Flood and Water Management

Priti Patel Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and I pay tribute to the Select Committee and its Chair for offering this comprehensive analysis of flood management issues. I would like to use this debate to bring the Minister’s attention to a couple of problems with existing flood management arrangements in my constituency.

I also put on record my thanks to the Committee’s Chair for her recent visit to my constituency, and for the time she spent meeting my constituents to discuss many of the flood management issues that I will raise. She learned of the serious flood and shoreline management problems in my constituency, and listened to the many concerns raised directly by Andrew St Joseph, the chairman of the independent farming-led Managing Coastal Change group, and other local farmers and landowners. They very much welcomed her interest in these matters, and are very grateful to her for her time and her visit.

The Minister will be familiar with some of the matters because of my correspondence with him at the beginning of this year about questions I had asked him in the House. In those exchanges, I highlighted the fact that landowners, farmers and people contributing significant sums of money to the Environment Agency for shoreline management felt completely excluded from the decision-making process. I urge the Minister to address that serious problem. Each year, through the general drainage charge, farmers in Essex give the Environment Agency something in the region of £800,000, which is a significant sum that could instead be spent on other investments or by farmers themselves in acting against flood risks. The farmers continue to feel that they are being subjected to a regime under the auspices of the Environment Agency that generates taxation almost without effective representation. For instance, there is no system in place and no channel of communication to enable people who have contributed to the cost of flood management locally to see how their money is being spent, or to make representations to influence that spending. It is therefore understandable that my constituents and those landowners feel totally ignored, while their contribution seems to be going in one particular direction. Could the Minister find the time to come to my constituency—we would welcome him with open arms—to see at first hand the problems and challenges regarding the flood and shoreline management plan? Alternatively, he could perhaps meet my constituents here in Westminster.

My constituents also raised concerns about matters that have already been mentioned, such as the modelling of sea-level rises always being based on worst-case scenario planning across the area rather than on examining the potential impacts at a local level, and about how the plans for managed re-alignment will work. If my constituents had genuine engagement with the Environment Agency, I am sure that those problems could be addressed and that we would have different scenarios and completely different outcomes.

There are also concerns about the dialogue and engagement with Natural England. I was impressed by the positive experiences of my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), which seem to have come off the back of direct action by the Minister as well. I welcome, endorse and praise that, and hope that we can bring something similar to Essex. However, the problem is the discrepancy in the experiences of engagement with such bodies, and I make a plea to that effect to the Minister.

In the Select Committee report, the link between the agricultural sector and flood defences has been clearly highlighted. In my constituency, there are farmers and landowners who want to engage with the authorities on flood management but already feel disfranchised by their experience with the shoreline management plan. They have many anxieties.

In light of the shortness of time, I want to use the few minutes that I have left to say that there is a plea here to get rid of the bureaucracy and red tape—about which we have already consistently heard—between the various bodies and organisations. It has been reported to me that it can take up to two months and reams of paperwork for the Environment Agency to grant permission when it comes to dealing with shoreline management and flood risk, while Natural England can issue 13-month permits for the same applications. There is, therefore, a bureaucracy and streamlining issue here, and I would welcome the Minister’s intervention and some positive views from him about how some of these areas can be simplified so that landowners can work on sea defences. It is all bureaucratic, but I look to the Minister to bring us positive news on that front in the time that we have left. He is welcome to come to my constituency and meet my constituents. I hope that he will take that on board.