Flooding

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement and for updating the House at the earliest opportunity following the recess on the latest situation regarding the floods. I join him in expressing our deepest sympathies to the families and friends of those who have died. Our thoughts are also with the thousands of people affected. This is the worst series of winter storms to hit Britain in more than 20 years, so I also join the Secretary of State and I am sure Members on both sides of the House in thanking Environment Agency staff and the emergency services for their work over the past fortnight, since this period of extreme weather began.

Despite all the efforts of agencies and local government staff, however, it is clear that some communities have faced delays and difficulty in securing the help they need. The Prime Minister heard the criticisms for himself when he visited Yalding in Kent, which suffered severe flooding and where more than 100 homes had to be evacuated. One resident told him:

“We were literally abandoned… We had no rescuers, nothing for the whole day… The Environment Agency said it was up to the council and when I did get through to the council they said if you need sandbags, get your own. On Christmas Day we saw absolutely no one.”

Another resident said:

“The people he’s talking to, the Environment Agency and so on, weren’t here… I swam this road on Christmas Day pulling people out on my own. There was no one here on Christmas Day or Boxing Day.”

The Prime Minister was filmed next to an inflatable boat on his visit, but journalists reported that it had been ferried in 10 minutes before and departed soon after he left. Those affected by these floods do not need stunts or the buck-passing we heard from the Environment Secretary when he put the blame on staff absent over Christmas. They want to know that lessons are to be learned about why some communities faced significant delays in securing the help they needed, and they want to know why lessons do not appear to have been learned from previous flooding incidents, despite all the promises from Ministers at the time.

I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has promised a review to ensure that lessons are learned, but can the Secretary of State assure the House and those forced from their homes that it will begin as soon as the current severe weather has subsided, and will he set out a clear time frame for when it will be concluded? Will he commit to returning to the House to make a further statement on its conclusions? Will he confirm that the review will focus specifically on preparedness for days such as Christmas day and Boxing day, including appropriate staffing levels, especially when storms are predicted?

Will the Secretary of State ensure that the review looks at whether there is sufficient clarity in the division of responsibilities among councils and the Environment Agency? Will the remit be wide enough to look at the performance of the energy companies? As he said, some companies clearly have serious questions to answer about the unacceptable delays in reconnecting homes, which ruined Christmas for many families, and it is also not clear that the Government acted with as much speed and firmness as they should have done in pressing those companies to act.

Will the Secretary of State ensure that the review looks specifically at decisions taken on flood defence expenditure since 2010? His Department’s own figures, verified by the House of Commons Library, which I have here, show that expenditure on flood protection has fallen in real terms from £646 million in 2010 to £527 million this year and will be £546 million by 2015, meaning that we will be spending £100 million a year less at the end of this Parliament than at its start. Will the review therefore look at whether the right choices were made over how best to implement reductions to the Department’s budget, particularly in the light of the Environment Agency’s estimate that every pound invested in flood defences saves the country as much as £8 in flood damage?

Does the Secretary of State still believe that no other areas of his Department’s budget or those of its 28 arm’s length bodies were a lower priority than flood defences when it came to making decisions on reducing spending? Does that include, for example, the £7.3 million he spent in recent months on his failed unscientific cull of badgers—£4,100 for each animal killed?

Will the Secretary of State confirm that the review will consider the warning from the chief executive of the Environment Agency that

“Flood risk maintenance will be impacted”

by further planned budget and staffing reductions? In the meantime, will he reassure those living in areas at risk of flooding that, despite these warnings, he is confident that he can deliver the cuts in a way that will not reduce the Environment Agency’s ability to protect homes and businesses and respond when floods hit?

Will the Secretary of State reassure us that his failure to protect flood defence expenditure over other potential cuts has nothing to do with his personal scepticism about climate science? Has the Secretary of State listened to Sir David King, the Government’s special envoy on climate change, who has today again warned that

“storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently....and the reason is—as predicted by scientists—that the climate is changing and as the climate changes we can anticipate quite a radical change in weather conditions.”

In the light of that clear warning, does the Secretary of State stand by his view that climate change will benefit the UK because of warmer winters? Will he now listen to the advice from his own independent advisers—the adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change—who wrote to him towards the end of last year to express concern that his flood reinsurance scheme misses simple measures that would reduce cost, increase value for money and cope with increasing flood risk?

Finally, will the right hon. Gentleman look again at Labour’s amendments to the flood reinsurance scheme, which Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members opposed in Committee?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to the shadow Secretary of State for her expressions of sympathy and her thanks to those who worked so hard in the Environment Agency and local councils through this difficult period.

The hon. Lady asked four questions about the review. She will have heard me say that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) is meeting tomorrow to work on recovery, and I shall work across Government with my colleagues to look at some of the lessons learned. The hon. Lady justifiably touched on one area which is, I think, a weakness. Although the Environment Agency and the Flood Forecasting Centre have put out very accurate short-term forecasts and although an efficient system was in place for distributing that information right across those on the ground—district councils, power companies, other utilities, transport companies—we saw a patchy take-up of some of that information and a patchy reaction to it. Some reacted very rapidly and were very effective; others had to be accelerated in their actions after a succession of Cobra meetings. The hon. Lady has touched on an area well worthy of investigation.

On expenditure, the hon. Lady is, sadly, simply wrong. Since I have been in this post—

[Maria Eagle]

You are wrong.

[Mr Paterson]

I will tell the hon. Lady; the chronology is very simple. I met her former colleague, the noble Lord Smith, at a tremendous flood scheme in Nottingham, where £45 million had been spent, protecting about 12,000 properties. What was really revealing was not only the 8:1 gain on the properties protected, as she mentioned, but the huge gain in land on the far side of the river that had been blighted for decades. So there is no stronger enthusiast in this House for flood detection schemes than me. I agree with Lord Smith that if we had a programme of projects that we could press on with rapidly, I would do my best to get money from my colleagues in central Government. [Interruption.] All those Opposition Members chuntering have to get back to some pretty basic figures. When we came into office in 2010, this country was borrowing over £300,000 a minute, and we had to take some pretty difficult decisions. In the light of that and the dire economic circumstances, reductions in revenue inevitably had to be made. Following my meetings with the noble Lord Smith, we got an extra £120 million for capital and have consolidated that into an extended scheme that will see 165,000 properties protected up to 2015. What is absolutely unprecedented is our clear programme of a further £2.3 billion up to 2021 to protect a further 300,000 properties. For all the blather from the Opposition, the simple question for the hon. Lady is whether she will nod now and say that the Labour party will go along with our proposal to spend £2.3 billion on capital up until 2021. Mr Speaker and colleagues, it is very noticeable—[Interruption.]