Flood Recovery Framework

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Flood Recovery Framework.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I look forward to the debate, which is important because flooding remains a highly topical issue for many of our constituents who have suffered the appalling consequences of flooding this winter. I regret to predict that many more may suffer that fate during the years ahead as climate change provides more rainfall events of more persistent duration and at unpredictable times of the year.

However, I am not here to forecast the weather or to dwell on the causes or impacts of climate change. There are plenty of other opportunities to do that, not least through the work of the Environmental Audit Committee —which I have the honour to chair—and our latest, recently launched inquiry on climate and security. The consequences of flooding for national infrastructure are one of the issues being considered.

I will offer a few initial words of context on the flooding challenge we face. The Met Office’s “State of the UK Climate” report in 2022 confirmed how the UK has become wetter over the past few decades, albeit with significant annual variation. The third UK climate change risk assessment in 2021 identified flooding as one of the most important climate change adaptation challenges facing the UK. Six of the 10 wettest years on record in the UK have occurred since 1998, and this past year has seen the most rainfall for any 18-month period in England since Met Office rainfall records started in 1836.

[Darren Henry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for securing the debate. My constituency saw devastating flooding to homes and businesses during Storms Babet and Henk. Each time such storms occur, the same areas of Broxtowe are severely damaged. Does he agree that we must act now, not just to compensate, but to ensure that we mitigate against that level of damage occurring in the future?

[Philip Dunne]

I will go on to talk about multiple flood events involving the same properties, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right: there is an obligation on the Environment Agency, as the lead on this issue, to identify preventive measures that can be taken to stop flooding of properties. Few things are more devastating for a householder than to see their home get flooded, but one can barely imagine what it must be like to live through that multiple times. Most of us in the Chamber do not need to use our imaginations to know what that means—we have seen it at first hand in our constituencies, as my hon. Friend has just identified.

About 5.7 million homes and businesses in England are at risk of flooding, and more than half of the best, most fertile farmland in Britain is on flood plains. That is particularly relevant in the River Severn catchment, which crosses Shropshire. The River Severn Partnership—whose parliamentary caucus is ably chaired by my neighbour, the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), who I am pleased to see in his place—has formed to work with local authorities and MPs along the length of the catchment, and with the Environment Agency and others, to seek holistic solutions to adapt to those conditions and reduce flood risk.

Flood risk is a real and present danger. Latest estimates suggest that, by the end of this century, the River Severn will be 0.85 metres higher on average across the year and up to 1.5 metres higher during winter flood levels, although it is expected to be lower in summer, with 25% less water available for abstraction by as soon as 2050. In the past three years, we have already experienced three of the five worst floods ever recorded along the River Severn and, as yet, no climate allowance has been built into the considerable defences installed.

Regrettably, the River Severn catchment accounts for a disproportionate degree of flood events. In February 2022, 44 of the 80 flood warnings put out nationally were for the River Severn. Even when the catchment is not at the centre of storm events, we are often affected in Shropshire. Properties along the River Severn have been flooded twice in the past six months. In October, Storm Babet flooded 109 properties internally and 28 businesses, and in January, Storm Henk flooded 74 properties and 32 businesses. Those figures almost certainly understate the impact, as some people do not report to their local authority or insurer for fear of losing access to insurance in the future.

Putting in place the right preventive measures to reduce the risk of flooding is what the River Severn Partnership is all about, but that is a discussion for another day, unless my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham wants to intervene on that topic, given that I mentioned him.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

This is the first time in 19 years that someone has encouraged me to intervene on the, so I am very grateful. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend—my constituency neighbour—who has been one of the most active in the caucus of 37 MPs along the River Severn, which I chair, and I very much welcome his debate. Does he agree that it is essential that we work in collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to continue to lobby the Treasury on the £500 million business case we submitted to finally manage and maintain Britain’s longest river?

[Philip Dunne]

I am very pleased to have created a first in my hon. Friend’s parliamentary career, and I am sure it will not be the last. I invite him to apply for a Westminster Hall debate to discuss the work of the River Severn Partnership; I would be happy to support it. We did indeed submit proposals to the Treasury—in fact, to the Chancellor himself—on the River Severn Partnership bid for significant funding to look at a whole range of remediation and adaptation options upstream, going as far as the source of the River Severn in Wales.

This morning’s debate is about ensuring that the right support mechanisms are in place for those who have been affected by flooding. A range of measures offer financial and practical help, including schemes for householders, businesses and farmers. Some are of long standing, such as the Bellwin emergency relief scheme, and others were introduced more recently by the Conservative Government in 2017 through the flood recovery framework to provide more targeted support.

However, the support is a complex patchwork, as one glance at the House of Commons Library briefing for this debate shows: there are several elements of support, with different eligibility criteria, applicable to different entities that have suffered flood damage. Home and business support is primarily managed through local authorities under schemes for which the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has lead responsibility. They include the community recovery grant, council tax reductions, the business recovery grant and business rate reductions.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

In my constituency, flooding has been absolutely appalling for the past 18 months. As my right hon. Friend said, the level of rainfall has been virtually double the average virtually every single month. I have the broads in my constituency, great swathes of which are still under water, and the water table is very high. That leads to multiple problems, including groundwater from the amount of rainfall and erosion. My right hon. Friend spoke about the patchwork nature of the schemes and the lack of co-ordination. What can be done to bring together the stakeholders—the water companies, the county councils, the internal drainage boards and the Environment Agency—so they work in a more co-ordinated fashion? At the moment, the response is often slow and there is a lack of funding, so there should be an overarching body that co-ordinates the response far better.

[Philip Dunne]

I am very grateful for that important intervention from my hon. Friend, who is a valued member of the Environmental Audit Committee. He is right to point out how complex it is to get to grips with the situation, given that different responsibilities fall in different places. I encourage him to consider the work being led by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham in the River Severn catchment in creating a partnership involving all the local authorities in the area, the Environment Agency and the non-governmental organisations that have an interest in the issue, such as the Wildlife Trust and the various broad and fen groups, as well as the internal drainage boards, which have a vital role to play. In many cases, such groups find it hard to come together regularly; there may even be a role for an enterprising and experienced MP to provide some leadership in order to cut across some of those institutional boundaries. I commend that partnership model to my hon. Friend.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

On that point, I would like to ask my right hon. Friend for his views on one matter. Now that we are out of the European Union, we do not need, for the first time in my life, to comply with the common agricultural policy. That means that we can, for the first time, pay farmers and landowners to hold on to water. My right hon. Friend referred to how our friends and neighbours across the border in Wales will be pivotal in helping us to do that. I would like to put on record the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Craig Williams), who is the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, has made very positive statements about that in his local newspaper. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a huge opportunity to strengthen our Union between Wales and England?

[Philip Dunne]

My hon. Friend tempts me to conclude my speech before I get to the point about farmers and sustainable farming incentives. There are provisions in the existing support arrangements, post the CAP regime, which will allow for mechanisms to help reduce flood risk.

My hon. Friend referred to the cross-border challenge. He will know that, on the English side of the border, in Shropshire and Herefordshire, there is a developing partnership with the equivalent counties of Powys and Monmouthshire, on the Welsh side, to provide practical schemes to allow them to co-operate across borders, which has been a problem. As we know, the environment is a delegated matter, but the environment, as we also know, does not respect administrative boundaries. The situation is a bit of a nonsense, and the responsible bodies can grapple with it only by working together. That includes the Welsh Government and Welsh local authorities, as well as the UK Government and English local authorities. My hon. Friend is quite right to draw that issue out.

I was going on to talk about the support arrangements for farmers and about the internal drainage boards, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) referred to. Those support arrangements are managed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Measures include the welcome introduction of a farming recovery fund, as a swift response to Storm Henk, with its eligibility criteria recently and pragmatically extended.

I should put on record my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a partner in a farming business. I am particularly pleased that the Minister for Water and Rural Growth is here to listen and respond to the debate. I know he cares deeply about water management issues, and has throughout his time in Parliament. I hope to suggest some pointers to him regarding the challenges facing farmers with flooded land.

I have just mentioned my entry in the register, and my farm is on the Herefordshire-Shropshire border. Part of it is within the Severn catchment and, as it is on the watershed, part of it is in the River Wye catchment. We have fields that, even this morning, in the middle of April, are still too wet to work. They have yet to dry out sufficiently, having effectively been waterlogged since last autumn. We did not have a specific flood event in the fields through either Babet or Henk, other than at the margins, but the water table has risen to such a level that we have not been able to get machinery on to some of our fields.

Before I turn to the specific farming measures that I would ask the Minister to look at, I would like to touch on the impact on properties, and particularly homes that have been flooded or are at material risk. Like many others in the House, I spent time earlier this year with homeowners, business owners and farmers in my constituency who had had their lives turned upside down by the impact of flooding. Some have been flooded more than once in the past year alone. I sympathise enormously with those who have had to deal with flooding, however it has affected them, having seen the damage and disruption it causes.

I visited one couple in Highley on the banks of the River Severn a couple of days after Storm Henk, who were still only able to access their home wearing waders, because flood waters had reached as high as the door handle on their back door. The heartbreaking devastation of that impact on their home was matched only by the anger and frustration of being told in the days that followed that they might not have been part of a sufficiently serious flood in their area to be able to access financial support, since fewer than 50 property owners had at that time come forward to report internal flooding of their properties across the local authority of Shropshire. That seems an arbitrary threshold. When visiting their premises, it was difficult to explain why the support mechanism did not apply to them, not least because it is at the discretion of the Secretary of State whether to invoke the mechanism at all.

The threshold is determined by local authority boundaries on a map rather than by the river system or catchment that has flooded, and it can take weeks or—as in the case of Storm Henk in Shropshire—months to establish whether the threshold has been reached, given the reluctance of some householders to report a flooding incident for fear of the impact on their subsequent insurability. Flood Re has significantly reduced but not eliminated that issue.

I appreciate that the eligibility criteria for the flood recovery framework is not the responsibility of my hon. Friend the Minister, but I urge him to impress on ministerial colleagues in DLUHC, as they undertake a review of the scheme this year, that they should consider how to improve access to the scheme to make it more fair. It is at present hard to comprehend why access can be denied to someone whose home or business is on the wrong side of the local authority boundary when, just upstream or downstream on the same river, properties affected by the same storm are awarded financial support.

As part of the review, I also urge Ministers to look at the per-property limits for support, as those are likely to leave people subject to multiple floods without further help once their property has reached the upper limit. If a property has changed hands between floods, the new owners might not be eligible for support even if their property has been flooded.

My second point concerns the administrative burden of implementing support under the flood recovery framework, which falls on local authorities. Everyone in this House is aware of the pressures that councils are already under, with limited resources for flood and water management. When a flood occurs, the community bands together incredibly quickly to support each other. I pay tribute to the efforts of local volunteers, flood action groups and local councillors who do so much to help when flood warnings are issued. Support from the local authority to help with prevention and then clean-up remains vital.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Member, the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, is making a great speech in a really important debate. On Boxing day 2015, we had the greatest flooding event in a century in Leeds on the River Aire catchment. All council members—I was a member of the council at the time—went to help the clean-up operation. Since then, the West Yorkshire flood risk partnership has created a new partnership between the local authority and local businesses. Local businesses are supporting, for instance, tree planting in the Upper Aire catchment and have been a full partner in the flood alleviation scheme on the River Aire. Such partnerships can help prevent future flooding and also come together when a flooding event happens to ensure domestic and business recovery.

[Philip Dunne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—I will call him my hon. Friend because we have worked together on the Environmental Audit Committee for some years—for making that point. He perhaps was not in the room when we talked about a similar partnership that exists in the River Severn catchment. He is absolutely right that when a flood event happens there is a sense of community spirit that comes together and acts—it is unfortunate that it should need to do so—as a mechanism to drive those who want to try to do something about it to form flood action groups, which have been a very successful community-led initiative across the country and are well supported at a national level by the flood action group and the Environment Agency. Those are good examples. My hon Friend the Member for North Norfolk referenced what should happen in Norfolk; he might like to look at the York experience as well.

On the burden on local authorities, Shropshire Council has one and a half full-time equivalent members of staff to deal with flooding issues and they do a great job. But asking them to take on the additional work of helping more than 50 households deal with the impact of flooding, and the significant work needed to act quickly to remedy flood damage or prevent recurrence, places a considerable burden on the team. That inevitably takes immediate priority over their long-term work to create lasting flood prevention schemes in their locality. They cannot do both tasks at once. I therefore urge the Minister to look at including provision within the flood recovery framework to award a revenue funding amount—perhaps as little as £50,000 to £100,000 per managing entity, which at the moment would be the local authority —to enable it to recruit suitable resource to help staff the activation and deployment of funds under the scheme, so that this time-critical support can be provided to those who properly need it.

I turn to flooded farms, for which the Minister does have some responsibility. The farming recovery fund has been a useful means of support to farmers in those counties declared eligible, but, as the Minister knows, that does not apply to Shropshire, despite it being in the same river catchment as Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, which are eligible.

I must tell the Minister that in a meeting with farmers and National Farmers Union representatives in south Shropshire last week, it was made clear to me that many farmers in Shropshire were affected by Storm Henk, and many more have been affected by the volume and duration of rainfall we have had since Storm Babet last October, yet they remain ineligible for the farming recovery fund. That is hard to fathom given that there are waterlogged farms across the county. I appreciate that the scheme applies to all land parcels that are flooded contiguous to a river that had notably high river level gauge readings during the 10 days following Storm Henk in January, provided that they registered under the rural payments service.

Payments of between £500 and £25,000 will have been a much-needed lifeline after the impact of the storm, compounded by the wettest March in over 40 years. Many colleagues raised similar concerns about the initially narrow scope of the support for farmers affected by flooding, and I commend the Minister for acting quickly to remove the limit—land had to be 150 metres from the centre of eligible rivers—so that all land flooded was covered as long as it was contiguous to an eligible river, as the NFU and others had called for.

I hope that today the Minister will be able to address whether further steps can be made and whether he would be prepared, in parallel to DLUHC’s review of its flood support measures, to encourage DEFRA officials to undertake a review of the criteria for support for farming businesses, so that badly affected counties, including Shropshire, will not miss out in future.

I encourage the Minister to speak to officials and ask them to take a holistic approach to the way in which farmers are encouraged through the sustainable farming incentive, as touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, to undertake work to alleviate flood risk downstream; I am thinking of the various measures to slow the flow in upland areas to create wetlands and the like. Yet when land becomes flooded from major events or waterlogged through persistent rain so that it is less usable to grow food, the support mechanism may not be there to access.

I also hope the Minister might listen to calls from the NFU and others to change the way in which farming support becomes available. For example, there is some confusion during exceptionally wet weather, when many acres of farmland may be flooded without 50 properties suffering the same fate, whether farmers apply through the flood recovery framework if their home or business premises are flooded or the farming recovery fund if the impact is on flood water on farmland. Are they, or should they, be eligible for both schemes? Because the scheme is new, it is not crystal clear where they should go. Providing a means of aligning the different schemes or understanding in what circumstances which scheme applies would be extremely helpful to everybody.

Given the recent wet weather and, as I have explained, that the water table rises, farmland can flood in the absence of significant named storms. I ask the Minister whether his Department would review, alongside the review undertaken by DLUHC, the workings of the flood support schemes that apply to flooded farmland.

There has rightly been a refocus on food security recently, given the threats we face in a volatile world. I know my farm will have lower yields this year as a result of the planting conditions this winter. I suspect the same will apply in many areas of the country. We will therefore see either a reduction in available home produce or an increase in prices—or both. That will be in large part down to the impact of weather conditions, for which I can readily see the Minister is not responsible. Finding mechanisms, however, to ensure that farmers are there to plant next year and are there for future years to produce the food on which we all rely is really important. I urge the Minister to take the opportunity to support farmers in these challenging times, just as we ask our farmers to support our country in times of uncertainty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Dunne]

I am encouraged by the Minister’s closing remarks. Before I address them, I thank all Members who took part in the debate, including those who intervened and have since left. I particularly welcome my good friend, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey), making his inaugural speech from the Back Benches following his period as a Defence Minister. It is good to see him here.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord), my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) referred to the lack of fairness that results from the way the thresholds and criteria are implemented. I am pleased that that was picked up by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), and specifically the Minister, who mentioned the review that is being done. What he said in his concluding remarks about the “alternative geographical boundaries” and looking at the level of the threshold was helpful. I will not repeat the spat across the Chamber about who said what to whom, but the fact that it is being reviewed is very welcome. The staffing allowances being offered to local authorities that undertake the work will also be helpful.

I should mention the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), who gave a compelling account of the problems that have been occurring in York. I particularly welcome her welcoming the defence measures that have made York a safer place to live.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).