Flood and Water Management

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I commend the EFRA Committee on its excellent report and on bringing it to the attention of the House in this debate. I particularly commend the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh).

Water is a scarce resource. We may not feel that that is the case, given the recent downpours that we have had. However, as the hon. Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham) said, the debate should not just be about defences, but about the use of water and about water management. Water is a scarce resource in this country, despite its being surrounded by water. If I may, Mrs Main, I will take this opportunity to advertise the fact that this very Saturday I will be doing a walk for WaterAid along the Suffolk coast, raising money for people who really do have very little water.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) gave a very thoughtful speech on the national flood standards, referring to the Benyon settlement or the Benyon formula. Perhaps there will be many arguments about that in future as there are about the Barnett formula.

I want to refer to a few paragraphs and recommendations in the Select Committee report. I will begin with recommendation 22 about the abstraction licensing regime. I made—well, it was not an error, but I drew the attention of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to the potential drought in Suffolk earlier this year and I wish that I had shut my mouth because we had so much rain in the summer it was untrue. However, I do not regret doing that because it did make things happen. [Interruption.] It did not make it rain, but it ensured that the Environment Agency worked with local farmers to ensure that Suffolk was one of the few areas suffering such arid conditions that was not declared an official drought area. They worked together in a co-operative way, and I was delighted with that.

The particular issue in Suffolk was abstraction from rivers. That was where we had the biggest problems—the biggest threat. The flexibility of licensing that is recommended is important, and I hope that the Minister will consider carefully widening the times of the year when water can be abstracted or stored and how it is used and captured. It seems ridiculous that when we are having downpours, we are not allowed to capture some of that water in our reservoirs.

The report also discusses tradeable rights. I think that such trading does happen now, but perhaps not in a formal way. Certainly in my constituency, farmers can use one another’s licences, but they have to secure agreement from the Environment Agency and Natural England. We all know the joy of trying to ensure that people work together, but that has worked and the people to whom I have referred pay one another. It may not be a formal scheme, but an informal scheme does operate.

We must be careful lest we end up with what happens under the fishing regime. People begin to buy and trade quotas, and they end up having rights to quotas and perhaps licensing arrangements that they never use themselves—they just use them as a financial asset. That would be a great mistake.

The grandfathering regime is referred to in the report. Of course, that exists now. It may not sound very conservative, but I am not talking about nationalisation of licensing or water rights. However, if people are to be rewarded, we should ensure they have actually been using their water rights and that they have not been sitting idle. It is possible that people are becoming a bit wealthier and may not have used their rights for some time.

On water storage, I understand exactly what the Committee says about the transfer from the regional development agency and the use of funds from the rural development programme for England. However, I still do not have full details from the East of England Development Agency about what is being done. I know that something has been done, but it is important that we are able to invest in water storage. Whether it is reservoirs or local schemes, I want to support it.

I return to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. I am not going to talk about funding for flood defences, as that has been eloquently discussed. Councillor Andy Smith from Suffolk Coastal district council and I have met the Minister, so he already knows of my concern that we seem to be relying on his common sense in setting up the regional flood risk committees. Authorities that have responsibility for coastal defences are not automatically included. I fully appreciate the assurances that the Minister has given me, and I realise that he will continue with that, but we will not always have the benefit of the Benyon effect. I hope that the Minister will be at the Department for some time; however, I do not want to limit his ministerial ambition.

I turn next to the practicalities of the necessary coastal defences. The Minister has visited Suffolk Coastal on a few occasions, and he is well aware of the schemes that have been proposed. I would like to thank him publicly for what seems to be a significant change in the approach of the relevant agencies. My feedback from councillors and landowners is that the Environment Agency and Natural England have—dare I say it?—a can-do approach. I am not sure of the reasons for the change, but I put it down to the Minister and his ministerial team. There is certainly a fresh enthusiasm. We have less money, and we cannot always gold-plate everything, so we have to be pragmatic, and some of that is coming through.

Recommendation 12 is on internal drainage boards. Much has been said about them already, and I support many of those comments. I agree that they could be used more, and I would welcome a localist approach if they wanted to take on more tasks. I believe that most of them have a local authority presence. I know that there is talk about oversight, and whether the boards are reporting to the Environment Agency. I like to think that county or district councillor members of IDBs are playing a full part. I realise that not all boards have filled those vacancies with councillors; I would encourage them to do so. I genuinely believe that IDBs can often do a lot of the work much more cheaply. It never fails to amaze me how a project’s costing is scoped out. Although some of that has changed, we should recognise that not all defences need to last 100 years, and that we could be looking at generational life of 25 to 30 years. We should use the IDBs whenever we can, as they do such a good job on other matters.

There is another problem that keeps coming up in my constituency. I have to be careful how I phrase this, but the Environment Agency says that it will not stop landowners defending their parts of the coastline. The same goes for Natural England. To some extent, however, they do stop hard defences being erected, although they will manage soft defences for a few years. The Benacre estate at the top of my constituency is losing land every year to erosion—I have forgotten the exact amount but I think that it is about 15 acres—but it is not allowed to use hard defences.

I realise that we are not debating shoreline management plans today, but they have to connect up. There is no particular compensation for that loss of land. We would not take land away from people living in the centre of the country and say, “You are not allowed to put a fence around that and someone else can come and camp on it and you won’t have access to it”—that kind of thing; I do not want to be controversial—so we should expect compensation for people who are not even allowed to use hard defences on their own land. I do not want to say too much about human rights, but there is a feeling that people are not being allowed to protect their own property.

I understand what paragraph 9 has to say about agriculture. Suffolk is famous for its pigs and potatoes, but if we did not have agricultural land the potatoes could be grown elsewhere or even imported. I am not sure that that is the right policy direction, however; I believe that we should think more about our resilience and the value of food security. I would like a little bit more value to be given to agricultural production in the funding formula.

Insurance is important, as several Members have said. I am slightly concerned that we will not have any more information on the subject until March 2012, just a year before the current agreement comes to an end. However, I have every confidence that the Minister and his officials will secure a successful outcome, so that people can continue to live safely and securely in their own homes.

I wish to make one final suggestion. It is not about legislation or directly to do with floods. The Department has worked well with the new planning policy framework to ensure sustainable development and to deal with water stress, but I return to a point that I have made in the main Chamber about building design. We should encourage people to reconsider the way in which electrics are installed, especially if we have to build in difficult places such as floodplains. I understand that one of the major problems when waiting for a house to dry out, which affects the cost of repair, is the fact that the sockets are at floor level rather than at waist height. Some simple planning guidance or design ideas would save the insurance industry a lot of money and result in lower premiums. I thank the House for its patience.