Rivers Authorities and Land Drainage Bill (First sitting)

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Committee Debate: House of Commons
Monday 11th March 2019 Public Bill Committees

[David Warburton]

My hon. Friend is precisely right. It is about planning for the future, and sustainability in the Somerset Rivers Authority. At the moment, it lives from hand to mouth and the local authority pays it voluntarily. Although £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money goes into it, it has no certainty about whether that will continue in five years, three years and so on. The Bill provides that certainty and the safety that the residents of Somerset deserve.

As I said, if there are gaps in the local plan, the rivers authority must publish a plan of proposed additional flood risk management work, which must supplement the work that existing risk management authorities have already planned to carry out. That will help ensure that work is not left for a rivers authority to pick up on another body’s behalf. The rivers authority can then either fund a relevant risk management authority to do the additional work, or contract someone else to carry out the work on its behalf.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

I think that we can all support the idea of having one agency that will do all this work. However, is there not a danger that in the areas where the work is needed the most, there will be far higher expense than there will be in other parts of the country, and that this will not in any way enable central Government to step in when there is an emergency or when a serious amount of capital work needs to be done?

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[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome for introducing the Bill. He spoke with detail and authority about its contents. I am pleased that we nearly have a south-west majority in Committee—it is about time that the south-west got its fair share, and if we have to get it by taking control of Bill Committees, I support that. We also have several hon. Members from SERA—Labour’s Environment Campaign, which is good.

The Opposition welcome and support this good Bill, because changes to flood protections for communities are long overdue, but I hope that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome will not mind my asking a few questions to understand how the powers will be implemented. Some of my questions will be for him, but I suspect that the Minister and her officials will have some insight on the more technical ones.

The Bill is timely, because there have been flooding incidents not only in the south-west. In the Lake district and across the country, flooding has had huge and disproportionate effects on small communities that often do not have the resources to provide the protection they need on their own. It is important that we set out a regulatory framework that will help them to pool the risk and the effort.

The Bill is also long overdue. Many of its measures should have been introduced by the Government long before they were proposed in a private Member’s Bill and we would have liked Government time to have been used for debating its provisions. None the less, we welcome the effort that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome has put into introducing the legislation. We need to invest time and energy in considering the proposals to make sure that they work for all our communities. We know that not every community will be affected by flooding and that not every community affected by flooding will be affected by the same type of flooding—coastal flooding and river flooding are very different.

[Sandy Martin]

Does my hon. Friend agree that although it is true that coastal flooding and river flooding are different and occur at different times for different reasons, the effects of climate change will tend to exacerbate both through increased and unpredictable rainfall and through rising sea levels?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is right and pre-empts one of my questions for the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome about how the provisions will work in coastal communities. From my reading of the provisions, it seems that many of them work for inland communities and river flooding in particular. I would be grateful if he set out how he envisages the provisions working in an environment where there is the risk of both river and coastal flooding, especially with regard to the cost implications that he just spoke about. Clearly, the responsibility for coastal flooding is much more expensive and, with the risk of climate change, can have much bigger impacts.

As I said, the Opposition welcome the Bill. Although we have no problem with the clauses, I have a few questions that I hope will provide some clarity about how the provisions will be implemented. As is outlined in clause 1, a rivers authority established under the Bill will be a locally accountable body with the powers to issue precepts to billing authorities that will collect money from council tax payers for additional local flood management work.

I understand from the Association of Drainage Authorities that the Department is not expecting a flurry of requests for the establishment of rivers authorities. The Bill does not impose rivers authorities on local councils, so it is for those that want them to be proactive. How will that work for councils that have suffered huge cuts and might not have the in-house resource to do that? How does the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome envisage rivers authorities being rolled out? Will there be additional support for the pilot rivers authorities to effectively overcome the early administrative obstacles that will inevitably come with the formation of a new rivers authority, so that pioneer projects can share best practice with the ones that follow?

How will local communities challenge and hold accountable local river and drainage authorities for their actions? It is good to hear that the majority of members of those committees will be from local councils, and so will be elected; that flow through of democratic accountability is important. On Second Reading in the main Chamber, I asked whether the Department would publish guidance on the composition of those boards, particularly on their gender balance. Having observed several such committees, they can be quite bloke-heavy—and, indeed, retired bloke-heavy—which, as a general rule, we should try to avoid when creating new public bodies. I will be grateful if the Minister or the Member in charge sets out whether there will be any guidance to that effect.

Will there be guidance on whether the heads of those authorities should serve for a fixed period, or will that period run and run? In some communities, the people who will be in charge of such bodies have also been in charge of everything else that came before. I just want to understand whether there will be accountability and a rotation of those roles. I assume that there will be the usual registers of interest to avoid any conflicts of interest, especially because these authorities will be dealing with small communities, where expertise is essential. There is a risk of a conflict of interest, so will the Minister set out how we will engineer out any of those risks at an early stage?

It seems that many of the provisions regarding rivers authorities’ proceedings in proposed new section 21D apply to local government, such as access to agendas, inspection of papers and inspection of minutes. Will there be guidance that such meetings should be open to the public to ensure full accountability, and that any private proceedings should be limited and face proper scrutiny? What input will members of the public have into the exercise of the duties of a rivers authority, especially in how the provisions in new section 21D will be implemented?

We know that there is an awful lot of experience in how to deal with flooding in our local communities, especially among farmers who have farmed land affected by flooding for many generations. A yearly flood risk management plan seems like a good option. I will be interested to see how the new bodies interact with water companies, particularly with the upstream thinking pioneered by many water companies that cover water catchment areas. A few of us in the Committee are covered by South West Water, which has pioneered upstream thinking for some time. We need to make sure that we are not setting up two bodies with slightly different agendas. That interaction needs to be there.

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[David Warburton]

I am grateful to the Minister for fielding all the questions so well. My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane is well known as a passionate advocate of environmental matters. She is right that the Somerset biodiversity action plan is exciting and that the IDBs will play an integral part in ensuring that our splendid Somerset heritage is maintained.

[Sandy Martin]

Is it not the case that making more provision for wildlife and helping to keep any possible river flooding upstream also creates savings for people downstream? Will there be any mechanism for those savings to be used to compensate upstream agricultural operations that might lose out financially?

[David Warburton]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Drainage boards operate area by area, and those within the area will benefit. However, of course they work together and they understand the needs of surrounding areas. That brings us back to rivers authorities and the reason, perhaps, why my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness wants to bring them together and create a rivers authority. It is about working together in the best interests of us all.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 2 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 3

Disclosure of Revenue and Customs information

Amendment made: 1, in clause 3, page 14, line 11, leave out “Data Protection Act 1998” and insert

“data protection legislation (within the meaning of section 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018)”.—(David Warburton.)

This amendment updates an outdated reference to the Data Protection Act 1998.

Clause 3, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

Consequential provision

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.