Flood Management

Lord Curry of Kirkharle Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in this debate as a trustee of the Tyne River Trust. I know that I speak for us all when I say that our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by this dreadful flooding. I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for proposing the debate. I firmly endorse his comments on Flood Re.

We would be naive to think that this will not happen again or that it is as bad as it gets. We need to ensure that the UK has a long-term flood management strategy in place to prevent damage to property, farmland, roads and disruption of people’s lives. I recognise and commend the swift action taken by the Government in response to the flooding crisis, but the problem is that we need to cease being reactive and instead put in place a long-term strategy that will help prevent events such as this.

The floods that affected Cumbria also affected Northumbria, where I live. Here, the flood barriers that were reinforced and rebuilt 10 years ago were not breached; the water just overflowed. To build ever- higher flood defences is not the solution. We would simply demolish the bridges if we did that.

I stress the seriousness of the situation for the farmers who have been affected by this. While it is very welcome that funds have been made available—the charity sector in particular has been very helpful and made significant impact; I am a trustee of the Prince’s Countryside Fund which has been delighted to help in this crisis—my deep concern is how difficult it may prove to be to access these funds. The application for funds during the Somerset flooding proved to be too arduous and complex for many farmers to benefit. For busy farmers trying to clear their land and cope with the stress of the experience, it was far from helpful. Will the Minister ensure that the system is as simple as possible, while still of course adhering to public sector requirements?

A further issue is that farmers can claim the support only after the funds have been spent. This policy fails to recognise the massive cash-flow problems that farmers will experience off the back of this bad winter. The fact that some have still not received their BPS payments is a major concern. Some have had stock losses. Therefore, the cash-flow issues are serious. I hope that the Government will look at changing this policy to consider advancing payments—either 50% or 75% of the payment—to allow farmers to carry out the work and invest as proposed. What we need—this has been reinforced this afternoon—is a policy for flood risk management that is integrated with other land use. Reliable and evidence-based policy is needed to inform both the practitioners and the policymakers to design appropriate solutions.

A balance needs to be struck between the interests of environmentalists while not being detrimental to the livelihoods of farmers. It is clearly inappropriate to dredge every ditch, stream and river. Precious environment would be lost if we did so. Neither should we rule out carefully selected targeted dredging where it is appropriate. We need to see much more integration between the range of bodies that have responsibilities within individual river catchments, not just the Environment Agency but Natural England, the river trusts, national parks, local authorities and so on—the LEPs and others. One size does not fit all. Not for the first time we often see individual bodies operating within silos. Farmers need to be compensated for the work they do in holding water to protect urban areas downstream. At present this service is unrewarded and comes with great costs. Clearly, we need to include that within integrated solutions.