Farmland Flooding

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Matt Rodda

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered nature-based solutions for farmland flooding.

It is great to see you in your place, Dr Murrison. Before I start, I will draw your attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a director of a farming company. I do not claim to be a farmer—look at my hands—but I am directly involved in farming and I could benefit from some of the measures that I am proposing.

There are two areas that I want to discuss. The first is the impact of flooded fields on farms and what should be done to help them. The second is the impact of agricultural flooding on other areas of flood risk, and what should be done to incentivise farmers to help ameliorate flooding elsewhere by accepting flooding in some areas of their farms.

Before I go into that, it is necessary to look at the background, and I will give some stats to help paint the picture. Seventy four per cent of the total floodplain in the United Kingdom is agricultural land. That is perhaps no surprise, because centuries of flooding and recession have formed some of our richest agricultural land. In fact, 60% of our best and most versatile land is on the floodplain. As a result, the argument about what should happen with floodplains—whether they should be allowed to flood, be rewilded or be retained for agricultural use—is central to the significant and increasingly political debate about food security.

The incidences of flooding are increasing. We can argue about the reasons behind that, although we do not need to do so today. Last winter, there were more than 1,000 flood warnings for farmland, which was a record high. As any farmer will say, particularly in the east of England, last spring the land was inundated with water. It was impossible for farmers to get on the fields until much later than normal, which had a knock-on impact on sowing and a consequential impact on yield for this year. More recently, we had the new year’s flooding right across the country.

We can see from that pattern, and from a much longer one, which we do not need to go into, that there is now a norm. If we look at the new and updated forecast of the change in our weather patterns that we should experience through global warming, although it is true that it will be warmer and drier in the summers, the expectation, which so far seems to be borne out by reality, is that the winters will be wetter with greater incidences of intense rain, which is the kind of rain that leads to flooding. We need action to fix the changing situation.

The first argument I will make about flooding on farms is that watercourses need to be cleared. Not every drainage needs to be slowed down to prevent flooding elsewhere. Although that is very fashionable—I fear that some of that fashion has found its way into the Environment Agency—it is crucial that drainage that is intended to remove water from productive farmland is cleared regularly, either by the Environment Agency or by it getting out of the way and allowing local farmers to do that on its behalf. Farmland is not free flooding for the Environment Agency. That is a crucial distinction between what the Environment Agency may have planned for flood defences lower down the watercourse and the necessary requirement that the best and most versatile land continues to be used effectively for food production.

We need to identify potential flood relief, including areas where the quality of the land is less good and where, in negotiation with landowners and farmers, we can identify historical floodplains and, perhaps, flood meadows. One of the few traditional flood meadows that still exists is in my constituency at Sculthorpe meadow, and there is another one on the Wensum. That is part of only 1,100 hectares of traditional flood meadow that still exist in the country. There can be agreements there with the Environment Agency, to take advantage of the funding that is available from central Government, which I will come to in a minute. There is a potential for farmers to benefit from allowing areas of lower-quality land to accept flooding for the benefit of others.

[Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate, which is important not only to rural communities and farmers, but to people living downstream in larger towns. Does he agree that the sort of discussions that he describes need to be held with landowners quite far up the catchment area, towards the top of a large river catchment? For example, for our area in the Thames valley, the ideal position would be that farmers in the Cotswolds or in the northern part of Oxfordshire are consulted about this, rather than farmers further downstream in the central part of Berkshire.

[Jerome Mayhew]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. One of the beauties of the environmental land management scheme brought in by the last Government is that it has three stages. There is the in-field sustainable farming incentive, countryside stewardship, which has the in-farm elements, and the landscape recovery tier, which anticipates exactly that—I would describe them as in-valley projects. It is right that we should look right across a watercourse in those discussions, but it needs to be done in consultation with farmers, who should not have this imposed on them by a lack of drainage on the part of the Environment Agency.

Where there is flooding of productive farmland, it is necessary for the Government to build on the farming recovery fund, which was instigated by the last Conservative Government. That provides up to £25,000 a farm for an uninsured loss event. I welcome the Government’s announcement that they will provide an additional £10 million to that fund, but that is the start, not the end, of what needs to be done, so that farmers who suffer uninsurable loss to their farmland—their productive livelihood—are compensated.