Future Flood Prevention

Debate between Rob Marris and Neil Parish

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.