Infrastructure Planning (Water Resources) (England) Order 2018

Baroness Byford Excerpts

Wednesday 21st November 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My case is very simple: the legislation does not work. That is why half of Keswick lives in fear every winter. If you go to Keswick today and take a poll on the street and ask people what their major concern is, it is that their houses are going to be flooded. In the last flood in that small town, 515 properties were flooded. Many of them had to be evacuated. So when we talk about legislation being there to protect these communities, I am sorry, it is just not working. We need legislation that works. This order offered us an opportunity to deal with these matters. It could have referred to other regulations which could be introduced to deal with those safeguards but there is no reference at all to them. So I will carry on.

The second point Lynne Jones makes is on scheme funding. She says:

“The way that the EA look at the financial viability of a scheme does not lend itself to a full catchment approach. Funding is limited to the cost of damage to the individual towns and each is considered in isolation. If funding looked at the damage to farms/infrastructure/footpaths etc. from the high fells to the coast then perhaps Cumbria/our catchment/Keswick would have a better chance of getting viable schemes. The EA has trumpeted a full catchment approach loud and long since the 2015 floods but the only actions are, frankly, an excuse to have various NGOs have their snouts in the trough and get money to plant trees/reconnect the river to the flood plain/re-wilding and other tinkering schemes which keep them in jobs and have no real impact on the kinds of flows which threaten homes”.


This is what people in Keswick believe, yet we are putting through an order which makes it easier for these water companies to build without safeguards.

Lynne Jones goes on to say:

“We need to tackle the series of intense and prolonged winter storms that we experience. Doing easy/cheap/relatively ineffective things and expecting us to cheer is not really helpful. I firmly believe that 6.4 of the Habitats Directive is not applied in the spirit for which it was created … Flood risk needs priority over environment. Brexit is an opportunity to improve legislation for community protection from flooding”.


She then says:

“The government’s funding formula is unfair. The Derwent catchment has no money for any major works which could reduce flood risk. The funding formula does not take into account much of the costs which a community like ours faces: damage to bridges, pathways, parks, sports facilities, tourism and business in the area; nor does it take into account depth of flooding, repeat flooding and the detrimental effects it can have on the health and well-being of the community”.


I return to my case: there is nothing about safeguards in this order. We drive such orders through, give these big companies the right to build more of these reservoirs and the regulations are not in place to safeguard communities.

Finally, the letter talks about resilience:

“Government has to stop praising our resilience. We have no choice. Resilience is used as an option instead of addressing the real risks. I doubt the Dutch would accept resilience as an option”—


I am sure they would not. She continues:

“Resilience leaves people open to cowboy builders, inflated prices, product companies that don’t last long enough to honour their guarantees. People are encouraged to buy flood gates when the water seeps in through the brickwork/up from the floor and the only dry section is the flood gate itself. Resilience is useless if flood water is over a metre deep as water then has to enter homes to prevent structural damage. Unscrupulous firms will sell products anyway”.


My point is very simple and I will repeat for a fourth time: this order gives big companies the right to build new water facilities—which the Minister has talked about and we all welcome—but the safeguards are not there. People are going to suffer. There will be more flooding in the future, probably as a result of these developments, because the legislative background that the Minister referred to does not work. People in the north of England, particularly in Keswick, desperately want legislation to deal with a problem that in many cases is ruining their lives, in some cases is ruining their livelihood and in many cases is ruining their health. I appeal to the Government to listen to these people and stop fobbing them off with silly little schemes.

[Baroness Byford (Con)]

I follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and sympathise with the situation in which people find themselves in Keswick. The Minister has already referred the noble Lord to the previous Act and said that there are restrictions in it. If they are not being observed or things are not being done, that is a slightly different issue from what is before us today. However, I well understand the vehemence with which he has—“used” is the wrong expression—taken the opportunity to raise the whole issue of having a development in not the right area and not protected in the same way. I suspect that other Members of the Committee will come back on the issue of flooding.

I support and welcome the measure before us. The question asked earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was: “Who is driving it and why are we having it?”. From my very amateur point of view, it is looking to the future. There are going to be more people and we are going to need more water, so the ability to have four or six newer, larger innovations that will enable us to use water in a better and more sustainable way has to be the right approach. Still, I say to the noble Lord that it is not that I do not sympathise; it has been a terrible experience for people who have been troubled by flooding.

I welcome this statutory instrument. We need to plan for the long term. We cannot suddenly find ourselves short of water with nothing to fall back on. As someone who comes from the farming community, I am only too aware of the many demands there are for growing more food. The one crucial thing that we need is water. For those who live on the west side of the country, water is not an issue—it is there all the while—but for those of us who farm on the eastern side it is a huge problem. So being able to enlarge a reservoir or have desalination as a backstop has to be a welcome new initiative.

The Minister mentioned climate change. I agree with him, whatever the way in which it is changing. I think this last year will have reinforced the fact of climate change for all of us: it was a very cold winter, then we had a lot of rain and then in East Anglia we had three months of no rain at all. So we need the ability to be able to drain off water in order to supply crops. Those in rural areas who were not able to do so lost crops and could not get them off the fields because there was no water to enable it to happen. So we face big challenges.

I gather we have more consultation coming in a draft towards the end of the year. Perhaps when that draft comes through, it could include some of the concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has indicated today. We need to ensure that where new reservoirs or desalination plants are being built, they are in a suitable place and not likely to reproduce the experience that they have had up in Keswick. There have been various consultations, and as far as I understand it they have on the whole been supportive.

I have one query for the Minister about the Explanatory Memorandum. There was one part of that I picked up on and did not quite understand because it struck me as slightly odd. I refer the Committee to paragraph 6.4:

“The development also cannot relate to the transfer of drinking water”.


I thought: why not? I am sure the Minister will be able to tell me why, but it seemed odd that we are dealing with different things. However, I suspect from listening to the earlier debate with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, that it will go back to a previous Act, where something will be written in to define what it is. Again, I think it should be slightly clearer in the memorandum because I do not understand why.

I am happy to support the statutory instrument, but I should like the Minister to bear in mind some of the comments that have already been made on the question of where such developments are positioned. This is a key issue. In some areas, I am sure that people will accept that they need to be there. They may be rural areas—I do not know quite how they would be defined, but in future years we will need to balance flood protection with water conservation and using water to the best of our ability.

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

My Lords, my experience of water retention on this scale is that I was involved in the transformation of Loch Lomond into a reservoir capable of supplying 450 million litres of water a day.

On the volume of water held back by a dam being increased from 10 million to 30 million cubic litres, perhaps the Minister can say whether the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, can take some comfort from the fact that the smaller reservoirs would still be subject to all the regulations in the 1975 Act. I have just come from a meeting where we were addressed by an executive from Anglian Water. He said that it was under severe pressure this summer and that, if it has to extract any more water from ground sources, it feels that it will be moving into an area where damage might be caused. This must be quite a worry.