Storm Arwen

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I think the hon. Member is right. Many of us across the House have had instances of flooding and extreme weather events over the last 10 years. I myself, in my constituency, had a very extreme case of flooding in 2014 and the issues she raised with regard to insurance and lessons learned are things I am very conscious of. I would be very happy to take this up with her in any subsequent conversation or meeting.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Storm Arwen was an extreme weather event, but we are having more extreme weather events as the climate changes. Already, every winter in this House we have urgent questions and statements on power outages caused by electricity distribution lines coming down, and train disruption caused by electrical lines failing. The long-term fix is to increase the resilience standards of the poles, pylons, wires and connectors on the system. It is not to do with local resilience forums, which are more about responding to crisis; this is about raising the technical standards of the equipment that is deployed. An example is undergrounding electricity lines, which could be as much as 20 to 30 times more expensive than an overhead line, but, especially near more populous areas, that may well be part of the solution. Will the Secretary of State be kind enough to look at the technical standards of the electricity distribution network, because we need to raise those in the face of climate change?

[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.