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Flooding

My Lords, I shall follow the injunction of my noble friend Lord Evans of Temple Guiting. I declare an interest as a resident of the city of Worcester and a member of Worcestershire County Cricket Club, which will sadly not be playing again at Worcester this season. I have two points. First, will the Minister extend his very welcome comments about the devotion of the emergency services to those public servants such as the employees of county councils, who have worked almost without break for the whole weekend? I have heard accounts this afternoon of county council employees working for 36 hours continuously to deal with the crisis in Worcestershire and of the staff of a special school who stayed with their pupils through the night because there was no other way in which to look after them. When we come to review the lessons from this awful weekend, could somebody please look at the flood defences on the River Severn, particularly upstream? This is not the first time that the Severn has flooded and it is certainly not the first time that Worcestershire cricket ground has flooded, but it is the first time that we have had anything on the scale that we have seen over this weekend. Could some form of permanent barrier be put in place to deal with this sort of situation in future?