Flood Risk Management

Fabian Hamilton Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

There is a contradiction at the heart of the Government’s policy on flood alleviation. In answer to a parliamentary question about flood risk, the Minister told me that

“The latest UK climate science confirms that rising sea levels and more severe and frequent rain storms are likely to occur—resulting in increasing flood and coastal erosion risk.”—[Official Report, 20 January 2011; Vol. 521, c. 922W.]

He said that the Environment Agency suggests that river flows may increase by 20% by later this century.

On the same day but in answer to another question, the Minister said that the flood risk management budget, paid by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to the Environment Agency, would fall from £354 million this financial year—the Government inherited that figure from the former Labour Administration—to £259 million next year. That is a reduction of 27%. It does not make sense to reduce public investment in flood risk management when those risks, and the costs that flow from those risks, are increasing.

Capital funding in Yorkshire has been hit harder than in any other region. According to a letter from the deputy chairman of the Environment Agency to the Yorkshire regional flood defence committee, funding has fallen by more than 50% compared with last year. Why has my region suffered a larger cut in Government funding than all the others?

The consequences for Yorkshire have been blunt. Three schemes in the Environment Agency’s programme were to have gone ahead in 2011-12. All three have been axed. The York scheme would have provided improved flood defences for the Water End and Leeman road areas of the city. There was a scheme for Thirsk. There was a large scheme to protect Leeds city centre, and York still needs flood defences to be provided in the Clementhorpe area, but that was not included in the original programme.

The Environment Agency tells me that those schemes have been deferred indefinitely, but I was pleased to hear the Minister saying in response to an urgent question in the House earlier today that the schemes have not been cancelled. Will he explain to my constituents the exact status of those schemes? If they have not been cancelled, I presume that it is envisaged that they will go ahead. Will he give us a time scale for when those schemes are to go ahead?

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that there is considerable urgency for flood schemes in the city of York? I shall be talking about Leeds later, but when I lived in the city of York the Kings Arms was flooded almost to extinction almost every other year. Does he not agree that we badly need these schemes, especially those for York and Leeds?

[Hugh Bayley]

The River Ouse, which flows through the centre of York, drains water from about 3,000 sq km of the Pennines. When there is heavy rainfall, the river rises enormously. At the moment, York has severe floods; the river has risen by about 15 feet above its summer level. When that happens, the Kings Arms public house gets flooded. I am sorry to say that there is no defence in the world that will stop it being flooded several times a year. It almost trades on the novelty of being built in such a way that people can simply hose down the mess and get on with the drinking.

Hundreds of private homes in York—and hundreds of businesses in York; I shall say more about them later—suffer catastrophically when the river rises. In 2000, when the River Ouse rose to its highest recorded level in 400 years, some 350 homes were flooded, and hundreds more came within a whisker of devastation. I left my job as a junior Minister then and went back to York to join Silver Command, which managed the crisis. I remember clearly the November night when hundreds of local residents and 500 soldiers from the 2nd Signal Regiment were sandbagging the Leeman road and Water End area, putting sandbags on top of the existing flood defences to protect the homes behind. Those homes came within a centimetre of being inundated. About 380 homes most certainly would have been inundated, and perhaps another 120 were at risk. Indeed, the leader of York city council was evacuated from his home; he lived in the area at the time.

I shall quote from a statement prepared for this debate by York city council’s chief engineer:

“Water End is shown in the York Strategic Flood Risk Plan as being an area of Rapid Inundation and failure of the existing defences in times of a severe flood could result in a depth of water inside properties in excess of l m, in a very short period of time.”

I remember preparing evacuation plans 10 years ago. Our fear was not that we would have seepage and slowly rising water levels in people’s homes, but that the flood defences might collapse. The engineers believed that that was a real danger, so much so that we tipped thousands of tons of sand and gravel behind the built flood defences to strengthen them. If they had collapsed, we could have had a wall of water running through the centre of York, which would have caused absolute devastation.

The City of York council received advice from the Association of British Insurers about the cost of repairs if the Leeman road and Water End flood defences were overtopped. The calculations were based on 382 homes being inundated. ABI’s advice was that the cost of repairing each of those homes would be between £20,000 and £40,000. The total cost of repairs for one flooding event would be £11.5 million, almost twice the cost of the flood defence scheme that the Environment Agency has deferred. The community largely consists of two-bedroom Victorian railway cottages. Many of them are privately rented, and others are owned by people on low to modest incomes—the priority group that the Government say should be helped by the new flood defence plans.

Ten years ago, 100 or so homes in the Clementhorpe area of York were inundated. It received a lot of attention because one of the streets involved is called River street. The papers all carried pictures of firemen evacuating people by boat. That area, too, needs protection. A temporary scheme has been provided by a private benefactor, but it does not work as the council would like, so it is not being used at the moment. Before this debate, I asked the Association of British Insurers and individual insurers, and I am grateful for their advice. For obvious reasons, insurers are always cautious about telling the public how much they pay out in claims. One told me that in York it has paid out £12.5 million in claims for flood damage—800 claims in all—over the past decade. The claims peaked in 2000 when it paid out in respect of 286 properties, and again in 2007 when it paid out in respect of 247 properties. The average claim per property flooded was £25,000.

When we debate the problems and risks of flooding, we often talk about home owners and households. It is quite right that individual people—our constituents—should be at the front of our minds, but we must not forget that businesses are very seriously affected, too. I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham) is nodding his head. He has had a much more recent experience of flooding than, thankfully, we have had in York.

In response to the Government cuts in capital flood defence schemes, Gary Williamson, the chief executive of the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire chamber of commerce said:

“I find it extremely concerning that the Government would take such a gamble with York and North Yorkshire economies. The cost of flood damage can have a devastating effect on businesses and is something that small, independent businesses and retailers may struggle to recover from.”

The impact of the floods in 2000 on businesses in York was catastrophic. Visits to main attractions, such as York Minster and the Jorvik Viking Centre, dropped by 94%, from 5,425 in November 1999 to 356 in November 2000. Once the flood had gone, the number of visits was down by 86%. Bed occupancy in hotels was down by a third. Retail business was down between 30% and 50%—it varied from shop to shop—in the busy pre-Christmas shopping period. The York Minster shop suffered a 72% fall in sales. Overall, as a result of the floods in 2000, there were 200,000 fewer visitors to the city, costing something in the region of £10 million, and that ignores all the other business and commerce in the city that suffered as a result of the flood and the subsequent severing of a railway line. The railway is an extremely important commercial highway, pipeline or communication link for York. When the line just south of York in Selby was severed by the flooding, it cost the city far, far more.

What will the Minister do to get the Leeman road and Water End scheme back on track, working with me, as MP for the city, and the local authority, the City of York council? Like all hon. Members, I understand that the country’s macro-economic position is weak. In the last published quarterly figures, we learned that the economy had contracted by 0.5%. Economists are now asking what the Chancellor’s plan B is should the country fall back into recession; in other words, two consecutive quarters of contraction of the national economy. Of course Labour has argued that the deficit must be brought under control, but the way in which the Chancellor is doing that is too fast and the cuts that he is implementing are too deep. In the run-up to the Budget, the Chancellor will obviously be considering his options. He may not announce it in the Budget, but it is perfectly obvious to all of us in this Chamber that the Treasury is considering a plan B. If the Chancellor were to respond to the worsening economic situation by relaxing the pace of public expenditure cuts, the most obvious place to provide an expansion—or perhaps a lesser contraction—of public expenditure would be in relation to capital schemes. We know that there is a current account deficit, but even when Governments are running a current account deficit, they continue to invest over the long term, and rightly so. When someone buys a house, they take out a mortgage for 25 years. When the Government invest in flood defences, they also need to borrow and pay back over a long period of time and pay back, because flood risk is a long-term risk and the flood defence will be there for 50 or 100 years and the capital scheme needs to be financed over that period.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) for initiating the debate this afternoon.

After the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), had made a statement to the House on flooding on 17 December 2008, I asked him a question about his proposed trial areas for surface water management in Leeds. My question was about an area in the Roundhay ward of my constituency called the Wellhouses—a series of residential streets through the middle of which runs Gledhow beck. I had been approached by local residents who were concerned that they had the responsibility for maintaining the banks of the beck, which frequently overflows during heavy rain, exacerbated by the excessive outflows of water from the balancing lake in Roundhay park. As always, my right hon. Friend was courteous and helpful in his reply, and promised to let me know whether Gledhow beck would come under his plans to transfer surface water management to local authorities such as Leeds—one of his trial areas—in 2011. The subsequent answer was that it would.

Surface water management might appear to many to be a rather dry and uninteresting issue until their homes are flooded by exceptional rainfall or overflowing balancing lakes. I took up the issue affecting the residents of the Wellhouses because I was shown first hand the appalling damage that could be done in an instant to the homes of people I am privileged to represent. Most people never give a moment’s thought to the merest possibility of their homes being flooded, until it happens.

It is true that many parts of the hilly city of Leeds will never be in danger of flooding. Where I am fortunate to live—in Pudsey to the west of the city, between Leeds and Bradford—we are more than 650 feet above sea level and can be complacent. However, much of Leeds is built around the River Aire, and is therefore susceptible to flooding. On 15 June 2007, Leeds city centre came very close indeed to being overwhelmed by water, after days of appalling weather when a whole month’s rainfall fell in 24 hours—Leeds was not unique in that, that summer. Many city centre roads were under water, and the city almost came to a juddering, squelchy halt. On 27 June 2007, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that more than 6 cm of rain had fallen during the previous nine hours,

“causing millions of pounds worth of damage to flooded homes, schools and businesses. Dozens of trains were cancelled and roads were gridlocked as the city tried to cope with the torrential downpour, the heaviest on a single day for 50 years.”

Suzanne McTaggart’s report added:

“The latest stormy weather comes after heavy rain hit Leeds just over a week ago, when rivers threatened to burst their banks and roads became waterways. Many areas saw six weeks worth of rain in just 24 hours yesterday…making this the wettest June ever—and possibly the wettest month since Met Office records began in 1882.”

On its excellent website, the Environment Agency says of its proposed Leeds River Aire flood alleviation scheme:

“Leeds has suffered from localised flooding in recent years which caused significant disruption to local residents, businesses and commuters. However, these floods were relatively small and there is always the risk of a much larger flood.”

The Environment Agency’s latest briefing on the Leeds scheme tells us that the agency is now working closely with Leeds city council to come up with an affordable scheme. It estimates that the current comprehensive scheme would cost about £190 million and would involve building raised defences on the River Aire, thus directly protecting 255 residential and 495 commercial properties and indirectly helping to avoid the flooding of 3,800 residential and commercial properties. The briefing suggests that if the city of Leeds were inundated by floodwater, the damage would total at least £480 million —several times the cost of the flood defences. DEFRA has asked the Environment Agency to continue working with Leeds city council to secure alternative sources of funding or to find ways to reduce the costs of the project, but initial indications from DEFRA, which I understand have now been confirmed, show that sufficient funding will not be available in 2011-12 to proceed to detailed design.

I intend no disrespect to my good friends who represent the great Yorkshire cities of Hull, Bradford and Sheffield, or, of course, to the wonderful people who live in those cities, when I say that Leeds is without doubt the engine of the whole Yorkshire regional economy. Like every other city in the UK, with the possible exception of London, Leeds has been badly hit by the economic downturn, but it still draws in tens of thousands of commuters every day, who come to work in the many businesses, legal practices and financial institutions that operate from Leeds city centre. Leeds is still the largest financial centre in England outside London—hon. Members can forget about Manchester. Imagine what would happen if the “relatively small” floods in 2007 became a much larger flood, as the Environment Agency fears they might, swamping the centre of Leeds, its wealth-generating businesses and its newly built apartments and homes.

Spending a relatively small amount now could, however, help to prevent catastrophe in the future. With climate change making rainfall in these islands ever more unpredictable, the River Aire will burst its banks sooner or later and drown our city. Not only will thousands of homes be affected, but millions, if not billions, of pounds of business activity will be halted, and thousands of hard-working citizens will have their jobs or their lives ruined—all for the want of the flood defences that could have been built, but which the Government cut because the deficit simply had to be repaid in four years, rather than five, six or even seven. [Interruption.] Sorry, does the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) want to intervene?

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

I am not allowed.

[Fabian Hamilton]

In the summer of 2009, I was approached by the residents of Valley terrace, which is in an area of housing just off the Leeds outer ring road, in the Roundhay ward. They were upset that woodland between their homes and the noisy, busy dual-carriageway ring road was to be destroyed and built on by developers.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I assume that the hon. Gentleman’s city, like my constituency, suffered bad floods in 2007. If it did, he should surely attach some of the blame for the lack of action on building flood defences to the Labour Government, rather than blaming this Government, who have had only six months to do anything about this.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I strongly disagree with the hon. Gentleman.

[Hugh Bayley]

I have fought hard for 10 years for flood defences to be improved in York and I would accept—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions are getting a bit long.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank my hon. Friend for that timely intervention. I was going to respond simply by saying that we cannot design flood defences in two or three years; it takes a long time to make sure that we have the protection that is appropriate to the environment and needs of a particular area to ensure that the system will work. A great deal of research has to go into these issues, from not only the Environment Agency, but every other agency involved. That is why these things were not done instantly after the 2007 floods.

Let me return to the points I was trying to make about the little piece of land between the ring road and Valley terrace. Some may accuse my constituents there of being no more than nimbys—that stands for “not in my back yard”—who do not want any further development now that they have their homes in such a lovely area. However, I supported their bid to stop the planning application, which would have destroyed that small area of woodland, because the woodland soaks up rainwater coming down from the hills into the valley where the ring road is situated. I am increasingly concerned—I would be interested in the Minister’s response—that planning authorities are allowing more homes to be built on woodland with no regard to the excessive surface water drainage problems that might occur as a result. I am delighted to say that planning permission was refused on this occasion—whether that was to do with my intervention, I simply cannot say.

That brings me back to the Wellhouses. June 2008 saw the publication of a not very entertaining, but very important DEFRA report, entitled “The West Garforth Integrated Urban Drainage Pilot Study”—hon. Members should try saying that when they have had a few drinks. Among its many conclusions was:

“The report shows that, as soon as serious resources are made available for investigating flooding problems and inspecting the condition of culverted watercourses, then opportunities for relatively modest actions become apparent that can have a significant beneficial impact.”

I am grateful to the Environment Agency, the leader of Leeds city council—Councillor Keith Wakefield—the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire chamber of commerce and my friend and constituent, Chris Say, for all their help in getting me the information, facts and figures on which I have based my contribution. This is an important issue for every resident of Leeds and has an impact on a much wider population. I therefore hope the Government are listening and will make our flood defences a priority at a time when money is in short supply—the futures of so many, and the economy of a whole region, depend on it.