We are still in the hybrid setting, as hon. Members will have noted. Mr Speaker has asked me to remind all colleagues that they are expected to remain for the entire debate. I also remind Members participating virtually that they must leave their camera on for the duration of the debate and that they will be visible at all times, both to one another and to us in the Boothroyd Room. If Members attending virtually have any technical problems, they should email the Westminster Hall Clerks at their email address, which is [e-mail]. Members attending physically should clean their spaces before using them and before leaving the room. I remind Members that Mr Speaker has stated that masks should be worn throughout a Westminster Hall debate in the Boothroyd Room. Members who are attending physically and are in the latter stages of the call list should initially use the seats in the Public Gallery and move on to the horseshoe when seats there become available. Members can speak from the horseshoe only where there are microphones. There can be no interventions virtually; they can be made only physically. Thank you for your attention.

Moorland Burning

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of moorland burning.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am grateful for the opportunity to debate the important issue of moorland burning. I hope no one in this House would dispute that we are in a climate and nature emergency. That means we have not only a moral imperative to ban this destructive practice, but environmental, ecological and existential imperatives to protect and restore our precious peatlands.

The UK peatlands contain an estimated 3,200 million tonnes of carbon, more than the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined. There is no way that the Government can tackle the climate crisis without ensuring that our peatlands continue to store that colossal quantity of carbon. It would be a catastrophe if it were released and, yet that is exactly what is happening.

While upland peatland should be a net carbon sink, continued mismanagement means that the UK’s peatlands are a net source of emissions. When they could and should be being used for carbon sequestration to safely store carbon, our peat bogs are instead releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reports that that is equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide released by 140,000 cars a year. The cause is moorland burning.

Between the 1940s and the present, there has been a sevenfold increase in burning on peatland in England alone. In Great Britain, between 2001 and 2011, burning increased at a rate of 11% per year. The more we allow that to continue, the greater the acceleration in the climate crisis we will see before our eyes. We will also see impacts on our environment.

Britain’s blanket bogs make up 10% to 15% of the world’s entire resource. Burning peat bogs dries out peat soil and lowers the water table, changing the flora and fauna to advantage species such as grouse, and transforming these rich, biodiverse habitats into distorted ecologies suitable for only a few animals and plants. We have a duty to preserve their vast biodiversity.

The dried peat soil also negatively impacts our water quality by releasing soil carbon into watercourses, which degrades their quality and increases the expense of cleaning our drinking water. That is because the burning harms the sphagnum mosses, which hold water in the peatlands. While the mosses recover, grasses and heather replace and out-compete them, which means that the water runs off down the hills, taking carbon from the peat with it and leading to polluted water. Burnt bogs are consequently less able to slow water flow, which leads to heavier flooding after rainfall.

I am sure my South Yorkshire colleagues will remember the terrible flooding our region suffered last year: 90% of the homes in the village of Fishlake near Doncaster were flooded last November, and, unfortunately, over a year on, some still have not been able to return to their homes. Funding for flood defences is a pressing issue, particularly when the south-east gets double the funding per person of Yorkshire and the Humber and more than five times that of the north-east. We need the Government to deliver fairer funding for flood defences, but we also need to move the debate away from mitigating the effects of the climate and environment emergency to tackling the causes. That means locking carbon in the ground by restoring our upland peat bogs, slowing the water flow, soaking up heavy rainfall and preventing the next flooding crisis before it occurs.

Peatlands also play a vital role in UK water security and must be protected to preserve the UK’s water supply in the coming years. Researchers at the University of Leeds estimate that 72.5% of the storage capacity of reservoirs in the UK is peatlands-fed water. That demonstrates the crucial role that peatlands play in our water security.

In January, the Committee on Climate Change recommended that peat burning should be banned by the end of 2020. The Government have routinely committed to ending the burns, but we have yet to see any legislative progress towards that. Instead, the Government have asked landowners only to sign voluntary agreements not to burn, and they simply are not working. For the sake of our environment, the Government must announce an immediate ban on this destructive practice and restore our peatlands to their natural bog habitats, so that they can deliver for biodiversity and carbon sequestration.

But that is only the first step. Announcing a ban is not the same as enacting one. For example, in my constituency, the moors at Stanage and Strines are both sites of special scientific interest, which means they should be protected areas, yet both regularly see burning. Due to the lack of proper resourcing and maintenance, too many of our protected areas are protected in name only. This Government’s record on maintaining existing areas of environmental protection shows a sustained failure to protect those protected sites.

In 2010, 43% of SSSIs in England were in favourable condition; by 2020 that had dropped to 39%. The condition of SSSIs in England is actually worse in our national parks and areas of natural beauty than outside them. That is a direct consequence of under-resourcing and underfunding conservation—yet another devastating consequence of the last 10 years of austerity. The Government’s own figures show that public sector spending on biodiversity in the UK fell from £641 million to £456 million between 2012 and 2017—a drop of 29%. The RSPB argues that the Government’s approach to achieving nature targets has completely failed due to

“neglect of basic monitoring and compliance, a reliance on voluntary approaches and unwillingness to regulate, and dwindling public resources for action”—

a damning summation.

As well as committing to banning peatland burning and giving a firm date on which that will come into effect, Ministers must commit to properly resourcing conservation bodies so that they are able to monitor and clamp down on any illegal burning and ensure that peatlands are rewetted and restored. That is why I am so pleased to support Labour’s plan for a national nature service.

An expansion of spending on maintaining or restoring our peatlands is vital if we are to maintain our zero carbon commitments, but it is also a way of providing the employment stimulus we need in the wake of the pandemic; protecting and maintaining our peat bogs and our natural environment in all its diversity goes hand in hand with creating good-quality public sector jobs.

We should take inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1942, whose workers planted 3 billion trees and paved the way for America’s system of national and state parks, which were also a central part of the new deal. The national nature service should be at the heart of the green new deal for workers, creating a zero carbon army. We need to manage our moorlands effectively and to lock CO₂ into the ground. At the same time, that would provide a host of secure jobs and benefit many people, including young black, Asian and minority ethnic workers, who have been hit hardest by the employment crisis. It would also help to diversify the conservation sector.

Nobody in this debate supports the deregulation of moorlands. The idea that setting fire to large swathes of our countryside is a responsible form of regulation and management is completely incredible. It releases millions of tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, making the climate emergency worse. It destroys habitats and damages the ecosystem and ecologies. As fires rage on our uplands, they increase the threat of floods from our lowland rivers.

We cannot rely on the good will of landowners to stop the burning—just ask the residents of Hebden Bridge and the Calder valley. We all saw on our TVs the damage done to those communities by last year’s flooding, and many now attribute those floods to heather burning on Walshaw moor. Instead, we need to restore and re-wet our peatlands, using them as one of the many natural solutions to the climate crisis. To do that, we must end the year-on-year cuts to spending on the environment and set out a plan for investing in nature. That means having a national nature service to create well-paid, secure, unionised jobs. We need to lock CO₂ into the ground and to protect biodiversity and our natural environment’s fragile ecologies. We also need to ensure that those who seek to burn protected peatlands face the full weight of the law.

I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to outline the timetable for bringing forward legislation. It is time to end the fires, floods and climate chaos. It is well past time we banned the burn.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

May I remind colleagues that there are five minutes for the Opposition Front Benchers and 10 minutes for the Government. This debate is due to finish at 17.32 pm. I am not putting a time limit on speeches, but we have eight other speakers apart from the Front Benchers and the mover of the motion at this point. Please bear that in mind.

[Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)]

Two thirds of the North York Moors national park—that glorious countryside that many of us will have seen on the television programme “Heartbeat”—lie in the Scarborough and Whitby constituency, and 79% of the North Yorkshire moors and Pennine special protection areas are managed as grouse moors. It is vital—I agree with the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake)—that we preserve that peat.

The North Yorkshire moors are not, in the main, blanket bogs. They are dry heathland peat, and different ways of management need to be conducted on different types of moorland. It is also vital that we preserve these fragile habitats, and if we are to preserve them, they do need managing.

Heather moorland is rarer than rainforest, and 75% of Europe’s heather moorland is in the United Kingdom. Of the upland SSSIs, 60% are on moorland, which has, for decades, been managed in traditional ways.

I remember, as a child, crossing the North Yorkshire moors and seeing people cutting peat for fuel. Indeed, the legendary Saltersgate Inn had a fire that never went out, because, apparently, a Revenue man was buried under the fireplace and it was the only way of preventing him from being discovered. Sadly, the Saltersgate Inn is no more.

It is important that we look at all ways of managing peat, particularly in terms of arable degradation—as a farmer myself, I understand that. We should also look at the way horticultural peat is harvested and—the Republic of Ireland is phasing out its power stations—at how we do not use peat for power.

I must make the point that the North Yorkshire moors are not a natural environment. They are a fragile environment. In the middle ages, the moors were covered in trees, which were cut down for fuel and used to smelt the iron stone found under those moors. Only in the Victorian era did management systems come in that encouraged sheep farming and grouse. That involved cool burning the heather in the winter period, between 1 October and 15 April, when the fire was unlikely to get into the peat itself. That involves burning small patches of the moorland to create a patchwork of different stages of heather, some of it very tender and young. It is the tender, young heather that the sheep and grouse can feed on. The old, woody heather is no good for the grouse and is certainly no good for sheep. It is also no good, by the way, for ground-nesting birds such as the golden plover, the lapwing and the curlew.

If the hon. Lady wants to come and see what happens to moors if they are not managed in that way, she should come to Troutsdale moor just outside Scarborough, which has not been managed as a moor for about the last 30 years and has reverted to scrubland. There are none of the birds that we want to preserve on the North Yorkshire moors. If there were no sheep, who would mend the stone walls? According to her, it would be a unionised army of nature service people, but the farmers are the people who should be farming on the moorland and managing it.

If we did not manage the moorland in the way we do, we would see wildfires. Burning creates firebreaks. We have seen in the United States and Australia how, when they stopped back burning, fires got out of hand. In 2019, there was a record number of wildfires. In 2020, that record was broken, with 110 fires.

Indeed, Saddleworth moor—a moor that has not been managed in the traditional way that we use in the North Yorkshire moors—had three weeks of fires, which produced the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide as 100,000 car years and cost £20 million. That fire got into the peat, as such wildfires do, which is what damages it. I must make the point that controlled burning does not burn the peat; it burns the vegetation and allows the sphagnum moss, which forms more peat, and the young heather to regenerate.

Mowing is not practical on most of the moorland because of the topography and the amount of stones; indeed, that encourages the growth of sedges, which can release large amounts of methane, which has a carbon factor 96% higher than CO₂. That is recognised by the North York Moors National Park Authority, for which it is policy to support the traditional rotational cool burning of heather to maintain the moorland in the way that wildlife, and economic activity such as grouse shooting and sheep farming, need.

I say to the Minister that we need more science before we make any decisions. The science is unfolding. We also need to understand that some people are against the burning of moorland because they are against grouse shooting. That is a perfectly respectable position to have, but they should not use it to destroy the very fragile environment of the North Yorkshire moors. If we do not have a managed moorland, we will have no grouse, no sheep, no lapwings, no curlews and no birds of prey.

When the Minister responds, I hope she will understand that we need to do more work. We do not want to destroy this very fragile managed environment, which has been kept this way for many years, and sacrifice it for some political campaign that is to do with a lot of other things, not just managing moorland.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Hon. Members know that I try to avoid formal time limits, so I will edge towards an informal time limit of four minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) for securing the debate. She spoke passionately, much as she did in her maiden speech, about the impact of peatland burning on the climate, the local environment and flooding.

Labour is calling on the Government to restate and act on their commitment to the legislation that they promised over a year ago. It is imperative that rhetoric on climate leadership is more than simply rhetoric, and they have an opportunity to put words into action. As part of our plan for nature, Labour is calling on the Government to help restore degraded peatlands to their natural state by ending the harvesting of peat and the burning of moors or blanket bog. A comprehensive independent review into habitats and fire risk caused by grouse shooting management arrangements, with a view to new regulatory controls, has been a long time coming.

We have had a very good debate, and there are obviously a wide range of different opinions, from those of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) to those of the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill), who spoke with characteristic expertise about moorland management. As my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) mentioned, Natural England recently published its position statement, which restates its commitment to end burning and to restore our upland peatlands in order to conserve wildlife and carbon. The restoration of those areas to bog habitats is also supported by the RSPB, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the majority of academics, environmental non-governmental organisations, and many northern councils and Mayors.

My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) mentioned that peatland also plays an important role in water and flood management, and I commend her for all the work that she has done on this issue. Our peatlands form a significant and vital part of the UK’s carbon storage. They contain more carbon than the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined but, through the burning of peat bogs, we are releasing huge amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year—the equivalent of driving over 140,000 cars a year. In January, the Committee on Climate Change recommended that peat burning should be banned by the end of 2020 as a “low-cost, low-regret” action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We are facing a great challenge ahead of us. We need immediate and decisive action to ensure not only that we meet our international obligations, but that we are world leaders in the efforts to tackle the climate emergency. Research by the University of Leeds has found that the burning of grouse moors not only releases climate-altering gases, but degrades peatland habitat, reduces biodiversity and increases flood risk. The Government have implicitly acknowledged the damage that burning is causing by including the restoration of peat and moors in the flood and coastal erosion risk management policy statement, and rightly so. Peatland prevents flooding downstream. It absorbs and holds back large amounts of water when there is heavy rainfall, and it releases water during times of drought.

In conclusion, we need to better manage our natural environment, not just oversee its decline. We need to improve biodiversity and reduce our carbon emissions, and we need to protect our communities that are increasingly under the threat of flooding. The Government must follow through on their commitments. It is not enough to state good intentions; we need action.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

The debate will finish at 5.32 pm. If time allows, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) might want to respond to what the Minister says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow]

Mr Pritchard, do I have time to take an intervention?

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

There are two minutes.

[Jim Shannon]

I am sorry, I did not realise the time. I just want to ask the Minister very quickly whether she might have conversations with the likes of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation and the Countryside Alliance to gauge the opinion of those who manage the moors, to come up with a policy that everyone can agree on.

[Rebecca Pow]

Thank you so much for raising that. I do talk to all those people. I have been out with gamekeepers to look at the land. We have to get this right; we do not want to make enemies. We have to work together. There have got to be ways. We will release our peat strategy soon and there will be some detailed information in there. It will cover all things relating to peat and these other sections, as well as the land managers. The Government have made a commitment to do something about this. We do have to do something about climate change, do we not, Chair?

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

I am neutral.

[Rebecca Pow]

Yes; sorry. And we have to do something about our carbon storage, our wildlife protection, our clean water and our flood control.

I will wind up now. I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam for raising the topic and I thank everyone for their input. It is a fiery and a heated topic, and there will be more water coming under this bridge.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

For the purposes of the record the Chair is neutral in all debates, but without telling anybody, of course we need to tackle climate change. I have probably broken the rules.

[Olivia Blake]

I thank everyone who has taken part in today’s rowdy debate. I want to quickly clarify a few points, if I may, about the body of scientific evidence. I will quote from the International Union for Conservation of Nature peatland programme’s position statement. The first point states:

“The current body of available scientific evidence indicates that burning on peatland can result in damage to peatland species, microtopography and wider peatland habitat, peat soils and peatland ecosystem functions.”

The second point, which is what I have been getting at, states:

“Healthy peatlands do not require burning”

to be maintained. I am not saying for one moment that our moorlands do not need to be maintained, but that the practice of burning creates a self-reinforcing circle. We burn the heather, it comes back, then we burn it and dry it out, and then it comes back. That is why the number of fires has been increasing year on year. Finally, just on identity politics—

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions. Have a good evening.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. That is why earlier this week we had a detailed workshop with both retailers and food processors to identify what they would like to do and what changes to competition law we would need to consider and implement. We are working on that right now.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

Telford and Wrekin Council will now have to deliver 5,000 free school meals a day without being able to do so through schools, except for key workers’ children. What more can the Government do, given that many volunteers and people working in charities who might offer to backfill where support is required may be self-isolating or may have been encouraged by the Government to self-isolate? There really is an issue with logistics.

[George Eustice]

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is working on a national volunteer project to co-ordinate the many offers of volunteer help that we have had. In the context of food, we have been working very closely with supermarkets to expand their click-and-collect services to make it easier, where possible, for them to expand their delivery capacity to homes. We continue to work with other groups to identify how we can get food to people at this difficult time.

River Severn Flooding

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the flooding of the River Severn.

I am grateful to have been called to speak in this debate on the recent flooding of the River Severn. I am sure that Members are aware of how badly Shrewsbury has been affected as a result of that flooding. The part of Shrewsbury where I live, Coton Hill, was badly affected, with terrible damage and flooding in my neighbourhood. However, over the past few days and weeks I have spent quite a bit of time in another bit of Shrewsbury, Coleham, which has also been badly affected by these floods. I will refer to a couple of people whose situations I am very conscious of, some of whom I have met: Lee and Sandra from The Hair Forum, Rachel from The Glam Studio, and G. O. Elson, who is in his 50th year as a local butcher. Seeing the devastation that has happened in those people’s neighbourhoods and the financial damage caused to their businesses has been galling.

Yesterday, I met with Peter Nutting, the leader of Shropshire Council, when he came to the House of Commons. He informed me that over 300 businesses and residential properties had been affected just in Shrewsbury, and estimated that the cost of clearing up from the ramifications of this flood will be over £1 million in my constituency alone. Of course, the Bellwin scheme will help, but a large chunk of money will not come from that scheme; Shropshire Council is having to find that money itself. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) and my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) will attest, our local council is grappling at the moment with the massive, spiralling costs of adult social care, and is running a deficit and struggling to make ends meet as it is. Those additional costs will be very problematic for it.

Local residents have stressed that action is needed, as problems with insurance and future floods will finish off many independent traders. I spoke to one bed and breakfast hotel owner who lost £30,000 over the course of these events. He was near tears as he showed me the devastation to his hotel. As is typical for businesses, his hotel will not only suffer during the floods, but for days and weeks afterwards. The media are very good at highlighting that Shrewsbury has flooded and very good at showing pictures of a flooded Shrewsbury, but not so good at subsequently informing citizens around the United Kingdom that those floods have alleviated. Whether a business is a local pub, a local hotel or whatever else, its books will be significantly down, not just over the course of the floods but in the following days and weeks.

Seeing the devastation and listening to the heartbreaking stories has hastened my resolve to get action for these hard-working entrepreneurs. That is why on Wednesday 26 February, I was here in the House of Commons rather than in my constituency with my electorate, because I wanted to challenge the Prime Minister at Question Time, to share with him what was going on in Shrewsbury, and to try to secure some sort of commitment from him. If she checks Hansard, the Minister will see that in response to my question, the Prime Minister assured me on the Floor of the House that whatever work the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency do together to alleviate the problems on the River Severn, and whatever solution they come up with, he will ensure that the Government support that solution. I am going to hold the Government to account on this issue and make sure that the Prime Minister fulfils the commitment that he made to me.

I am obviously delighted that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced a massive additional allocation of taxpayers’ money for flood alleviation schemes in this afternoon’s Budget. With that in mind, we are going to ensure, hopefully collectively—I am pleased that other right hon. and hon. Friends from constituencies along the River Severn are also present—that we fight for our share of those additional resources to make sure a holistic solution is found for the Severn.

Last week I asked the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to visit Shrewsbury, and I am grateful that he took the time to visit my town. He met flood victims and also came to Shirehall, the council building in Shrewsbury, to meet with local councillors including Peter Nutting, as well as with council officials including Mark Barrow and others, who are in the audience today. He received a presentation on a topic I hope to address later: the River Severn partnership, which is a holistic, collective approach of communities and organisations up and down the River Severn, working together to come up with a credible solution for managing that river. We will then want the Government to support that solution.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend on having secured this debate, and have absolutely no doubts that he will hold the Government to account. He has already alluded to some heart-wrenching stories, but does he agree that there have also been some very positive stories, and that we should pay tribute to local authority workers, Shropshire Council, Telford and Wrekin Council, the Environment Agency and the emergency services? All those groups have done a huge service to the people of Shropshire.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I could not agree more, and I am sure that all of my right hon. and hon. Friends from Shropshire will join him in paying tribute to those people.

The River Severn partnership is a strategic coalition of 18 organisations, including local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, water companies and the Environment Agency. It has an agreed memorandum of understanding aimed at working collaboratively to develop a comprehensive long-term approach to management of the River Severn. Here, we have an established group of all the relevant and appropriate bodies, working together on an innovative and forward-looking holistic solution that could literally be a game-changing approach to flood management.