Flood Risk Management

Debate between Hugh Bayley and Fabian Hamilton

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]

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—