Storm Eva: Local Authority Support

Rachel Reeves Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing today’s debate. There have been different experiences, but we are hearing very much from Yorkshire today. Many aspects of the operations in York are to be highly praised—the mountain rescue team, the Army, the public sector workers who gave up their Christmases, and the awesome response from volunteers across the city, mainly co-ordinated through one person, Chelle Holmes, and her Facebook page, “York Floods 2015: Help for the affected”, with its 14,000 members, which put together the operation. That, together with BBC Radio York, became the mainstay of communications.

Other parts of the operation have been heavily criticised by people on the ground. Much of this has boiled down to communication and co-ordination during the flood period. It has now become clear from a meeting in the city last Friday that the local authority had no plan for the Foss catchment should flooding occur, despite the council’s strategic flood risk assessment highlighting a greater than one-in-10-year risk of the capacity of the River Foss exceeding the capacity of the pumps at the barrier. To give some context, the River Foss is protected from the far larger river, the Ouse, by a sixteen-and-a-half-tonne steel barrier. When flows of the Ouse rise, the barrier is closed to protect the Foss catchment, and eight pumps are switched on to pump up to 30.4 tonnes a second.

The capacity of the water was 35 tonnes a second over Christmas. The pumps could not cope, and water surged up into the pump house, where the power for the pumps and operations for the barrier were. The decision was therefore to switch off the power supply and lift the barrier in the belief that this was the least worst option and could save 1,000 homes. Reports from the Environment Agency going back to 2004 show that there was a risk of this happening. In the 30 years of the barrier, there has been no attempt to raise the level of the electrics, which are at a low level. There was a plan to lift them higher, but planning permission was denied to the agency at the time.

The revelation that there was no plan should the barrier fail and not be able to cope is quite astounding, and it has left people in York angered, upset and certainly with a host of questions that still need answers. I have been inundated with correspondence. I have been going door to door, and I have held a series of community meetings with residents and with business to ensure that we drill down on the issues and raise them, as we now are, with the various agencies.

I want to raise various points about action for the future. The first and perhaps most vital is that I want to see all local authorities having flood plans externally audited. This will ensure that we will have the right support in place at the right time and that local authorities are not left with the burden of marking their own homework. We know that there were certainly some serious flaws in York during the flooding. Vulnerable people, particularly those in an elderly residential complex and an area where Travellers live, saw no one at all from the council. People self-evacuated when the waters rose. There were also difficulties with the sandbag operation—not only were there problems filling them, not enough shovels and not enough personnel to fill them, but there was no distribution plan. That must be addressed.

There were problems with phones even before 45,000 phones went down—an issue that is the subject of a different inquiry. If someone whose home was being flooded called the number that the Environment Agency gave to the council, they got an answer machine message saying that the council was returning to work on the Tuesday morning. That is not good enough. When the phones at the council came back into operation, just four people were answering calls. We need proper plans in place.

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I am listening with interest to what my hon. Friend is saying about the response of her local council. In my city, Leeds, the council responded to the floods amazingly. Nevertheless, the council is worried about the future and what the additional cuts to its budgets will mean, not only for its day-to-day capacity for things such as keeping gullies clean, but for how it will respond in emergency situations. Does my hon. Friend share those concerns?

[Rachael Maskell]

Absolutely. Part of the inquiry I am carrying out is about how much cuts to date have affected the resources available to the plethora of agencies involved and how that will be addressed in future, what with further cuts planned, including to the fire and rescue service, which was overstretched over the Christmas period.

People gave up their Christmases, but there was no one to direct them to where they should volunteer. Again, that was a serious problem. I could discuss other issues, such as electrics being switched on in residential council accommodation without sockets being checked and people being denied their £500 despite their properties being flooded. The list is enormous—it is six pages long—but the Minister probably gets the gist: things must be improved. The council has said that it will carry out its own independent investigation. It is incredibly important that it truly is independent, that all questions are asked and that no stone is left unturned.

I want to share some of the other questions and issues that people have raised. We must recognise that the agencies came together and ensured that nobody died, but important questions have been raised. First, the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax that we hold a conference to try to share best practice was excellent. We are learning a lot at the moment, so it is important that we share best practice in a structured way to ensure that local authorities draw on it to respond to communities.

Secondly, I ask the Government to hold an inquiry into the communications failure. Elderly residents who depend on their Lifeline personal alarms were left without any communications at all. I explained earlier the situation with the phones. When phones go down in an emergency, we should be able to switch systems. Even the ambulance service did not have a system to call on. We should be able to switch call centres to enable a continuous response. We must even look at the basics on the ground. Someone with a loud hailer or a siren could have made such a difference to people’s lives.

Thirdly, I very much support the point made by the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) about expediency in responding. We have a local barracks, but we had to wait for a process to be gone through before soldiers were mobilised. It could have been done a lot quicker. I am going to meet Brigadier Strickland to discuss future military involvement.

Fourthly, we have heard about the success of the flood wardens on the ground who were able to bring things together. There is now a real appetite among the community to ensure that flood wardens are part of the future strategy. It is really important to draw on that experience.

Fifthly, there is concern about drainage, which relates back to the point about local authority resourcing. Gullies, drains and ditches must be cleared. Surface water was a factor in the flooding in parts of the city, so we need to ensure that the right resources are in place to address it. We must also ensure that drainage and sewage are dealt with appropriately, because Yorkshire Water suffered a breach when its pumps failed and sewage went into the mainstream water supply.

Sixthly, we must ensure that there is better flood literacy. There is an assumption that people know how to address issues appertaining to floods and how to build resilience for the future. We cannot make assumptions in these situations, so it is vital that we ensure that there is proper education around floods—what people need to do, how they should respond and how they can protect themselves for the future.

[Rachael Maskell]

My hon. Friend makes a very valid point that is true not only for during the flooding, when people are trying to save lives and protect the public, but for the clean-up operation. Clearly, when people are dealing with sewage, they are also dealing with risk. People need to be made aware of the risks and how best to protect themselves.

Seventhly, we have heard very clearly that businesses really do require support. Last Friday I brought together the local chamber of commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the local enterprise partnership to discuss how we can support business better at times of flood. It is clear that our city centre, like so many towns and cities, is experiencing a downturn in trade, so it is important that we get more support to local authorities to help with plans to build capacity back into the city.

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend mentions the impact on businesses. In my constituency, around 250 small businesses have been affected by the floods, but those businesses employ 2,500 people, most of whom have not been working since Boxing day. That is a real worry. As well as talking about the businesses, we should be mindful of the people who work for them and think about the support we can provide to them, both to regenerate the places where they work and to support them in the interim.

[Rachael Maskell]

I totally agree.

Finally, I want to raise the issue of personal finances. So many people in my constituency who were flooded could not afford any insurance at all. They just do not have the resources to pay for insurance, and £500 does not stretch far. All I have been told is that they need to draw on charitable sources. We need a more structured approach to support people who, in their poverty, have lost even more.

There are so many things that I could raise; this is just the start. I hope that there will be an opportunity for MPs to gather together to share their intelligence and concerns and to raise issues that they believe could help future operations. As we gather that intelligence, between us we could ensure that sufficient plans are in place to address the need, should such floods occur again. With climate change on its way, there is a high possibility that that could be the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Wharton]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I hope that I have shown in many different kinds of debate my support for devolution and for allowing people at the appropriate level to make decisions and to drive forward responses, whether to flooding or in other areas of local government. We have seen some of the lessons learned in the Government response to the events of recent weeks and months. We have seen funding transferred quickly to local authorities, but control over how it is spent has also been devolved to them. They have had much greater flexibility in how they deliver schemes, in how they support local areas and in what they do. We have looked not only to support but to empower local authorities to do what is needed with that £200 million of funding on which I have already commented.

[Rachel Reeves]

Will the Minister give way?

[James Wharton]

I will give way, but I then want to make quick progress.

[Rachel Reeves]

I agree with the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) that a bottom-up approach is needed. Floods are an example of an area in which we have to pool risk and share resources, including for flood defences. In 2011, the Government scrapped the flood defence scheme in Leeds that would have protected the area from the city centre and the train station up to Newlay bridge. Had that scheme been in place, the Boxing day floods would not have had the same devastating impact on Kirkstall. I urge the Minister to take the opportunity to learn the lessons from the floods and to put in place the comprehensive defence schemes necessary if we are to create a northern powerhouse.

[James Wharton]

I gave way hoping that the constructive nature of our debate would continue, but I fear that we are starting to venture into broader points of a party political nature, which I had hoped we would avoid. In 2005, the Government spent £1.5 billion on flood defences; the coalition Government in the last Parliament spent £1.7 billion; and in this Parliament £2.5 billion is to be spent—a real-terms increase in each consecutive Parliament.

We need to learn lessons, however, and we need to look at what the areas can do. We need to listen to what local communities understand about their areas and about what has to be done.

[Rachel Reeves]

Will the Minister give way?

[James Wharton]

I have given way to the hon. Lady once, but now I must wrap up so that the Member who introduced the debate may conclude it.

It is important that we recognise that MPs from across politics and the areas affected have worked well in and with their communities. Lessons have been learned from what has happened before, and we have seen evidence of those lessons in the route that Government response has taken recently. We ensured that funding got out more quickly and we gave local authorities as much flexibility with it as we could to ensure that they could respond properly. We are continuing that in the nature of the resilience funding that we are providing, which is up to £5,000 per flooded household. Furthermore, only last week at a meeting in Manchester, we gave guidance to local authorities that gave them flexibility on how they will deliver their schemes, because we recognise that different areas need different things.

Hon. Members have raised a number of important issues, some of which I have been able to touch on, including insurance. We need to continue to look, to listen and to learn lessons from what has happened. A lot is being done, but we can always ask, “Can we do more?” My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley wanted a single responsible person, but we have already seen great improvements in how Government respond and bring Departments together. We have seen the appointment of flood envoys by the Prime Minister in response to some of what we have seen happening recently. We always ought to look at where we might go further and what else we might do, however, and my hon. Friend’s ideas are valuable.