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Flood and Water Management Bill

I agree, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work in his constituency. All Members representing Cumbria have done such work in very difficult circumstances, and I shall say a word more about that a little later. The Bill demonstrates that we have listened and responded. If legislation needs fixing or sorting, our duty is to ensure that we have the means to do the job, and Parliament should respond. That is exactly what we are doing with this Bill. To conclude the thanks that I wanted to express, I turn to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary. His hard work and commitment, and his open way of doing business, if I may so describe it, has won respect and friends in equal measure in all parts of the House. He has led the Bill through Committee and Report stage with considerable skill and determination, and great knowledge. Everybody involved, including me, is extremely grateful to him for the fact that we now have the Bill before us in such good shape. Our discussions in Committee and on Report have made a good Bill better and stronger, with significant changes having been made since it was first published. That shows that we have listened to those inside and outside the House as it has been scrutinised. I want to touch on some of those changes. First, there is the new clause agreed in Committee on building regulations and flood resistance, which amends the Building Act 1984. As the House will know, Sir Michael Pitt recommended revising the building regulations to ensure that all new or refurbished buildings in high flood-risk areas are flood-resistant or resilient. Powers in the Building Act allow regulations to be made to cover flood resilience or resistance for new buildings or for major alterations, but they do not allow similar provisions to be made for most types of minor repair work. A practical example is the replacement of flood-damaged plaster with a more resilient plaster. Extending, through this new clause, the scope for which building regulations can be made will enable us, if appropriate, to regulate so that flood resilience or resistance measures are required when a building is being repaired. That prepares the way for implementing recommendation 11 of Sir Michael Pitt's hugely influential report into the floods of the summer of 2007. At this stage, I would like again to place on record, on behalf of Members in all parts of the House, my thanks to Sir Michael Pitt for an outstanding report, for the way in which he went about his work, and for the fact that he did exactly what I asked him to do in the wake of the 2007 floods, which was to identify what lessons needed to be learned. As the House will know, we have not waited to get on with implementing several of his recommendations, some of which required legislation. This Bill is proof that we have listened to what he had to say and made good progress in acting on it. Secondly, we have the new clause that helps to tackle the problem of bad debt in the water industry, which was raised on Second Reading. The new clause was tabled after those concerns were aired following the publication of Anna Walker's final report on the review of charging for household water and sewerage services. The new clause requires the owner of a property that is occupied by persons other than the owner to ensure that details of the occupier are given to the water and sewerage company. Should they fail to do this, the owner becomes jointly and severally liable for the bill payment, along with the occupier. The provisions added to the Bill will allow water and sewerage companies to identify the bill payers who are liable and to pursue them for debt if they leave a property without having paid their bills. Ultimately, the benefit will be felt not only by the water companies but by all paying customers, who currently subsidise those who do not pay their bills by about £12 per household per year. This is therefore a very practical change. Today, on Report, we have agreed to add to the Bill new clause 22 on the subject of social tariffs, about which a lot of hon. Members feel very strongly. The new clause, which is, again, very practical, will ensure that Ofwat does not rule out schemes brought forward by water companies on the grounds that those schemes introduce new cross-subsidies for other customers. Such schemes could potentially give badly needed help to those who are in the severest financial difficulty. We also tabled several Government amendments, almost all of which directly responded to debate in Committee where my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary said that he would consider issues further or responded to representations from other stakeholders. They include, first, measures to make the scope of the water infrastructure provisions clearer, for example to allow for retendering or for projects to be split. Secondly, there is a measure to make the duty on local authorities to investigate flooding less burdensome, because in Committee fears were expressed about local authorities having to do a whole range of things. The position on that will be clarified. Thirdly, we have made the hosepipe ban provisions wider, adding to the two uses of them that were originally identified. Fourthly, we have made the compensation and appeals provisions more comprehensive, particularly in relation to designated assets. There is now to be a comprehensive right of appeal, which I am sure will be widely welcomed. We have just discussed the process for the approval of sustainable drainage systems, and we have made clearer the provisions on the protection of them once built. We have fitted together the timetables for the approval of SUDS and the granting of planning permission, and we have ensured that we protect SUDS by making it absolutely clear that if somebody digs up or affects them in the course of doing other work, they will have to repair them. Finally, we have made much more explicit the need for landowners to be consulted when risk management authorities use their new environmental powers. With those changes, the Bill will be even better. On Second Reading, as my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) has just reminded the House, we all had in mind the then recent events in Cumbria and the terrible impact that they had on the people, businesses and homes of that community. For many, it will take a very long time to recover. I pay tribute to all those who have worked very hard to provide support as people recover from the terrible impact of that night, such as the local authorities, neighbours who have helped neighbours and local communities. The Environment Agency recently reminded us that the 2007 floods, which were where the Bill began, cost us more than £3 billion. That is a clear indication of the serious impact that flooding has and why it is right that we have taken all the steps that we have since then to protect more people. As the House will know, we have invested more money in flood defence, so more homes are protected than at the time of the 2007 floods. We have taken practical steps to provide support for property-level flood protection where it is not possible to have a flood defence scheme, and we have learned lessons about how the emergency services work. I must say that they did a pretty good job in 2007 and certainly a very good job in the recent Cumbria floods, as any Member who was there will attest. As the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore, said at the end of the Committee stage less than two weeks ago, we know that we need to be better prepared for more extreme weather in future. This is an incredibly important Bill, and it has received cross-party support and is eagerly awaited outside Westminster because it will take the further practical steps that are required to ensure that we are better prepared and protected in the years to come when large quantities of rain fall out of the sky. The Bill will put in place new responsibilities on upper-tier local authorities to lead in dealing with surface water flooding of the type that we saw in Hull and Sheffield in 2007. As a society, we have come to learn that if we pave, tarmac and concrete over all our towns and cities and huge amounts of rain fall, it will be difficult for the water to flow away. We are therefore saying to upper-tier and unitary authorities, "You now have responsibility for bringing people together to work out where the water can flow". They must consider whether they can minimise the problem in future through work on sustainable urban drainage and through implementing the change that we have made to require planning permission if people wish to pave or tarmac over their front gardens. That is a very practical step, as is giving the Environment Agency overall responsibility. For all those reasons, I am confident that both this House and the other place, where the Bill will now go into the capable care of my noble Friend Lord Davies of Oldham, will want to see the Bill reach the statute book. We have made good progress so far, and this was the right Bill to bring forward now. I commend it to the House.