Climate Change

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

New tree planting is absolutely fundamental to our new ELMS and environmental policies. We have very bold targets for tree planting. However, my noble friend is absolutely right: they need to be in the right place. There is incredibly powerful evidence to show that a tree’s ability to move water underground from the surface can enormously contribute to flood mitigation. It is very much part of our policy.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, over the last fortnight vast swathes of the UK were battered by three ferocious storms in seven days, leading to the heartbreak of many thousands of properties being flooded, some of them for a second or third time. We are told by the Met Office that these extreme weather events will continue and get worse. The Government recognise that flooding is a key risk in their response to the CCC report, but what urgent action is being taken to follow that up and to accelerate building the defences that we will need not only now but for the future to withstand those threats? Can he give an assurance that this action is being accelerated?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I can absolutely do that. We have doubled our investment in flood defences to a record £5.2 billion. with some 2,000 new defence schemes over the next six years. This programme will better protect 336,000 properties, including homes and non-residential properties such as schools, hospitals and transport links. But, as I just said to my noble friend Lady McIntosh, concrete and steel are not the sum total of this; it is also about planting trees and using nature to slow water. That is at the fundamental heart of our new agricultural policy.