Flooding

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2020 Commons Chamber

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

rose—

[Mr Robertson]

I have limited time, but I shall give way briefly.

[Mr Robertson]

I am grateful for that intervention.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. As he will know, the River Severn has flooded terribly in his constituency and mine. Does he agree that the Government need a more holistic approach to managing the whole of the River Severn, from my constituency right down to his?

[Mr Robertson]

I thank both my hon. Friends for those interventions, with which I agree. I must move on quickly because of the shortness of time.

The other issue that I wish to raise is house building, or any kind of building, in flood risk areas. It is causing an awful lot of trouble. In my constituency, the current joint core strategy proposes a 50% increase in the number of houses in the council area where I live. Not only does that increase mean that green-belt land is seriously compromised, but we have a lot of flood risk areas. The building of that number of houses in my area will cause an awful lot of misery for very many people.

I am concerned about our approach to building in flood risk areas. The Pitt report of some years ago was somewhat compromised: it said that yes, flood risk areas should be avoided, but it also said they should be avoided unless there was a need for a certain number of houses. I do not think that that compromise is necessary, because when somebody is flooded for more than a year, they really do not want to see more development in their area.

I am rather concerned about how the Environment Agency makes its assessments. It uses maps that in my view are not always accurate—they do not always reflect the flood risk in an area—and it talks about frequencies, but the frequencies of flooding have changed, with flooding now much more frequent than it used to be. Who knows where that trend will go in future?

We have heard it said that we do not really build in flood risk areas any more; we absolutely do. I have shown the Secretary of State a photograph of an industrial digger preparing land in my constituency for houses—and the digger is stood in water. Around 2,000 houses are going to be built on that land, which is already sodden and far too wet. It is a matter not only of whether the houses built on that land will flood, but of water displacement—will building on that land cause flooding for people in other areas? It is a serious consideration. Just this week the Environment Agency said that

“it isn’t always possible or practical to prevent all new development in flood risk areas”;

well, that is going to cause an awful lot of problems for very many people.

We really ought to revisit the policy. I know the driver behind it—I know that this Government and successive Governments have wanted to provide homes for people. I joined the Conservative party during Margaret Thatcher’s time, and one of her great policies was on home ownership, with which I entirely agreed. Home ownership is a fantastic aspiration, but we need to be careful about where we build houses. Building houses for the sake of it will not actually make them more affordable. We risk compromising the green belt and building in flood risk areas for no actual benefit to some of the people who are looking to buy houses.

I referred to the site in my area where an industrial digger is sat in water; that is at a place called Twigworth and Innsworth, where permission has been given not by the local council but by the inspector. The inspector looked at the application in December 2017 and should have rejected it, but the fact that the Environment Agency did not object to the development did not help. Everybody who lives in that area knows what a problem it is going to cause. I shall name one person who knows what a problem it is going to cause: David Cameron. In February 2014, he visited the area. Why? Because the road was completely blocked because of flooding and the fields where the development is now taking place were flooded. He declared then that building should not take place in such areas. What has gone wrong?

I pin no blame at all on the new Secretary of State—he is brand-new to his position and I wish him well—but I ask him to revisit the existing policy on assessing whether land is suitable for development. The surgery that I did at the weekend was very busy, full of people coming to complain about overdevelopment. I think the one message that they would like me to give to the Secretary of State is that we should review the policy before it is too late. Once we have built on land, we cannot unbuild on that land.

--- Later in debate ---

[Craig Whittaker]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I shall cover a number of those points later in my speech.

It is for those reasons that I will not be voting for the Opposition’s motion but, just to show balance, I must say that the Government amendment is also a great opportunity lost, and is of no comfort or consolation to the thousands of people who have had their properties flooded—in many cases, yet again.

First, I wish to mention the Government response. In 2015, when the whole of the north of England was hit by flooding, the Government were quick to announce a support package for each of those affected by floods, whether homes or businesses. Given the scale of the devastation, Cobra was called and a package was announced in the first few days. This time, as the initial Storm Ciara damage was limited mainly to just the Calder Valley, Cobra was not called, which I do not have an issue with, and no package of support was triggered. The next nine days were like pulling hens’ teeth. In trying to get a response from Government, and after speaking to virtually every Department in Whitehall, it was discovered that the package comes from four or five different Departments.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Craig Whittaker]

I will not. I am sorry, but I have too much to say.

All Departments were sympathetic, but none was able to trigger the package without the other. I also discovered that there was a package, but that the flooding of 1,187 properties in the Calder Valley on its own does not qualify for support, because it does not hit the criteria. Will the Secretary of State agree to look at and amend the support package so that we can have an off-the-shelf package that is automatically triggered for any constituency that suffers the devastation of flooding? Under such an arrangement, no constituency would be left waiting for nine days ever again.

I want to make it very clear that we do have three fully funded hard flood defence projects in the Calder Valley—one is partially completed and two are waiting to start. We also have a series of works beyond those projects. Treesponsibility and Slow The Flow are two fabulous charities. One has planted thousands of trees and has plans to continue planting trees around the catchment, while dozens of volunteers work with Slow The Flow on the leaky dams in the moors above. Grips are being blocked as part of moorland restoration in partnership with Natural England and landowners. Yorkshire Water has trialled reducing reservoir levels during times of heavy rain, but it will take a change of legislation to mandate that to happen. Hopefully, that can happen through the Environment Bill, with the amendments that my neighbour, the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), has put forward.

We have set aside money to build holding ponds, but only four have been managed to be built. This is all good stuff, but we are just toying with it. If we are serious about mitigating the risks of flooding, we need to do much, much more of this type of work in the catchment.

I have a number of asks for the Secretary of State. First, can the Calder Valley be elevated to tier 1 status, like the City of London? That would ensure that an annual sum of money would be allocated for a wider catchment plan both to slow the flow of water coming off the moorland and to protect areas further downstream, such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy).

If the Government are not prepared to raise the Calder Valley’s status to tier 1, will the Secretary of State consider a series of pilot schemes for catchment areas across the country? I am talking about six catchment types that all have very different needs. That would require a commitment to annual funding for wider catchment plans, which could initially be developed over a five-year period. These pilots could form a wider strategy for the rest of the country so that we could start to manage flooding much closer within the catchment than at present, rather than consistently reacting to flooding.

I also ask that the wider catchment plan is given to the local authority to manage, as that is where all the local knowledge is held. Farmers were telling me back in November that the moors were sodden and that we would be in real trouble if the rains continued.

My final point is on the Environment Agency. Nobody can deny that it has done a brilliant job on the ground during the floods and on preparing people in the lead-up to them. The response has been much, much better than we experienced in 2012 and 2015. The issue, however, is in the amount of time that flood defence schemes take to implement. The upper Calder Valley has just one main road in and out. The one road has been down to a single lane for three years, while the scheme in Mytholmroyd is still under construction. We have had three years of people sitting in traffic at peak times for over an hour to travel just a couple of miles. The Mytholmroyd scheme was still not complete for the floods last month and, to rub salt into the wounds, the schemes for Hebden Bridge and Brighouse have not even started after four years. The Environment Agency will say that the schemes have to be done in sequence but, according to local water engineers and experts, that need not be the case. My final ask is that the Secretary of State puts pressure on the Environment Agency to get those schemes finished before the threat of our next major flood.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for mentioning Tenbury Wells, which was in my constituency in 2007 when it flooded three times. The fact that somebody lost their life there is a proper tragedy, and when one talks about flooding, there is only one thing worse, and that is efforts to politicise it.

In just two days, we had a whole month’s worth of rain, on 15 and 16 February, which has caused about £10 million of damage in my constituency. Some 110 properties have been flooded, and 389 people were evacuated or led to safety. The fire brigade has done a phenomenal job. It also rescued 30 dogs, 12 cats, 55 sheep, a pony, a parrot and a snake, believe it or not. The village of Hampton Bishop in my constituency was very badly affected. We saw the Lugg and the Wye rise to their highest levels since recording began 200 years ago, so people who think that this was a normal flood are wrong. We had 700 tonnes of water per second going past the bridge on the Wye in Hereford. The Environment Agency pumped water out of Hampton Bishop, but the problem is of the one-in-100 year floods meeting one-in-25-year defences, and we need to do considerably better.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend is outlining the devastation that Herefordshire suffered during the recent floods. We of course experienced similar problems in Shropshire, but the leader of my council is telling me that the Bellwin scheme is not proving sufficient to meet all the demands that the council has in clearing up the mess. Could he say something about that?

[Bill Wiggin]

My council has had the same problem. I would ask the Government to think very carefully about training local authorities in how to manage the Bellwin scheme. Certainly, councillors in Herefordshire have been panicking because they do not necessarily understand how the scheme works, they do not know how much they can spend, and they do not know who to turn to. I think the Department that is managing this scheme needs to reach out to the affected local authorities so that at least the officers there know what they are talking about and can advise elected councillors properly.