Flooding: Irwell Vale and Surrounding Areas

Sara Britcliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food (Victoria Prentis)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Ms McVey.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) for securing this important debate on the flooding in Irwell Vale, and for describing the area and its inhabitants so passionately and so well. It is also good to see my hon. Friends the Members for Hyndburn (Sara Britcliffe), and for Bury North (James Daly), who remind us through their very presence that raging torrents do not stop at constituency boundaries, and that we have to look at the problem in a whole-catchment, or catchment-sensitive, way.

The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), who has responsibility for the environment, is sorry not to be responding to the debate, but she is at the United Nations oceans conference in Lisbon, so I am afraid that my right hon. and hon. Friends have her stand-in today. However, I undertake to speak to her about this debate, and will ensure that she meets interested colleagues once again to discuss the issues to do with the scheme that have been outlined this afternoon.

The devastation caused by flooding is terrible. Having lived all my life in the Cherwell valley, I sympathise deeply with all those affected, including those who have been affected repeatedly over the past 10 years. It is even more devastating when a location is affected time and again. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen described graphically, residents rarely have a moment’s peace when the rain is coming from both directions.

I pass on my sympathies to all residents in my right hon. and hon. Friends’ constituencies who have been affected by flooding, including during really dreadful events in February 2020, when 56 houses were flooded, and on Boxing Day 2015—that was the really bad one—when 94 properties were flooded.

[Sara Britcliffe (Hyndburn) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentioned the Boxing day flooding. As she will know, it brought all our communities together, but these events also take away from all our local police services and other services. On that day, police came from Blackburn, Bolton and Burnley to tackle the problems, but as we know, there are sometimes other issues in communities on Boxing day. Does she agree that whole communities are affected? Also, we want people to live in these beautiful places on our patches, but house insurance is nearly impossible to get, because of flooding.

[Victoria Prentis]

My hon. Friend makes some important points. It is always good to have conversations and debates on flooding with a group of interested colleagues, so that decisions can be made in a joined-up way.

Irwell Vale and nearby areas, including Strongstry and Chatterton, face a combination of risks from river, surface water, and groundwater flooding, which are all interconnected and therefore difficult to deal with in isolation. When flooding has taken place, the water has been very deep and fast-flowing, and has cut off access to communities, in many cases very badly. The EA recognises the importance of trying to alleviate the flood risk as much as possible, especially given the complexity of the risks. That is why the EA, working closely with partners including Lancashire County Council, has installed a permanent automatic pump to help reduce the frequency of surface water, and has done various works on banks and embankments in those communities, as well as having removed gravel.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen mentioned that the Irwell Vale scheme is sometimes described as a linear scheme; he rightly said it was much more than that. The estimated cost of the scheme is £19.5 million. The EA has secured around £11 million for the scheme through various sources, such as grant in aid, a local levy and the assets replacement allocation. As he said, that leaves a funding gap of £8.5 million.