Flooding: Planning and Developer Responsibilities

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con) [R]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered flooding and planning and developer responsibilities.

It is a great pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this issue, and to discuss how we can help the Minister to tackle the tsunami of inland flooding that is sweeping so much of the country—not just my beautiful Mid Norfolk constituency, but many other areas. The presence of so many colleagues from different parties and counties speaks volumes about the scale of the problem.

I will start in December 2020, when I fully woke up to the scale of what was coming. It was a lovely Christmas in Mid Norfolk when the phone started ringing, as it did for many colleagues in our part of the world. Along with many people, I spent that Christmas week baling out constituents, clearing out sewage and getting Anglian Water to pump out houses. It happened in not just one village, but seven or eight across Mid Norfolk. At that point, I realised the scale of what was coming and why the issue had been becoming increasingly prevalent in the constituency letterbox. Following that, I set up the Mid Norfolk Flood Partnership with the 14 worst affected villages, as a result of which we set out 15 very practical things that we in Norfolk could do. We set up the Norfolk Strategic Flooding Alliance with the county council, and this year we held the first Norfolk flood summit.

I want to update colleagues on some of that work and flag some of the things we have identified. I commend the Minister for the grip she has exerted on the problem since arriving in office. She is on the cusp of having the chance to do something quite significant for generations to come. I want to highlight the things we are particularly suffering from in Mid Norfolk, explain what the problem is in our part of the world—it is different in different parts of the country—and set out some suggestions that I hope the Minister will take on board in the flood review that she is leading.

To that end, I have arranged an all-party flood summit on 2 June with the four all-party parliamentary groups. It says something that four APPGs have been set up—standing room only—in order to deal with flooding. Of the 400 or so new MPs who have arrived in Parliament, I think 100 have put flooding very high on their list, so this is a big issue; it is no longer marginal. I want to say something about the importance of gripping it at scale, so that future generations do not have to experience the horrors that our constituents have. In other words, I want to put wind in the Minister’s sails to do something that Whitehall often struggles with. As a veteran Minister myself, I know that the sticky-tape solution is often the tempting one to reach for, but this issue, as the Minister knows, requires a structural change in the way we think about water across our economy.

Mid Norfolk—the clue is in the name—is not a maritime constituency. I am talking today about inland flooding, although I appreciate that there is also a coastal flooding problem. One of the issues in Norfolk is that we have had so much coastal flooding that the focus has been on that, and not so much on inland flooding. My constituency is largely made up of Breckland, the glacial clays and sands—a clue: it should not be flooding. It is dry—very dry. Where there is water and sand, there is very productive agricultural land. Yes, we have some lower-lying, very beautiful areas—the chalk streams, the Wensum valley, the Yare and the Tud—where we should not be building, not least because they are sites of special scientific interest and hugely strong habitats, but they are also prone to flooding.

So why is Mid Norfolk flooding? That is the question I hear hon. Members asking, because it should not be flooding. Other areas should be, but not Mid Norfolk. There are several answers, but I will first explain the scale of what has happened in the last five years. There has been serious flooding in 22 of my villages, by which I mean sewage washing between houses, and more than five houses affected at one time. There are plenty of houses that are near a ditch or river and get some flooding; I am talking about at-scale, serious flooding, with chronic consequences for the people affected. I will give an example. At Mill Lane in Attleborough there is a culvert that was terribly designed in the 1970s. No one has taken responsibility for it, and the four houses at the entrance to the culvert have flooded every year for 10 years. Last autumn, 100 houses around Mill Lane flooded. That is when people really started to wake up and understand.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate. As soon as I walked in, a colleague looked at me in astonishment and said, “Is there flooding in west Hampstead?”, and I said, “Actually, there is.” It takes only a heavy rainstorm to fill all the homes in my constituency with water and sewage.

I intervene at this point in the debate because we, too, have a Mill Lane—not the same one—in west Hampstead that has been flooded. The risk of surface water flooding has not been taken seriously, which is strange, because properties in danger from surface water flooding outnumber those in danger from rivers and seas by two to one. I am proud that our friends in City Hall are actually publishing their surface water strategy tomorrow, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that developers also have a role to play in managing surface water flooding? I am sure he will address that, but I want him to know that there are others in this room who agree with him about the role of developers.

[George Freeman]

The hon. Lady makes a brilliant point; at the risk of opening the floodgate of interventions too early, I will absolutely come on to her point at pace, so that Members from across the House can pile in.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. He is absolutely right. One of the problems—if I can put forward the reasoning behind what he is referring to—is the old system of building houses, not just in Norfolk, but right across this whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Having the storm drain and the sewage within the one system is the way they did it 40 or 50 years ago, in the houses we grew up in. That creates a problem for the houses built around that time. Every time there is heavy rain—rain no longer comes lightly, but comes in hurricane-like storms—it brings a deluge of water. The system is not able to cope with that, so does he have a solution for moving forward? This is about not just new developments, but the old developments and the old houses. What was okay years ago is not okay today.

[George Freeman]

The hon. Member—I am tempted to say my great and hon. Friend, since we have spoken in this Hall together so many times—is absolutely right. My constituency has 130 villages and three towns. At the last boundary review, I lost Wymondham because the rest of my patch has had 10,000 new houses built in the last 10 to 15 years. Very few constituencies, apart from possibly that of the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy), have had as many houses built as mine.

That is part of the issue, but another part of it is that developers are tending to build on the outskirts of villages and towns, because it is the easy place to dump commuter housing, but they are not upgrading the drains. Little villages that have happily existed and been able to drain themselves for years and cope with some growth, are now finding huge problems with the existing drainage infrastructure not being able to cope, which leads to the sewerage problem.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. On the point about new developments, does he agree with the Liberal Democrats that making the water companies statutory consultees in the planning process would mean that developers cannot build where the infrastructure cannot account for the new houses?

[George Freeman]

That is a very good point, and I do agree—in fact, I will go a lot further than that, if Members will allow me to get to the radical, central elements of my Bill. However, I do agree that that is absolutely something we need to do.

Across Mid Norfolk, the 23 villages—I will not list them all—go from Old Buckenham in the deep south east, through Wretham, Hockham, Rocklands, Thompson, Watton, Saham Toney, Cranworth, a cluster of co-adjacent villages, north Elmham, Billingford, Lyng, Elsing, Yaxham, Mattishall and right up to Weasenham in my north-west frontier, which should not be flooding. That tells us that this flooding is not just geomorphological. It is the result of housing and the lack of investment in the drainage infrastructure.

The truth is that the patient people in Mid Norfolk—they are pretty patient, given that they have had me as an MP for 14 years—are getting really impatient with this. There is a contract between the state and the citizen whereby if they pay their taxes and buy a house, while they do not expect that much these days, they do expect that their house will not flood because of systemic and structural failures of national infrastructure. When it does flood, and they call, hoping that someone will come and pump it out, they expect the water companies, to whom they are paying very high bills, to be there and to help. However, the service and the responsiveness has not been there—at least until they are able to sit on the answering machine and ring enough times that eventually a tanker arrives. People are fed up with that and with the fact that this has been coming for quite a long time, so they are very excited by the fact that the Minister is gripping this issue.

Let me spin through the problems, as I have experienced them in Norfolk. It is, of course, climate change; let us not undermine the importance of that. Last year we had the eight wettest months on record, one after another. That is not happening for any weird, strange, unexplained reason; it is happening because of climate change. The issue is also that in my part of the world we are building a lot of houses—but the country has to build them, so I do not think that not building houses is the answer. The devil is in the detail.

Another problem is that our agricultural practices have changed. In my part of the world, a proud farming county, we now have a lot of contract farming. The big landowners are often things like pension funds and are remote. The farming is not done by a local landowner, but by contract farmers on a very tight, low-margin contract, with huge bits of kit, roaring around trying to get the job done and scratch a living. In the old days, on the farm I grew up on, in a rainy month we would go and mend the fences and clear the ditches, but that work does not tend to be in the farming contracts. Our county councils have also seen their budgets hammered by the rising cost of social care and through some of austerity 1.0. There is a basic maintenance problem.

We also have a big planning problem. The point made by the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) was a good one, but the real problem in my patch has been that because of the five-year land supply, good planners have said, “Well, we don’t want to build here, and we shouldn’t build there,” as well as holding statutory consultations. Many of the big developers have then land banked—they have taken their permissions where they know they are going to get them and have not built them out—and then invoked the five-year land supply.

The five-year land supply was a sensible coalition policy designed to ensure that a 20-year plan could not be ignored, but it has been used to blow the whistle and say, “You are not building out at your five-year land supply, so we will now invoke the freedom to dump where we want.” It is a win-win. They then dump 100 houses outside Yaxham and 200 outside Mattishall—they want to go near Norwich, dump on the outskirts of a village near a road, move on and not invest. That is what has driven a lot of the problem.

Statutory consultation is fine, but this is also a planning issue. Part of what my Bill addresses is that we must somehow ensure that when developers are building like that, it should not just be that they are statutorily consulted and go through the tick boxes. The only way to make them take this seriously is to say, “Look, if you build, and within five or 10 years of your building there is significant flooding that never used to happen in that area, you’re going to be on the hook for upgrading the drains. You’re going to be on the hook for doing the repair work.” We have to create a fiduciary financial liability that makes the directors of those companies say, “I think we’d better upgrade; we’d better do the investment up front, rather than relying on consultations.”

In the end, somebody has to pay. To be fair, the water companies have got to pay more, but we are also asking them to pay billions to improve pipes, build reservoirs and stop leaks. Somewhere in the system we have to find a bit more money to do the upgrade of the traditional drains and improve the infrastructure. It behoves us all to give the Minister some solutions. Where will the money come from? Nobody in Mid Norfolk wants to pay more council tax; it is already very high and it is going on social care. One answer is from the developers.

There is another problem, however. When someone in Mid Norfolk picks up the phone and asks who is in charge, there are 36 organisations in Norfolk with responsibility for flooding prevention. In Whitehall that probably seems like a low number, but in Norfolk people only want one. We do have one: it is called the local flood authority. It is great, but it has no money and no power.

The good news is that in addition to the LFA we have the internal drainage boards, which have been looking after flooding since about 1550; they really know their ditches and dykes. Colleagues with agricultural constituencies—I can see them nodding—will know that these are the very local experts who know about hydrology and water and how it all works. The problem is that their budgets have either been cut or not maintained to keep pace with demand.

There are quite a small number of areas—I think15 to 20 districts—particularly in the east of England, such as the fens, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and other areas, that have a very high incidence of flooding. The other problem is that where they are being hit, the IDBs have to be propped up by the district councils, which means the residents in those areas are then penalised as funding is—quite properly—diverted into flooding. That is funding that they are not getting into their public services. There is a huge problem with the allocation of funding.

[Terry Jermy (South West Norfolk) (Lab)]

I am pleased that the hon. Member, my county colleague, mentioned internal drainage boards. For every pound that King’s Lynn and West Norfolk borough council in my constituency collects in council tax, 43p now goes to internal drainage board levies, which is completely unsustainable. Does his draft Bill address IDB levies and call for a permanent, full-time solution to the funding issue?

[George Freeman]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is my constituency neighbour and good friend. Yes, my Bill absolutely does address that issue; I will take his steer and get to the guts of it. He is absolutely right; IDBs are crucial in our part of the world. When I first looked into this issue, I thought, “How come Norfolk is top of the league table for flooding?” I soon discovered—even more shockingly—that we are not; I think we are county No. 6 or 7 out of 10, which is why many hon. Members from other counties are here.

The problem is fourfold, and there are four provisions in my draft Bill—I am keen to use this debate as an opportunity to polish it. First, we need a much clearer and sharper set of responsibilities. At the top, the Environment Agency obviously has overall responsibility for flooding in the country, but this is a local problem, so we have to properly empower the strategic flood authorities locally and re-empower the IDBs. At the moment, many of them find that in dealing with flooding they come up against all sorts of environmental green tape produced by the very agencies that are there to stop flooding—as though the Environment Agency is more interested in filling our ditches and drains with mud and wild flowers than encouraging them to drain the water. People feel frustrated by well-intended green bureaucracy that is getting in the way of local solutions, so responsibilities should be put back locally.

Secondly, on funding, I strongly believe that we should be top-slicing and ringfencing some of the Environment Agency’s funding and giving it to IDBs and strategic flood authorities. It would be a rounding error for the Environment Agency—

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

Order. Could I encourage the hon. Gentleman to come to an end, because it is a very short debate and many Members want to come in?

[George Freeman]

Certainly. Do we have 90 minutes?

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

We have 60 minutes.

[George Freeman]

I am sorry; I thought we had 90.

We have to put funding in the hands of people who have responsibility. Thirdly, I want to create planning liabilities for development companies so that they have a proper incentive—not just a vague instruction—to upgrade the drainage.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Earlier today, I met Thames Water and Sutton and East Surrey Water representatives to discuss that very issue. They all agreed that, as professional consultees, their contributions are not given the same weight as those of statutory consultees. My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) has already mentioned this, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that some thought should be given to making them statutory consultees, as a minimum for medium to large developments?

[George Freeman]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. That is all part of the planning mix and we have to get it right.

My last point is about data. When an area floods, we reach for data and ask, “How bad is it? How much worse is it than it used to be?” It is striking that there is not a properly collected dataset. I have a map with dots for all the flooding in my Norfolk patch, but it does not seem difficult to have a properly collected national flood heat map at the Cabinet Office to see where the flooding is coming. If it is coming much more quickly in Mid Norfolk and, I suspect, in many other areas, the Cabinet Office needs to be aware that that is a growing national critical infrastructure resilience issue.

Locally, we need flood maps to prepare for which places are likely to flood this winter. As the former Minister with responsibility for the Met Office, I know that it has amazing data and can now predict when, for certain areas, when it rains to such an extent over in the west, the surge will hit because of the geomorphology. We can now make predictions with AI and other tools, but they are not being done properly. There is a lot more we could do with data.

Forgive me, Mrs Hobhouse—I thought this was a 90-minute debate. I am conscious of time and how many hon. Members want to get in, so I will close. I look forward to hearing the comments from hon. Members from all parties.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Freeman]

Thank you, Mrs Hobhouse, for guiding us this afternoon. I thank the Minister, the Opposition spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), and the—I think—16 colleagues from across the House who have spoken; the rule of 10 normally applies in this place, so there are many others who would have wanted to come. That shows the Minister how much interest there is in this issue.

This is a serious national problem that can only be solved locally, and the local solution is the key. It is getting worse fast. In Norfolk, 1,000 houses have been flooded and 200 have had internal floodwater in the past 18 months. That did not happen five or six years ago. It is getting bad, and it is costing the county and the country a fortune. This quarter—Q1—there was £200 million-worth of approved claims, which is up by £67 million on the previous quarter. This is getting a lot worse very fast.

On behalf of all those people who are very nervous and worried—one constituent was so worried about this that they took their own life—I urge the Minister to be bold and brave. I urge her to strike a blow for local communities and local experts, and give them the power and funding to do what they know how to do best.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered flooding and planning and developer responsibilities.