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Pitt Report

The hon. Gentleman thanked me for advance sight of a copy of my statement, but it is clear from what we have just heard that he did not do the House the courtesy of reading it or listening to it when I delivered it a moment ago. I do not share his assessment of the performance of the emergency services, and it is no good saying that he pays tribute to what they did. The reason that the emergency services were able to deal with the emergency in the way that they did was precisely the planning that had been put in place. Nor do I share the hon. Gentleman's assessment of progress on the urgent recommendations that Sir Michael Pitt made in his interim report. On the question of infrastructure, the hon. Gentleman has just heard about the progress that has been made. There are 43 local resilience forums in England, with 38 to be briefed—because the six forums in London will be briefed as one—and 29 of which have been briefed, so there are nine to be done by the end of August. Those nine have not been done because they have said that they want to wait for a revised list of essential infrastructure to be published. Once that happens, they will be briefed. There are 4,716 households out of their homes, 58 per cent. of which are in Hull and the East Riding, and 8 per cent. in Tewkesbury. We will continue to work hard to get those people back into their homes, but we should pay tribute to the enormous effort that has resulted in most of the people affected going home. Some 48,000 homes were affected by the flooding and great progress has been made in the past year: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman was not prepared to acknowledge that. The money that my hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government has promised local authorities has been delivered—up to £88 million—and, as I said, there is more to come in the £31 million that will be allocated by the end of next month. The question of connection to sewerage is something that we will look at in the proposed Bill. I gave the hon. Gentleman the answer to his question about the national framework in my statement and I hope that he will welcome the fact that the outline will be published by the end of July and the first draft by the end of this year. On the opt-out, the hon. Gentleman clearly did not listen to a word I said, because I told the House that the Environment Agency will now automatically register people whose numbers are publicly available and is in the final stages of sorting out the problem of ex-directory numbers. Of course, people have the right to opt out of a warning in those circumstances, but I am sure that all hon. Members would advise them not to do so.