Farmland Flooding

Matt Rodda Excerpts

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Dyke]

rose—

[Matt Rodda]

rose—

[Emma Hardy]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) and then to the hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke), but I have only six minutes.

[Matt Rodda]

The Minister makes an excellent point. In my area, a major flood prevention scheme in Caversham, which is part of the Greater Reading area, has unfortunately been deferred. However, there is some good news regarding the point that she and the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) made about landowners working together. I visited Kennet meadows and Fobney meadows, and saw three different landowners working together to rewild a flood meadow to enhance the land’s ability to soak up water. Much can be done if central Government and local government play a leading role in co-ordinating work with landowners, and build a team approach at a local level.

[Emma Hardy]

That sounds like an excellent example. I note that the hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton intervened earlier on the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham so, if she does not mind, I will use the last five minutes of the debate to respond to some of the comments made earlier.

We are looking at reviewing the flood funding formula, which was brought up by farmers during many of the visits that I made when I was in a shadow ministerial position. I want to work with all the various stakeholders on that, and I recognise that, in my opinion, at the moment the flood funding formula disincentivises investment in rural areas. I want to have a serious look at that.

I hate to see an outbreak of, almost, unity—although that is nice to have sometimes—but there is much love among Labour Members for natural flood management, so I welcome the comments made by the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham. The Government champion and support natural flood management, and I am keen to explore how we can encourage more of it, throughout England. I have therefore convened a roundtable on Monday to explore opportunities and challenges in the delivery of natural flood management. It will include experts and those directly involved in the projects, and will help inform our delivery of natural flood management. I look forward to hearing from farming representatives as part of that discussion, and have invited the National Farmers Union, the Nature Friendly Farming Network and the Country Land and Business Association. I am keen to hear how their views can feed into Government work.

As has been mentioned, various natural flood management methods can be used to protect flooded farmland, such as planting winter cover crops, soil management, matching grazing density to the capability of the land, avoiding growing certain crops on steep slopes, and blocking drainage ditches to slow down run-off and create wetland habitats. There will be measures that benefit flood mitigation in all three of the environmental land management schemes: the sustainable farming incentive, countryside stewardship and landscape recovery.