Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

May I compliment my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on the way in which the tragedy for people in the north-west has been dealt with? Some people have a simplistic view about flooding, seeing it as a binary issue and, for example, saying that dredging works in all cases—we know it does not. There are circumstances where capital schemes such as the Minister has outlined are the solution, but in other cases a more nuanced approach is required. Will her team continue to make the point that every different flood event requires a specific solution?

[Rory Stewart]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who was a distinguished floods Minister and is right in what he says. We need to look also at upstream mitigation, which means the planting of trees, the restoration of poached soils, and examining peat bogs and river movement. This is not only about hard defences, and the work that we will be doing over the next few months will focus exactly on those natural measures.

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[Mr Speaker]

Dr Huq, we will get to you. Your question is different, but we will reach it.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

In people’s minds, fossil fuels are obviously a cornerstone of the Paris accord. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the involvement of faith groups was absolutely vital in getting that agreement? Everyone from the Pope to Christian Aid, and many other organisations, was fundamental in making sure that the moral case for tackling climate change was heard.

[Mrs Spelman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The engagement of faith leaders in securing a successful agreement in Paris last weekend was very important. I want to commend the work of the Bishop of Salisbury, who led an initiative in which 200 pilgrims from the Church of England walked 200 miles to Paris to show their commitment to reaching an agreement.

Climate Change and Flooding

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

I am not sure into which category I fall, although I suspect that I know.

First, I express my sympathy to all those victims of floods—Monmouthshire has been affected by flooding in the past, of course—and all those who helped with the clean-up. However, I take issue with the idea that man-made climate change has caused all that. It is unfortunate that the two issues have been mixed up.

We have had few debates about global warming and climate change. Climate change has been with us for millions of years, ever since the Earth was created. I urge the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to ask a few hard questions of those who are frankly displaying some hysteria about climate change. In the past 2,000 years, there have been periods of warming and cooling. It was warmer during the Roman period; it got cooler in the dark ages; it was probably warmer during the medieval period than it is now, and it got cooler again until about 1680, during the so-called little ice age.

One of the first questions to which the Secretary of State should find an answer is how much of the small amount of warming that has taken place in the past two centuries—about 0.8°—is down to man-made carbon emissions and how much is due to natural factors, such as the warming that must have taken place as a result of coming out of the little ice age.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

rose—

[David T. C. Davies]

I have asked that question on many occasions and nobody could give me an answer, but I think that a former Minister is about to do so.

[Richard Benyon]

Ninety-five per cent. of climate scientists seem to suggest that man-made climate change is the problem. Many of us would like my hon. Friend to be right in his scepticism because that means that everything will be okay. Unfortunately, 95% of climate scientists, such as those we met at the Royal Society, disagree with him.

[David T. C. Davies]

I take issue with my hon. Friend. The 95% or 97% figure is floated around often, and I have done some research on it. It appears to have come from the Zimmerman/Doran survey, which was sent out to 10,257 potential respondents, who claimed to be climate scientists. Only 77 responded and 75 said, “I’m a climate scientist and it’s all down to man.” [Interruption.] If any other hon. Members know where the figure came from, they are welcome to let me know.

The IPCC’s most recent summary for policy makers has also put out some misleading statements. Page 17 of the “Summary for Policymakers 2013” states that it is extremely likely that more than half of the increase in global average temperatures from 1951 was caused by man. However, of that 0.8° figure, only about 0.5° comes from the second half of the 20th century. That means that, if the IPCC is correct, only just over 0.25° out of 0.8° was caused by man. That means that more than half is due to other, more natural factors.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change may also like to ask about the lack of firm correlation between the increases in temperature and those in carbon emissions. Even in the past 200 years, there has been a sharp increase in carbon dioxide, but there has not been a sharp increase in temperatures. They have gone up and down. They were going up between 1910 and 1940 and they were going down markedly between 1940 and 1977, leading many to believe that we were on the brink of another ice age. From the mid-1970s until 1997, temperatures were rising, as were carbon emissions, but from 1997 or 1998 until now, there has been a sharp increase in CO₂ but no increase in temperatures. We may wish to ask why that is.

I have had meetings with the Royal Society and the Met Office, and I recently asked that question of Professor Jim Skea—a lead author on the IPCC—in a public meeting at the House of Commons, chaired by Lord Deben. I asked why there had been no increase in temperatures for the past 17 or 18 years, and he said that that was statistically insignificant. That is a fair comment. He was not trying to say that this is about oceans or because the volcanoes are cooling, or any of the other many theories; he said that it is statistically insignificant, and he may have a point. However, if the past 17 years of no increase in temperature are statistically insignificant, why are the 27 or so years before that when there was an increase in temperature so statistically significant that we have to go ahead with all sorts of policies that will have a massive impact on homeowners and businesses in the UK?

Finally—I do not think anyone will be kind enough to intervene on me, although if someone wishes to, I shall be more than happy—

draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme and Scheme Administrator designation) regulations 2015 DRAFT FLOOD REINSURANCE (SCHEME funding and administration) REGULATIONS 2015

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 General Committees

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I do not intend to detain the Committee for long. I add my congratulations to the Minister and all the others involved in getting us to the point—next April, I think—where the programme goes live. The team of officials supporting my hon. Friend have done extraordinary work over the last four or five years. They have even found success in working with the Treasury—and that, in the annals of Government, is something to be celebrated. I also include Huw Evans, the chief executive of the ABI, and his predecessor, who attended many long meetings—some in Downing Street, some at DEFRA—trying to bolt together something that would work.

It is worth, for just a few seconds, thinking about where we were. The statement of principles that so many Members on both sides clamoured for the coalition Government to continue, to roll over into the future, never could have been continued. First, it was time-limited; secondly, as my hon. Friend the Minister said, it had no limit on price. It was going to cause, as increased flood risk continued, a serious problem for constituents such as mine. In 2007, 3,000 households were flooded in west Berkshire and the stress and strain of that experience continues every time we have periods of heavy rain. Although many measures have been taken to stop such floods from taking place, we can now give people the added security of affordable, available—and it is available—flood insurance that will make an extraordinary difference.

There were those who put pressure on us to say that the market could not cope and therefore the solution had to be statist. They were asking us to go down a route rather similar to the United States flood insurance fund, which is costing the US taxpayer—unfortunately, it is a bankrupt system. The threat of a large-scale flood event has caused that scheme to be practically unaffordable in the United States; that proves that we were right to try for a hybrid solution, working with the industry, in which the Government put in a commitment and legal framework to try to set up something that works. Our scheme’s great benefit is that those with the broadest shoulders will bear the biggest burden.

The aim—this is what I want to press my hon. Friend the Minister on—is to move fast towards encouraging and incentivising households up and down the country to realise that if they take measures to secure their house against flood risk, they will benefit. They will start to be able to look at bespoke offers from insurance companies that will create great specialisms in this area. They will be able to have affordable solutions that will benefit them in the years to come. I dispute the idea that Flood Re is a waste of public money; I think it is vital spending that will be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country.

Flood spending has to increase, and I dispute the assertion of the hon. Member for Brent North that it does not. The Opposition amendments in Committee would have required us to go back to the Association of British Insurers and it to go back to its members and say, “Look, we have to tear up these very complex financial models that we have been working on for months and months to dance on the head of a pin.” At the end of the day, it would have failed. The Minister and his Department need to feel confident that they have brought forward the best possible solution that will be welcomed by households up and down the country.

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[Rory Stewart]

From the insurance company’s point of view, in the case of the households that are most at risk, Flood Re provides the ability to lay off the flood component of its household and buildings insurance, which for a basic rate council tax payer is in the region of the £220 to £250 mark. There would be no reason for an individual insurance company to make the flood component of its insurance exceed that amount—that is the purpose of the £180 million pot.

I agree, however, with the hon. Gentleman on the basic questions with which he began, and we certainly need to look at this during the next 25 years: building on floodplains, climate change and increasing flood risk. That will have an impact right across the industry.

[Richard Benyon]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Can I urge the hon. Member for Brent North to be careful about making bland criticisms such as those about building on floodplains? London and York are floodplains. Do the comments apply to those great cities? The issue is about how we build on floodplains and how much flood resistance there is. We can all think of buildings on floodplains that were lunacy and should never have happened—perhaps the Environment Agency was ignored—but such sweeping statements on this important issue need to be qualified carefully.

[Rory Stewart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is correct. Building on floodplains is a question of doing detailed calculations; the point is not that floodplains cannot ever be built on. Scotland provides a good example in the constraints that it has placed on building on floodplains, but Scotland has certain advantages in terms of population movements and the nature of the land.

As my hon. Friend said, there are technical solutions that allow for building on floodplains in Britain in a more sensible fashion, but most important of all is the natural capital calculation. We need to be much more realistic about looking at the social and economic costs of building on floodplains. What are the likelihoods of a risk? How much is that likely to cost the householder? How much misery and distress is that likely to cause them? What impact might that have on house prices? When all that is taken into account, someone might still, for particular reasons, decide to build on a floodplain. There could be very good reasons to go ahead, but they must ensure they have gone through the due diligence and looked at the potential costs and risks of doing so.

That brings me to my conclusion. This has been a good and testing debate, as I have come to expect from the hon. Member for Brent North, and it means that we are now one step closer to ensuring affordable insurance. I am reassured that the Opposition are not challenging the measures. I think Members across the Committee would agree that the work done over the past few months by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury, by the insurance industry and by many of our civil servants—who must be both relieved and exhausted at reaching this stage—has brought us to a pretty impressive model.

I would like the United Kingdom to boast about and share this model with the rest of the world, so that others can see how we have addressed the issue in a pragmatic and focused way. We have done it by working with the insurance industry instead of against it. We have included a very broad sweep of universal provision and have taken into account questions of transition. We have set up a 25-year process. All that shows long-term strategic thinking and market focus, which we should be proud of.

I thank the Committee for the opportunity to set out the Government’s approach on Flood Re and the insurance industry for its hard work. This legislative framework is a good model for balancing pragmatic considerations of how a scheme can operate with public policy objectives. I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme and Scheme Administrator Designation) Regulations 2015.

Draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme Funding and Administration) Regulations 2015

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme Funding and Administration) Regulations 2015.—(Rory Stewart.)

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

Flood Re was established in May and will become operational in May next year. The House will have an opportunity to debate the regulations with me next week.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend reassure me that, as well as the hard engineered projects that will be funded by the large sum of money he has mentioned, there will be soft engineered projects that build on the experience in Pickering, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), which uses natural features such as woodland and coastland wetland areas, which protect coastal communities from flooding? Such schemes can be cheaper and more effective in certain circumstances.

[Rory Stewart]

My hon. Friend has an enormous amount of experience in this area. We can do much more to help on flooding, including restoration of peatland, woodland and wetland areas, which not only benefits flood alleviation, but considerably benefits habitats and the biodiversity that depends on them.

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[Mrs Spelman]

I can reassure my hon. Friend that we are opening up churches to the social needs of the community and using them for a wide range of purposes. For example, churches are being used as citizens advice bureaux, post offices, shops, night shelters and food banks. Let me give the example of two churches in his area of Harrow: St Paul’s has a job club open to people of all backgrounds; and All Saints’ Harrow Weald provides not only an art exhibition facility but a forest school. These facilities are open to all.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is precisely the sort of issue where local leadership in the Church can make a difference? She might therefore understand the confusion in the Oxford diocese, where it has been many months since we had a bishop and it could be a year before one begins his or her new role.

[Mrs Spelman]

I am aware of the circumstances in the Oxford diocese. The Crown Nominations Commission did convene on 11 and 12 May but was unable to discern who the right candidate for the Bishop of Oxford should be. A number of bishop appointments need to take place in sequence, so the next time the commission convenes will be on 4 February. We all hope that in short order the right candidate will be found, but Bishop Colin, the acting bishop, is doing a splendid job and he is confident, as are his senior staff, that the needs of the diocese will be fully met.

Coastal Flood Risk

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[James Heappey]

The frustration locally was that the flooding came after more than a decade of under-investment in local flooding protection schemes. The dredging has been a great success. Farmers and local communities report that the water moved off the land much more quickly this winter, so the dredging had an immediate benefit. The improvement of local pumping infrastructure has also been well received, and water has been moving more quickly out to sea.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I apologise for not being here at the start of the debate, but I was at a meeting of the all-party group on flood prevention—I thought I should make it quorate before coming here.

Did my hon. Friend see the satellite photograph of the Bristol channel at the time of the floods 18 months ago? It showed a plume of soil going out into the sea, which gives credence to his point that we need to take an holistic view in areas such as Somerset and, no doubt, in Lincolnshire too. That needs to be about dealing with not only the problem in rivers such as the Parrett, but land use in the hills surrounding areas such as the Somerset levels. When maize and other crops are planted in the wrong place, Somerset ends up in the Bristol channel.

[James Heappey]

I absolutely agree: we cannot tackle flooding simply by dredging a river, building an attenuation pond or building better flood defences—taking a dynamic, holistic approach to managing the whole area is key. Within that, it is important to recognise what land is used for, and farmers are becoming increasingly sensitive to the impact of what they plant on their land and its ability to hold water.

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[Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)]

This is my first time speaking in Westminster Hall, too, and I do so on a pertinent issue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) on securing the debate. I represent a coastal community that is surrounded on three sides by the sea, so this issue is particularly close to my heart.

Of course, coastal flooding is a particular problem in England, with 5 million properties in England potentially being affected by it, and we have heard from hon. Members about some of the extreme weather that has impacted on their constituencies.

I will pick up on what hon. Members from Northern Ireland, including the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie), and the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), have said about the devolved nations. I will talk about where we can learn from one another, which is quite important. Similarly, one hon. Member from Northern Ireland, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), talked about Europe.

Let me talk for a minute about Scotland, where the situation is a little bit different from the situation elsewhere. Our topography is slightly different, but that is not to say that we have not been affected by the devastating impact of changes in the climate, extreme weather and flooding.

The environment is largely a devolved matter in Scotland, and flood risk management has been a priority for the Scottish Government, who have invested quite heavily in flood defences and maintained and protected funding for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. We have also looked at developing a national picture of flood risk across Scotland, which will help us with investment efforts in the future.

The subject of my first question was raised by the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). Will the Minister give us a slight insight into tomorrow’s Budget? I ask because we are worried about cuts to the budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, especially at this time. The UK’s own climate change risk assessment of 2012 said that one of the biggest challenges in the UK will be flooding and water shortage. So can the Minister tell us why there is a possibility of DEFRA’s budget being cut, and what impact such a cut might have on the Scottish Government?

[Richard Benyon]

May I offer the hon. Gentleman some comfort, albeit without having any knowledge of what is happening to the DEFRA budget? At times of great austerity, DEFRA managed to protect the flood funding budget; in fact, it spent more on flooding than any Government had in any previous year.

[Stephen Gethins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point, and I am glad that the situation reflected what was going on north of the border; I know that he had a good working relationship with the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Food and Environment, Richard Lochhead. We need to talk about this issue, to find out how we can learn from one another across these islands as we face the challenges of climate change.

The hon. Member for South Down said that we were facing a situation arising from “man’s inhumanity to the environment”. We are seeing the devastating impact that that is having on communities across these islands, and further afield. That is why we are interested in looking at climate justice, and considering not only adaptation to climate change but mitigation of it. We also need to consider how climate change impacts on people beyond these shores.

We are seeing the increased impact of climate change. We have taken action in Scotland through our national coastal change assessment and our national picture of flood risk. I ask the Minister what he can he learn from us and what we can learn from him. I urge that the issue is treated as a priority, because it is a priority for communities across these islands. We must continue to invest in flood defences.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

Seven schemes in the hon. Lady’s constituency have now been identified within the six-year programme between now and 2020-21, with a total investment value of £4.3 million. We are also raising money from partnership funding and the private sector, which enables us to protect more homes and more communities.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

In 2007, the community of Thatcham suffered the surface water flooding of more than 1,100 homes. Since then a huge community effort, working with the Environment Agency and unlocking a lot of local funding as part of the partnership funding scheme, has seen a lot of measures reintroduced. The last piece of that work needs preliminary design funding for this year. Will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the new Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), whom I welcome to the best job in Government, look closely at this case, so that Thatcham is protected for the future?