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Flood and Water Management Bill

The hon. Gentleman is correct. I hope that we will return to that issue soon—although it would have to be after the general election. We should treat the Bill—or Act, as it will then be—as a working document and a good start, but as something that we need to improve on. There is nothing wrong with that; we have to start somewhere. I do not mean to be over-critical of it, but I would rather see it improved in certain ways now. We have heard a lot about floods occurring once in 100 or 200 years—or, in respect of the north-west floods of a few months ago, once in 1,000 years. I do not think that we can speak in those terms, as I do not believe that floods have been recorded for 1,000 years, in which case we cannot say how often they have occurred over a 1,000-year period. In view of climate change, which we discuss in one form or another every day, we cannot assume that weather patterns will be the same in the future as they have in the past. The point is that we must do everything we can to prepare our areas for flooding. My own area of Tewkesbury floods regularly. It has been flooded in the past couple of weeks, and the roads as well as the fields near the famous Mythe waterworks, close to where I live, have flooded. It does not always make the news because it happens so often. It is something that we have to live with regularly. Living at the confluence of two rivers, the Severn and the Avon, we know that we are going to flood every so often. What we request of the Government is that they do not make matters worse—for example, by building too many houses in the wrong place. Also, where it is possible to adopt measures to improve matters, we should do so. I shall speak briefly to three amending provisions proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh), the first of which is new clause 2, dealing with the Environment Agency and the maintenance of main watercourses. We had major floods two and a half years ago, and afterwards, of course, there was a lot of wisdom: we then saw many drains and culverts in disrepair, ditches and streams that had not been cleared out, how much work could and should have been done on the rivers, and so forth. While we have to repair the damage—that has been done throughout my constituency—we should follow a principle of maintaining the waterways. It is the same principle as having our car serviced at regular intervals rather than waiting for it to break down. Servicing should happen so that there is less chance of breaking down again. Even with the car, we cannot entirely rule out a further breakdown, but servicing should make it less likely and if it does break down, the damage should not be so bad if proper maintenance has taken place. It is crucial to stress to the Environment Agency and other bodies responsible for waterways that we must have regular maintenance. As I said, we found many examples in my constituency of where the situation could have been better—or less bad, which is probably a better way of putting it. The village of Prestbury, which contains the great Cheltenham race course and falls within my constituency, saw flooding not only in July 2007, but earlier in June 2007. I visited people who told me that they had lived there for 40 years, yet never experienced flooding before. I thought that that was rather odd as the area contains houses and streets that flood quite a lot, but it seemed not to have happened in this particular place until June 2007. I then realised that a housing estate had been built on what I consider to be an inappropriate place, which no doubt contributed to the flooding further down the road. I also discovered that two culverts had been put in, supposedly to take the water away, but—unbelievably—they had not been joined up. One culvert had become damaged, but had not been fixed. That is a good example of how a lack of maintenance and a lack of proper planning can make matters so much worse. I thus endorse new clause 2 and what my hon. Friend said about it.