Oral question asked in the House of Commons, by David Kidney (Labour). It was answered on Thursday, 25 October 2007 on behalf of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Flood Risk

Question: Following this summer's flooding, my survey of 4,000 households in my constituency tells me that people would support my right hon. Friend's Department giving incentives to landowners to manage their land in ways that help to prevent floods—not just the normal daily work of keeping watercourses and gullies free from obstructions but proactively, for example, by creating new water meadows and other wetland. Will he change the conditions for the single payment and the schemes for stewardship of land in order to give that incentive to landowners?

Answer: My hon. Friend raises an interesting and important point. Of course, there is already land that naturally floods during the winter, but the problem for some of the farmers whom I met was that they did not expect it to flood in that way during the summer, so it came at a bad time of the year and affected their ability to get their crops out of the ground. Yes, the Environment Agency does need to consider all the ways in which we can accommodate astonishing flows of water of the kind that we saw in June and July. It is debatable whether landowners have to be paid to do that because in the winter they provide such flood capacity naturally. However, one lesson that we have learned from all of this—Sir Michael Pitt will be drawing all of them together in his lessons-learned review—is that we have to look at the inter-relationship of the ways in which water can escape when we have the astonishing amount of rainfall that we experienced during the summer. If my hon. Friend has not already done so, he might like to pass on the result of his consultation to Sir Michael Pitt so that he can consider it in his review.

Secondary information