Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rebecca Pow and Luke Hall

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Luke Hall (Thornbury and Yate) (Con)]

T6.   Seven parish councils along the River Severn from Aust to Sharpness have joined forces under the chairmanship of local resident Mr Barry Turner to ask the Environment Agency for improvements along the riverbank, in preparation for rising tide heights and more extreme weather events. Will the Minister meet me, Mr Turner and the local councillor, Matthew Riddle, to discuss their concerns and help find a solution?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)]

I believe the Environment Agency has already met Mr Turner and his group, and I am happy to meet my hon. Friend too. Obviously, I must stress that managing coastal change in those legacy landfill sites, some of which have historical issues, is very much the responsibility of the local coastal protection authorities. The Government are taking action, looking at what priority action we could take on these historical landfill sites to find a way forward in these many and varied areas.

Climate Change and Flooding

Debate between Rebecca Pow and Luke Hall

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I am speaking today, first, because we have to praise the historic agreement that was made in Paris. I commend not only my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, but the whole team and Labour Members for all the work they did in the past. We also have to send commiserations to all those poor people suffering from flooding. We are dealing with both those things in today’s motion.

I felt I had to speak, coming as I do from Somerset, like my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey). Taunton Deane was, sadly, at the heart of the terrible flooding of 11,500 hectares of land from December 2012 right up, really, until January 2014. So I really can sympathise with the poor folk of Cumbria.

In Somerset the impact was enormous. The cost for businesses, with all the knock-on effects, was estimated at £147 million, and it affected half of all the businesses in Somerset, even the ones that were not flooded, because of the road closures and things like that.

It was a once-in-a-hundred-year event, so it was not exactly expected, and it was not just a result of not dredging rivers, although that was one of the things that made a difference. The rivers Parrett and Tone had not been dredged during the 1990s—and I am afraid I level that at our friends in the Labour party because it was under their Government that the dredging stopped.

The flooding was also caused by a combination of many other things, including increased run-off from the urban areas around Taunton. But whether this extreme flooding was to do with climate change—that is still debateable—we clearly do have to be prepared for these events. In Somerset I am very pleased at the programme that has been put in place to set up the Somerset Rivers Authority. This has come with general agreement and much debate. A precept is to be set on everyone in Somerset and legislation will be passed to introduce it. That will then deal with the wider programme of tackling flooding in the future.

I commend the Government. They have spent £15.5 million on flood defences in Somerset, protecting thousands of properties, and have made an overall commitment of £35 million until 2021. They are taking flooding extremely seriously.

[Luke Hall (Thornbury and Yate) (Con)]

I take my hon. Friend’s point about preparations. Will she join me in welcoming the doubling of investment for innovation in low-carbon technology as one of the less talked about outcomes from Paris?

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I know he was at Paris. I was going to mention that at the end of my speech, but I will mention it now. Nobody has so far mentioned one of the crucial aspects of this debate: the investment in science and technology to enable us to meet all these commitments so that we can get to our zero rating. With our brains and our scientists, I am absolutely sure we can do it.

The investment in flooding is money well spent, because every £1 spent on flood defences gives between £4 and £9 of benefit to the economy. So it is well worth doing.

With my environmental-agricultural hat on, and as the new chairman of the all-party group on ancient woodland and veteran trees, I want to highlight a few areas, and here I have some agreement with the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). There are many other things we can do to mitigate the effects of climate change and extreme weather in our environment. There is the wider catchment approach. There is working with farmers and landowners to slow the flow of water into the river basins, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan) will agree with me on that. There is more tree planting; I applaud the Government’s commitment to plant 11 million trees—that is one for every five people. Perhaps we could plant a few more. Those trees will also help to slow the flow of water. Re-wilding is another area we could be looking at, as well as silt traps, ponds, and storage areas higher up in the valley to stop the water coming down quite so quickly.

All of those things can be, and ought to be, included, and I will put in my usual call for more grass. Grass and mixed farming economies are the way forward. Grass holds in the water as well, and sequesters the carbon. I hope that the forestry Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), will look more closely at including grass in our policies. [Interruption.] We may laugh at that, but this is a serious way forward and it is great for the management of the countryside.

On climate change, I commend the Government on everything they are doing. We have taken immense steps forward in securing this ambitious global deal, and we are moving in the right direction, but there is much still to do. Zero carbon emissions is a testing ambition.