Future Flood Prevention

Rob Marris Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes another good point. Planning conditions can be flouted, and they are sometimes not properly enforced. It is sometimes claimed that resilience measures cannot be put in place because of the economic situation, but we must ensure that houses are not built unless those measures are taken. I am sure that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister present will pass on that point to her colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government, because this is a planning matter. If we are going to plan for the developments that we need, we must plan them properly. I do not think that any of us are against development, but we must have the right kind of development and hold the water back. Indeed, if we could make a feature of those measures, we might also create some leisure facilities as well. That would be a planning gain.

The recommendations in our report also include the need for a new governance model to deal with flooding. As part of our inquiry, the EFRA Committee visited the Netherlands to learn how that low-lying country manages flooding. We learned that 25% of the land there is below sea level, and that half of its 17 million population live in flood-prone areas, so they know a lot about flooding. The threat of flooding led to local government and water management being administered hand in hand from as early as the 13th century. As the threat of flooding in the UK grows, we need to borrow some ideas from the Dutch and to mirror their focus on dealing with floods locally and nationally. The fens in this country were drained by Dutch engineers, as was the part of Somerset where I still have my farm. They know exactly how to deal with water, because if they did not deal with it, they would not have a country. It is as simple as that.

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my disappointment that many of the things in this very useful report from the EFRA Committee were being discussed in this House a dozen years ago and have still not been implemented? An example is the recommendation about “building back better” that appears in paragraph 60 of the report. I discussed that matter with the Association of British Insurers in, from memory, 2006, but we have made almost no progress on it. Since then, the Labour Government and the coalition Government have cut spending on flood defences.

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We have tried to ensure that the report is not party political. Under the last Labour Government, the spending on flooding went down in dry times and up in wet times. The same thing happened under the coalition. We can argue about the figures, but they very much follow that same pattern. The report recommends learning from what has happened and putting in the proper resilience measures.

As I said, the report discussed the Dutch system. The idea would be to set up a regional flood and coastal board and then involve local authorities and local drainage boards, where they exist, and then landowners and businesses in order to have a broad catchment basis. As such, the Government should completely overhaul flood risk management, to include a new English rivers and coastal authority that is accountable for the delivery of flood protection. The Netherlands has a flood commissioner who is answerable to the Dutch Parliament and at a local level, which provides real focus. We may not need a full management system like that of the Dutch, but we can learn many things from it, such as how to alter the system through the Environment Agency and others to make it more answerable to Parliament, local authorities, drainage boards and landowners. I am convinced that, until we get a system that works from the top down and from the bottom up, we will not make the best use of our resources, because they will always be pressed. The commissioner would be able to hold those carrying out flood prevention work to account for their performance, because we have to get the best value for money.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I rise to speak on behalf of the Environmental Audit Committee, which has published a report on flooding. We found a lack of long-term strategic planning for flood risk and that the Government had not been doing enough to ensure the resilience of nationally significant infrastructure. Crucially, there has been a stop-start approach to flood defence funding and a lack of support for local councils. Our report called on the Government to take a proactive approach to funding and to make companies that operate key digital, energy and transport infrastructure report on their preparedness levels for flooding and their resilience targets. We called for more support for councils to prepare plans to deal with the risk of flooding, and for the Government to publish a 25-year plan for flooding alongside the long-awaited and much delayed 25-year plan for the environment, for which, yes, we are indeed still waiting.

Before I discuss the detail of our report, I wish to say a few words about climate change. Flooding is the greatest risk our country faces from climate change. As hon. Members have said, the risks are already significant and will increase as a result of climate change. Even if global temperature rises are kept below 2°, the UK faces a rising threat from surface water as a result of the intense rain patterns, from coastal erosion and tidal surges, and from fluvial flooding. It is important to stress that cities such as Hull face all three of those threats—some areas are much more vulnerable than others.

Sea-level rise forecasts vary from 50 cm to 100 cm by the end of the century. That will make tidal surges bigger. We saw how exposed is our North sea coast on the east of England in January’s storm surge, when the coastal town of Jaywick in Essex, which suffered so grievously in the 1950s, had to be evacuated by the Army. It is good to see a faster response time from the Government in such fast-moving, life-and-death situations, but we need to be able to scale that up if the North sea surge happens simultaneously along the whole eastern coast.

Various predictions, including the forecasts in the Government’s national flood resilience review, say that monthly winter rainfall could be 20% to 30% higher over the next 10 years, so as well as planning for the next 80 years, for our children’s lifetimes, we need to be thinking about the next 10 years. There are risks to all nations and all sectors of the economy. In its latest risk assessment, the Committee on Climate Change said:

“Current levels of adaptation are projected to be insufficient to avoid flood and coastal erosion risks”.

We are not yet doing what we need to do to match the scale of the risk.

[Rob Marris]

I hope my hon. Friend shares my disappointment at the slow rate of progress. The adaptation measures in the Climate Change Act 2008 are the direct result of a private Member’s Bill I introduced around 10 years ago. As she points out, we have made almost no progress.

[Mary Creagh]

There has been some progress, but we need to move much further and faster as the scale and nature of the risk becomes more apparent and as the science develops. My concern is that Government policy is not changing fast enough to meet the changes in the scientific forecasts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute, and I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). I do not want to speak to the whole report or the Government’s response. I shall focus rather on our Select Committee’s recommendation 15 on the statutory duty for the fire and rescue service. This recommendation is consistent with our other recommendations 16 to 21, which all raise concerns about governance, command and control, structures and relationships. The evidence the Committee heard led us to the conclusion we reached. Sadly, however, the Government disagree.

Under recommendation 15:

“We recommend that the Government places a statutory duty on the Fire and Rescue Service in England and Wales to provide an emergency response to flood events and commits the necessary additional funding and staff resources to support delivery of this responsibility”—

a point to which I shall return later. The Government’s response states:

“Fire and Rescue Services in England already have the discretionary powers they need…A Statutory Duty would potentially reduce flexibility with a one size fits all approach, and there are clear advantages to a permissive regime”.

That sounds like civil service and ministerial double-speak or euphemism if I ever heard it.

I am grateful to Pat Strickland in the House of Commons Library for its briefing, “Should Fire and Rescue Services have a Statutory Duty to deal with flooding?” It outlines that the 2008 Pitt review into the 2007 floods said that there should be fully funded national capability for flood rescue

“underpinned as necessary by a statutory duty”.

In a written answer in December 2015, the then Minister with responsibility for policing and fire said that the good response of the fire services to flooding in that year suggested that there was “no need for review”. The Labour Government had arrived at the same conclusion in 2008, but we have seen more and more serious flood events since then, so the situation is changing.

The briefing paper details the law as it stands:

“The Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 does not place a statutory duty…to respond to floods, although there is a power to do so…the Act sets out the statutory ‘core functions’ of FRA…to provide for…fire safety…fire-fighting…rescuing people and protecting people from harm in the event of road traffic accidents”—

or road traffic collisions in 21st-century jargon. The law in Scotland is different. There has been a statutory duty since 2013, and the Pitt review took a similar view to the one that now exists in Scotland:

“The Review believes that clarifying and communicating the role of each of these bodies would improve the response to flooding. However, we are concerned that the systems, structures and protocols developed to support national coordination of multi-agency flood rescue assets remain ad-hoc. We believe that the Fire and Rescue Service should take on a leading role in this area, based on fully funded capability. This will be most effective if supported by a statutory duty.”

That is essentially the core of recommendations 15 to 21 and, as I say, nothing much has changed.

The Library briefing goes on to examine the history of the proposal and the debates in the House. I would like to focus on the history of the fire and rescue service’s statutory duties. Colleagues might expect that the fire service has always had a duty to attend fires, but it was partly the fire that destroyed most of this Palace of Westminster in 1834 that led to the creation of the London Fire Brigade, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Most colleagues would also probably expect that the fire and rescue service has a duty to prevent fires, and I suspect most would consider the role of the fire service in dealing with road traffic collisions to be a statutory duty. That is not the case. On fire, the statutory duty was created only in 1938. On fire safety, it was the Fire Services Act 1947 that created it. As for road accidents and road crashes, it was the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 that created the statutory duty.

When the Government say that the fire and rescue service will deal with floods because it has, it does and it will, that was also the case for fires, fire prevention and road traffic collisions until the prevailing wisdom decided that an expectation was not enough and the Government had to do more than just expect. There not only has to be a legal requirement for a duty; it has to be resourced and paid for, and the Government need to legislate for that outcome.

The Select Committee report makes the case for changes in structures. Part of our recommendations for better preparedness, better governance and stronger resilience is to confer a duty on the fire service to boost all those elements. The Government clearly do not want to proceed in that direction at present.

[Rob Marris]

Does my hon. Friend share my suspicion that the Government’s refusal to create a statutory duty for the fire and rescue service in this regard is driven principally by their desire not to commit resources to this area of endeavour?

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

My hon. Friend perfectly anticipates my next point. I was about to quote a statistic to demonstrate that the Government do not want to proceed in this direction—because staff reductions in fire and rescue services since 2010 have been significant, with nearly 7,000 jobs having been lost. By my estimate, that amounts to 20% of the British fire service disappearing since 2010. Those numbers are very worrying.

Furthermore, the transfer of responsibilities of the fire and rescue service to more and more police and crime commissioners, and budget pressures on both the police and the fire services suggest that there is real fear of further reductions. The fire and rescue service needs to be able to maintain the staff and equipment necessary to continue to play a prominent role in dealing with floods, preparing for them and mitigating them. To achieve that, they need recognition in law. The Select Committee believes that that needs to be done. It is an issue that is not going to go away. I suspect that at some point—perhaps not now—the Government will get the message.