Future Flood Prevention

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to open today’s estimates debate on the future of flood prevention. Flooding is one of those issues that is rarely considered until it actually happens. When the weather is dry, we talk about drought, and as soon as it starts to rain we have to deal with floods. In the round, we have to deal with both. Because of that, it can be tempting for the Government sometimes to disregard flood defences and resilience measures when the weather is much drier and budgets are under pressure. I believe, and the Select Committee believes, that this would be a grave error.

Effective flood defences, both hard and soft, are a vital part of this country’s infrastructure. With the UK’s experience over the years of more severe storms as climate change continues, flooding is likely only to get worse. We have recently seen the high tide that came down the eastern side of the country. Fortunately, this did not cause massive flooding, but it might well do in the future. I was flooded back in the ’80s and particularly 1981, when we lost a lot of sheep after huge tidal floods in the west of the country. When the barriers are overcome, we must have the right infrastructure in place.

In November 2016, the Select Committee on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published its “Future flood prevention” report. We found that flood prevention work in the UK is fragmented, can be inefficient and sometimes ineffective, and has let people down. The winter of 2015-16 broke rainfall records, and storms Desmond, Eva and Frank disrupted communities across northern parts of the UK, particularly Cumbria and York. Storm Desmond alone cost the UK more than £5 billion, but the impact is not just economic. It is very much about individual businesses, individual residents and all those hugely affected by flooding—and sometimes about the amount of time it can take to get people back into their homes or to get their businesses up and running again. Many communities live in fear that a disaster is just one downpour away.

There is no doubt that we are now encountering long periods of dry weather, followed by a huge amount of rain—200 or 300 mm in just 20 or 30 hours. Believe it or not, I do not blame the Minister or the Government for that amount of rainfall coming down so quickly, but we do need to be aware that it can happen and we need to be ready to try to mitigate some of the worst of the disaster that happens when we get these very high levels of rainfall occurring over a very short period.

I personally understand the concerns of many parts of the country that experience being under water for perhaps many months. We need to reflect only on what has happened in the past. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) will talk later about what happened in Somerset, when a huge amount of water fell and remained for up to three months, devastating not only property, but the land. A huge amount of debris was created, and the vegetation and much of the wildlife was lost. This was a disaster not only from a residential and farming point of view, but from a conservation point of view.

While frontline staff and rescue service workers worked tirelessly to support those affected, our system for managing flood risk can and does fail on occasions. That is why I want to talk about the importance of the recommendations that our Select Committee made in our “Future flood prevention” report. I shall touch briefly on the Government’s response and on what action DEFRA has taken to date. I shall conclude by outlining what the Committee believes the Government must do to improve the situation further.

What, then, were our recommendations? We recommended to the Government how to reduce the flood risk to 5 million people and we looked into the “one in 100 years” flood and how to deal with risk. One problem is that, if we are not careful, people living in an area with a “one in 100 years” risk which is flooded are inclined to think that they will be safe from floods for another 99 years. Of course, that is not the case. An area with a high flood risk will continue to have that risk until better defences are created or resilience measures are introduced, and it will probably always be a pretty high-risk area.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is bringing back a great many memories of those terrible floods. Does he agree that communication is very important? One of the points made in the Select Committee report was that perhaps we should stop using the “one in 100 years” terminology. We should adopt a way of warning people about how serious floods are that does not involve years, because the current terminology is misleading.

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The evidence that the Committee took, and what we heard from people who came to talk to us, suggested that it is very helpful when communities are able to get together and warn each other about exactly what is happening. The Environment Agency and others can give the warnings, and the agency, the fire brigade and local authority staff are there to help, but the flooded communities themselves have built up a resilience that will help them in the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, because it is not just about planting the trees; it is also about where we plant them. If we plant them along the edges of the fields or the banks of the streams and rivers, we can hold back the water and hold back the soil. Very often, the soil and debris being washed from the field is also contributing to the flood. So this is not just about the number of trees; it is about making sure we are smart in where we plant them. The way we plant them is important, too. We visited the north of England, and when the old Forestry Commission was planting trees it turned the soil up and put it up into a furrow and planted the trees on the top of it. The only trouble is that there are then two gullies either side of it, which then allow the water to run down very quickly if the trees are planted on a slope. Therefore, over the years there are many things we can do, but my hon. Friend makes a very good point that this is about planting trees, holding that soil back and holding the water back long enough for the major flood to go through, and that was what much of the work was done on.

[Rebecca Pow]

My hon. Friend is talking about soil, and I cannot let the moment pass without intervening to stress that soil is a very important part of our ecosystem. Does my hon. Friend agree that we lose it in floodwater at our peril, because it is the lifeblood that we use to grow our crops?

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend will also be very aware that many fields only have so much topsoil on them, and it is the topsoil that is fertile and that we grow our crop in. Therefore, if farmers lose much of their topsoil to the streams and rivers, they have lost a lot of the very fertile soil in their fields. I think most farmers, when presented with a plan that can save their topsoil and the way they manage their fields, can see a big advantage in this, but we have to work with the farming community, rather than, as perhaps has sometimes been the case, just imposing our will upon them. If we can persuade them that there are many good reasons for managing soils in a slightly different way, we can perhaps get a lot further with that. We can sometimes use carrots, and not necessarily sticks. I am sure our Minister has many carrots to offer today, and we will be interested to hear about that when she sums up the debate.

We also need to take a closer look at development in built-up areas affected by flood risk. Naturally, we have laws that we hope will restrict most building on floodplains —sometimes it is breached, but on the whole it is not. When an area is flooded, very little of the water has actually landed on the flooded area. It usually comes from higher up. Rather than stopping building in flood-risk areas, we need to think when building developments of several hundred or 1,000 houses about capturing the run-off water from everywhere on those estates, including the roads. It could be captured in ponds or in reservoirs or tanks underneath some of the homes. Building in resilience measures to ensure that the water from a development could be held would make the situation better rather than worse. We can build developments, but we do not always give enough consideration to what is going to happen further downstream.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I took part in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee flood prevention inquiry and was involved with the Environmental Audit Committee’s flooding report. I very much welcome the recent focus on what is a very serious area, as we know only too well in Taunton Deane, where we have experienced such serious flooding in recent years.

The Government have been somewhat under attack, but I must start by saying that they have committed an incredible £2.5 billion to flood relief work, and I applaud the excellent schemes under way or in place that we have heard about. Indeed, this represents a real-terms increase in capital investment, which is up from £1.7 billion during the last Parliament and from £1.5 billion between 2005 and 2010.

I want to raise some of the issues addressed in the inquiries, but I begin with Somerset. We are used to winter flooding on the Somerset levels—it is natural—but not to the degree witnessed in those severe weather conditions in 2012, December 2013 and January 2014. The whole area effectively turned into an inland sea. It is my home area and I witnessed that at first hand. An incredible 11,500 hectares of land were under 65 million cubic meters of water, largely owing to the build-up of silt in the rivers and drainage channels, which was not effectively dealt with over the many years since the channels were engineered in the 1960s.

The knock-on effects were enormous. Utter disruption and despair was caused to people in their daily lives. The economic impact assessment estimated that the floods cost the local economy £147 million and that 50% of businesses were affected.

I welcome the Government’s reaction, and we are looking ahead optimistically to never having to suffer such serious consequences again in Somerset. They committed £20 million to flood defences to protect properties—£4.2 million was focused only on the Somerset levels and moors. Every £1 spent on flood defences gives a benefit of between £4 and £9, so it is definitely money well spent.

The Government oversaw the establishment of the Somerset Rivers Authority. It was set up to work with many organisations and still exists, and will go on to run and manage the area. It is funded through a precept on council tax bills—initially, the Government committed £1.9 million to start it up. I welcome the Government’s continuing work with the SRA on its long-term funding arrangements. I urge them to find time to give the SRA a statutory basis. It is such a good model that I believe it could be copied elsewhere. It will do both dredging and the wider catchment work about which so many hon. Members have spoken. It involves a range of organisations, which I must praise, including the farming and wildlife advisory group, and the Royal Bath and West Society, which has raised money to help to advise farmers on their forward planning. It is essential that we enable the SRA to continue to operate.

Many hon. Members have referred to the wider catchment approach. I held one of my popular environment forums in Taunton Deane. We were delighted and honoured to have my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) to speak to a cross-party gathering, when we discussed a holistic approach to flooding, which went down exceptionally well. Minister, there is an awful lot of positive feeling about engaging that approach much more widely, with leaky dams, more tree planting and better soil management, which has been referred to. There is a raft of traditional and modern environmental techniques, working with science to slow the flow of water into the rivers and reduce flooding. It will not work everywhere, but it will help—it can be part and parcel of everything else.

With Brexit heading our way, we have a marvellous opportunity to have a new think about land management. I was heartened to read in the response to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee second report on flood prevention that the Government are thinking of a catchment-based approach in DEFRA’s 25-year environment plan. That is a good direction to work in.

We need to consider how much public good is achieved from flood protection work. I urge the Minister to do some early work to calculate how we can value work so that farmers know how much it will cost them if they store water on their land for the short or long term, what it will achieve, what the forgone effect is of not growing crops but storing water, and how much we should pay them. I declare a slight interest in that I come from a farming background and family. Farmers are cautious folk. They do not want to flood their land if there is not a good reason to do so, or no good results or consequences. If we can prove that there will be good results, I am sure they would do it.

I urge the Minister to look at running a large-scale catchment project, another recommendation from the Select Committee’s inquiry, to gather evidence on a wider scale. There are many very good small-scale projects—we have heard many examples today—but we do not have a large-scale project that is able to demonstrate what really works, why it works and what we should do. I therefore urge the Minister to consider running such a project.

Another issue raised in the Select Committee report is whether it is possible to engage water companies more in this approach to handling flooding. After all, they deal with our water day in, day out. I note with interest that the recently published “Natural Capital Committee’s fourth state of natural capital report” recommends natural capital catchment-based approaches by encouraging Ofwat in particular to get involved. This is definitely an idea that has come into the public domain.

I want to touch on housing. We are seeing a huge and necessary increase in house building to address the housing shortage, but let us ensure that those houses are not exacerbating the flooding problems. Sustainable drainage systems and green infrastructure such as ponds can contribute to protecting communities from flooding. It is welcome that the Government recognise that and I urge other Departments to work them into their plans, too. Water has no boundaries, so we need to look at all aspects of its impact on our lives.

Finally, I may have sounded rather biased towards Somerset, but much accumulated knowledge on flooding has now been gathered, including a comprehensive real-time system devised by the Met Office for feeding in rainfall data and river levels. Will the Minister consider applying this model elsewhere?

The Government are committed to tackling flooding. I know that because of all the money they have already committed to it. However, there is so much more that we could do. Brexit offers an opportunity to look again at how we manage our land, and how we could have a whole new and effective approach to flooding to benefit us all.

[Several hon. Members rose—]