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Flood and Water Management Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), who made a measured and passionate contribution that was based on the experiences of his constituency. It is a pleasure, as secretary of the all-party group on flood prevention, to make a modest contribution to the debate. We might have heard the last words on this subject from my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping)—the same applies to the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack)—but each speech was certainly a tour de force that contributed to our proceedings. In my 13 years in Parliament, my name has, to my knowledge, been mentioned only once in Cabinet. My sources tell me that a slide presentation was made to the Cabinet earlier this year on flood defences and the work of the Environment Agency. Perhaps minds were beginning to wander by slide 27, but then they reached the final slide, and who should appear—modesty does not forbid me from saying—but the hon. Member for Selby, sitting on top of the flood defences in Selby on the occasion of their opening. Those flood defences are worth £18 million and protect 3,000 people. I am told by my informant that one or two members of the Cabinet made comments on that last slide; I do not know what they said, but perhaps it was how well deserved the money was, given my constant record of support for Ministers over the past decade. In return for such confidence from Ministers, I put on record that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his predecessors have ensured that there has been a continual increase in flood expenditure over the years, which has not always been easy. While I take on board all the criticisms that have been made about the current insurance arrangements, some European countries do not have any insurance arrangements at all, so the maintenance of our arrangements represents an achievement, although I wish that the insurance industry was much better at enforcing the terms of the codes. It was also crucial that the Bill came before the House before Christmas so that it could make progress, and Ministers are to be commended on those three issues. I want to make three points about the Bill, all of which have been referred to, although perhaps not in detail. My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood talked about the regional flood defence committees. It is important that those committees continue, so I am a little alarmed by clauses 22 to 26, which deal with such committees. The functions of the committees will be changed and they will become more advisory and less executive. Ministers will also take greater powers to appoint the committees' members. At the moment, about half the membership of a committee is made up of local authority members chosen by individual local authorities. If we are to give local authorities much more responsibility for local management and co-ordination, the least that we can do is maintain their influence. There is no evidence to suggest that that influence has been malign at a regional level. One marvellous phrase in the Government response to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee is:""the Department wishes to strengthen these committees by ensuring their members are of the right calibre and standing and able to provide effective local input."" I read that as meaning that the man from Whitehall knows best who should represent local authorities on the regional flood defences committees. Alternatively, perhaps it is a way of ensuring that the local authorities are unable to have a good block vote. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State came up to Yorkshire some years ago, and since then he has become an honorary Yorkshireman and a champion of local democracy. When he looks at this matter, I am sure that he will realise that it will be much better if Yorkshire's regional flood defence committee makes the final sign-off on flood defence schemes and so on, and not some anonymous bureaucrat in Whitehall. My second point is again inspired by my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood. I may go a little further than he did, although I am not about to suggest any windfall taxes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) proposed. That must be a first for him, but I shall be measured in my remarks. My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood suggested that water companies, however they are regulated or owned in the future, could have a greater role to play with regard to SUDS. I think that he is on to something there, because the water companies' greater role in terms of private sewers and so on means that they have the engineering experience needed for SUDS. It would take many local authorities a long time to build up that expertise, so there is a logic in the suggestion that water companies and water authorities should have a greater say about SUDS. A strong case can be made for that. My third and final point has to do with the basic thrust of the Bill. Those of us who have been affected by flooding know what it is like. There are 88 settlements in Selby, and well over half of them have been flooded at some time during my years as the local MP. I am sure that all of us representing areas that flood have seen people suffering terribly when their houses get flooded. We will have looked at all the various agencies—the Environment Agency, the local authorities, the drainage boards and the water authorities—and wondered which of them was in charge. I play a small and modest part in the co-ordinating role in my area. Every six months, I chair a meeting at which representatives from the villages affected by flooding have half an hour to talk about the problem as they see it. We sit there all day and between us we try and co-ordinate action and so on. It is quite a tough job, and I shall give the House one example, involving the village of Saxton in the heart of Yorkshire. A few years ago, the village was repeatedly flooded by surface water flooding. The people there made good use of the discretionary funding from the regional flood defence committee and they put together, from various sources, a pot of money amounting to nearly £100,000. However, they then discovered that improving the drainage in the village meant that they had first to get round the pipes and other equipment blocking the drains that had been put in place by the various local utilities. We are now making an appeal to the various utilities to remove their services by the time that England play their first game in the World cup against the United States on 12 June next year. All but one have agreed to do that, so, if the funding bodies keep the funding in place, we will be able to put the scheme in place. We are also appealing to the National Grid Company, which has not yet fulfilled a deal that it made with a local farmer to fix the drainage in one of his fields. That shows that an awful lot of co-ordination is involved just for one village. For that reason, the task that local authorities are to take on, and the expertise that they will need, should not be underestimated. I compare the task facing local authorities with the one that faced them when, in the early days of this Government, the co-ordination of crime prevention became a local authority function for the first time. Local authorities had to do lots of things that they had not done before, and they also had to talk to lots of people whom they had never talked to before. That is the scale of the challenge that we are facing with this Bill. The all-party flood prevention group was formed after the experience of the floods of 2000. I was a relatively new MP at the time, and I will never forget watching hundreds of troops pass sandbags along a line one Saturday night in a desperate attempt to keep Selby's flood defences from failing. That brought it home to me how big an issue this is for many communities, and I am very pleased that the Bill is before the House tonight. May it have a fair wind in the new year.