Flood Risk and Flood Defence Infrastructure: North-west England

Mike Kane Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Sarah Hall) for this important and timely debate.

For my constituents in Wythenshawe and Sale East, flooding is a growing concern, severely affecting local communities on both sides of the river. On new year’s day, we witnessed one of the most severe flood events in recent memory: the River Mersey reached its highest level in 66 years following an intense downpour—70 mm of rain in just 18 hours. Emergency crews worked tirelessly and I join my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) in giving my thanks to them.

At Northenden golf club, helicopters dropped one-tonne bags of rock to plug the breaches in the embankments. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Withington (Jeff Smith) and I met representatives of our respective golf clubs, Northenden and Withington, a few days after the event. One of the nightmare scenarios now is that golf clubs cannot get insurance, and that is only spreading. That is what climate change is bringing to us. Manchester city council evacuated over 1,000 residents that day and closed footpaths and infrastructure near the river. The exact same thing had happened just a few years earlier; the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, visited a couple of days later—we thought we had averted disaster but clearly we had not.

Thanks to flood defences, nearly 12,000 properties were protected, but tragically 99 homes were still flooded because of the embankment breaches. On 1 January, the river at Northenden peaked at 3.76 metres, well above the property flooding threshold of 3.3 metres. That was not an isolated incident. When I was a young councillor growing up in Northenden that was a one-in-100-year event, but now it is happening annually because of climate change.

That is not all. The relentless discharging of untreated sewage into the River Mersey by United Utilities also points to a system under strain, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper) mentioned. Storm overflows are designed to prevent sewerage systems from backing up during heavy rain. When they are overwhelmed, the environmental impact is profound. Polluted waters threaten wildlife, biodiversity and public health. The River Mersey becomes a wet wipe and tampon alley for weeks and months on end, making it unusable.

Yet in 2024 alone, United Utilities discharged sewage into the Mersey estuary 1,865 times, lasting for a total of 12,500 hours. That is the equivalent of 1.4 years of continuous sewage, at an average of five spills every single day. That is just the estuary. The combination of damage to homes and businesses and the environmental impact of sewage overflow caused by flooding has created a perfect storm in my constituency and right along the River Mersey estuary. We are paying for it in countless unsustainable ways.

What can we begin to do about the situation? Local action is extraordinarily important to stem the waters entering the Mersey in the first place. The South Manchester urban brooks project, in collaboration with the team at Biora, have come up with a plan to de-culvert Baguley and Fairywell brooks. We have to tackle these issues at the source.

De-culverting and freeing our buried waterways, restoring them to their natural, open-air condition, is transformational: it reduces pollution, improves water health, creates vital habitat for wildlife and lowers water temperatures. Most importantly, it slows the water course down before it ever enters the River Mersey basin at all. That is why that type of infrastructure upstream is critical for helping my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South. It also creates recreation opportunities for residents; Baguley brook in my constituency runs by a cycle path, for example.

When we bring back our rivers and streams, residents gain access to improved green space, which in turn improves their own wellbeing. But more than that, de-culverting reduces the long-term infrastructure costs and acts as a natural form of green infrastructure, which, critically, slows down the flow of water and reduces peak flows during heavy rain, mitigating flooding further downstream.

Bringing back our brooks in a restorative course of action will reduce flooding, but it requires careful hydrological modelling and carries a high up-front cost. It needs funding and commitment from decision-makers to succeed. Will the Minister meet me to discuss the plans in my constituency, to make sure that we take action on the devastating impact of flooding all along the Mersey valley?