Flooding

Debate between Owen Paterson and Joan Walley

Monday 6th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee for her supportive comments. Emphatically yes, we want spending on maintenance to continue. That is why I added a further £5 million to that budget for 2015-16. For further information, although there was a 1% reduction in budgets across DEFRA, I have not passed that on to the flood budget. Again, that shows our absolute determination to protect flood schemes. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to praise partnership schemes. I have been around the country to look at tremendous projects, and only today I was on the Thames where there are prospects of extending the Jubilee river scheme that would require partnership spending by six local councils.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Is it not the case that the sum being spent is way below what the Environment Agency said in 2009 would need to be spent to keep pace with climate change? Is not the real fact that, as the adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change’s report states, the

“extreme events seen in recent years will become the new normal”

and that we need to do far more? We need urgently and immediately to review the cuts being made to the Environment Agency.

[Mr Paterson]

I thank the Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee for her comments. Emphatically yes, we have reacted—look at what we are doing. I agreed a whole range of projects with the noble Lord Smith and we got them passed in a difficult spending round. We have agreed extra funding, as I have just told the Chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, for revenue spending and we have agreed, unprecedentedly, a programme of increased spending on capital up until 2021. We are spending more money in this spending round than in the previous four years, we have brought in partnership funding and we have set out an ambitious programme. We are reacting—the hon. Lady needs only to look at what we are doing on the ground.