Storm Arwen

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise the infrastructure challenges that we are experiencing in extreme weather conditions, which will probably be more frequent given the climate change to which he alluded. He will appreciate that, essentially, a whole new infrastructure not only takes time, but means paying considerable amounts of money, and in the meantime we have to deal with those extreme weather events, so the local resilience forums are very important. He is quite right to say that they do not solve the infrastructure problem long-term, but it is really important that they can act nimbly, because we can improve our infrastructure standards, but we are not simply going to abolish the threat of extreme weather conditions.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

The immense disruption caused by Storm Arwen over the weekend demonstrated how vulnerable much of the country is to extreme weather events. Recently, businesses and residents in my constituency were devastated by extensive flooding following torrential rainfall in the space of just a couple of hours. With climate breakdown set to make such events a more frequent occurrence, can the Secretary of State inform the House what steps his Department will be taking in conjunction with his colleagues at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to improve the resilience of communities such as Birkenhead to extreme weather?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The hon. Member raises an important point, and he also alludes to the nature of the problem. BEIS is responsible for electricity and DEFRA has been particularly effective in responding to flooding, and he is quite right to suggest that both our Departments are working together, as we do with other colleagues across Government, and are more and more focused on the effects of climate change—and that is what it is—on our infrastructure and our people. We are working together to try to solve that general problem.