Sustainable Drainage Systems

Lord Watts Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I know I did so yesterday, but I welcome the noble Baroness to her place. She has great experience in local government and I look forward to working with her. She is quite right that it is important that local authorities take the maintenance seriously. Planning practice guidance already sets out that local authorities should be satisfied that all SUDS have clear maintenance and adoption arrangements in place for the lifetime of developments. In June we published new national standards on SUDS that introduce the need to consider the multiple benefits of SUDS—reuse, run-off quantity, water quality, amenity and biodiversity—and those standards should be used by developers to provide the best possible SUDS and by local planning authorities to assess the quality of proposals, with the aim that they will be consistently provided and, importantly, consistently maintained.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, large storage tanks can be used to store water at a time of flooding and then can be used in a dry period to pump off into the system. Are there any plans to extend the use of those tanks so that we can both deal with the flooding and provide water when we need it?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I cannot give my noble friend an answer to the specific question he asks, but the storage of water when it is available is critical. It was shocking to realise that we had not built a reservoir in the country for 30 years; we are now planning new reservoirs to store water. Also, during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act we talked about on-farm storage, for example; it is perfectly possible for farmers to develop storage on their own land so that they can keep water when it is plentiful for the times when it is not.