Flooding

Debate between George Eustice and Mark Garnier

Wednesday 4th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

That is correct, and the national Coal Authority sits within BEIS. We have directed it to carry out an urgent assessment of those mines.

The area that was worst affected by Storm Ciara was the Calder valley. Hebden Bridge flooded after Storm Ciara, but not after Storm Dennis. Many businesses there have adapted their buildings to flooding, which were back trading after a few days or weeks. The military were deployed to Ilkley in West Yorkshire, where 700 metres of temporary barriers were erected. They also worked in the Calder valley, building a temporary defence and sandbagging properties. The scheme in Mytholmroyd is due to be completed this summer, and further schemes are in the design and consultation phase at Hebden Bridge, Brighouse, Sowerby Bridge and other locations along the Calder valley.

The area most severely affected by Storm Dennis was the Severn catchment. Since 2007, many parts of the Severn have been protected by demountable barriers. Those barriers are deployed to hard standings and permanent pillars along the river bank and removed when the risk of flooding recedes, so that people can gain access to the river for cycle paths and to prevent views from being affected. Those demountable barriers have been particularly popular with communities and have been effective during this most recent episode. While some homes were flooded, the defences put in place have protected around 50,000 homes.

Tenbury Wells was the first place to be affected by Storm Dennis and had previously flooded in October. Soon after flood alerts were issued, community information officers assisted residents in the town. Sadly, the area of Tenbury is not suitable for temporary barrier deployment due to the length of defence needed, significant access issues and the need for pumps to mitigate water seepage on uneven ground. However, in our future programme, we are developing plans to deliver a scheme at Tenbury Wells protecting over 80 homes and 80 businesses and costing in the region of £6 million, and we are seeking partnership funding to develop that phased approach. My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) and the local county councillor have been keen advocates of the proposed scheme and have discussed it with me.

In Selby, where there were concerns about water over- topping a flood retention bank, the Army were on standby but, in the event, Environment Agency and local authority staff deployed 3,000 sandbags to top up the defences, build the bank higher and ensure that there was protection.

Turning now to Shrewsbury and Bewdley, where demountable barriers along the Severn played an important role in reducing the impacts, there are four phases of demountable barriers deployed to protect infrastructure and properties in Shrewsbury, and all were deployed in time for Storm Dennis. In Bewdley, we also deployed demountable barriers to complement the permanent defences and temporary barriers in part of the town. Environment Agency staff were present throughout the flooding, checking those barriers and pumping water back into the river.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for talking about my constituency, and thank the floods Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), for being there to see the demountable barrier being put up on the very first day. The demountable barriers are one of the finest gifts that one of the best leaders of the Labour party, Mr Tony Blair, has ever given us—in 2001, I think, with an £11 million investment. But the problem for Bewdley remains Beales Corner, on the other side of the bank. This highlights the difference between what is a demountable barrier and what is a dangerous temporary barrier, which gave way and was overtopped. A not-very-good approach was developed at Beales Corner, which is the property-led defences. I do not think they worked in the event of this flood.

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I was going to go on to say that the temporary barriers deployed to the Beales Corner area of Bewdley were overtopped by the sheer volume of water flowing through the town. Environment Agency staff deployed pumps to mitigate the overtopping, but eventually this operation was overwhelmed. I know that staff have continually provided updates to residents via local media, with live-streamed videos from site and post-strategic command meetings to inform the public.

Interest Rate Swap Products

Debate between George Eustice and Mark Garnier

Thursday 21st June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier]

That is an incredibly important point. We live in an ever-increasingly complex world, and banks are competing against each other to come up with more and more sophisticated products that appear to be user-friendly, such as simple fixed rate mortgages. But as products become more complex there are more hidden elements in the contracts that people sign, such as in the one under discussion, whereby in a completely unforeseen period of super-low interest rates, business owners have to pay what amounts to a fee to buy themselves out of the contract’s residual value.

People then get into very complex calculations to try to understand what is going on, and the economic value of, and internal rate of return on, the contract. That is when things go way above the pay grade of most people, apart from those specialists sitting in dealing rooms in Canary Wharf who really understand such stuff. So, as part of the banking review and the Financial Services Bill that is passing through Parliament, we need to look very carefully at the classification of customers and of salespersons in order to get back to the fundamental point that we have to match products to a customer’s ability to deal with them.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

I have seen cases in which, through a process of legal discovery, a very clear e-mail trail has shown banks wilfully deciding not to explain the disadvantages of such products and, sometimes, a complete mismatch between the length of their loans and the length of the product they were selling. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is not just about people not understanding the situation, but about an intention in many cases by people not to inform customers because they wanted the business for their own bank?

[Mark Garnier]

The hon. Member—