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Flooding

We also wish to express our sympathy to all of those affected by the floods. They are severe and there has been an enormous amount of hardship caused for many, many people. We also wish to join in the congratulations offered to the emergency services and, indeed, to join in the pride that the House should rightly feel in their dedication and devotion to duty. An independent review of the lessons to be learned from these events is surely welcome. Will the Secretary of State also confirm that he intends to proceed with the strategic overview for the Environment Agency of all flood risks, which the Government announced in March 2005? There is a confusion between what has been a good set of co-ordinated responses through Gold Command by the emergency services and the much less clear response of the agencies responsible for the prevention, forecasting and warning of flooding. After all, that commitment in March 2005 was before the revolving ministerial door in the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs took its toll. Ministers should now proceed with this. Is it not crazy that the responsibility for preventing floods and for protecting us against flooding remains split between councils, water companies, the Highways Agency and the Environment Agency, all of which operate on different assessments of risk? Perhaps the Secretary of State will clarify that point. Drainage is assessed as adequate when it deals with one in 10 year events; river flood defences are expected to be proof against one in 100 year events. When will the Department insist that those be brought into line, while, we hope, clearly taking account of what is happening because of climate change? When will the Department ensure that there is a proper map of drainage and sewerage systems that are poorly maintained or otherwise inadequate? It is already clear that official assessments of river flooding are now woefully behind reality. For example, the new £23 million flood defence on the River Chelt at Cheltenham was meant to be proof against events once in every hundred years, yet it has been over-topped not once but twice in three weeks. On that reckoning, either the Environment Agency has to redo its sums or Cheltenham need not expect another flood for 200 years. Will the Secretary of State now review all existing provisions and future ones as, clearly, the greater likelihood of flooding means that many more schemes will pass the Government’s investment threshold? The Prime Minister, whom I am delighted to see in his place, has to take particular responsibility for the Government’s flood failures, as he was the person who cut the flood defence budget by £14 million last summer. There is no point in saying that the capital budget was not affected; those are weasel words. The truth is that the overall flood defence budget was cut and effecting feasibility studies meant that capital projects are likely to be delayed. If he doubts that, I suggest he talks to some of the people involved with the flood board in Yorkshire and Humberside. The local flood boards were asked only last month to plan for real-terms cuts for the next three years. Even after the Yorkshire floods, the Treasury conceded only that the flood defence budget should be boosted in 2010—as the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) said—while saying nothing about the next two years of the spending plans. I heard the Secretary of State say that we should wait for the comprehensive spending review, but surely the urgency of the situation demands that we get some clarity about the Government’s intentions earlier than that. Is it not time that the Government recognised the urgency of the threat posed by climate change?