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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as a farmer and landowner and a member of the CLA and NFU. These are quite modest interests compared with those of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, but we on these Benches try our best. The Bill is relatively uncontroversial and is much needed to create certainty in an area in which the problems can get only worse in the decades to come. Furthermore, I believe that the Bill has greatly improved since its first appearance and my remaining concerns are relatively minor. My biggest concern all along has been that we might inadvertently lose our very valuable heritage of managing our water on a catchment by catchment basis. As has been said on numerous occasions, water flow does not organise itself to follow our political administrative boundaries, although as it happens in my county of Somerset, our historic boundaries are based on catchments, and with the exception of one or two minor tributaries, all our rivers rise in Somerset and fall to the sea within our county boundary. But we are an exceptional county in a variety of different ways. On the other hand, most local authorities either receive water from their neighbours or pass it on to others—or sometimes both. In other words, they are part of a greater whole known as a catchment. There was a time when I went to two or three water conferences on the continent, largely to do with the absurd nitrate directive, which I shall not go into here. But the point that was again and again rammed home to me was how lucky we were to have our water industry and flood protection administration on a whole catchment basis. Those involved in water issues on the continent were extremely jealous of what we had here. They, of course, could not achieve that. Some of their rivers crossed boundaries not only of local administrations but of countries, some of which were not always on good terms with each other and might not even speak the same language. Downstream administrations have to work harder on their diplomacy to ensure that the upstream policies on abstraction, discharge and flood protection do not inconvenience them. My starting point in considering the Bill was that catchment based water management is a pearl that we must never surrender. I believe that the Bill is a very good attempt to compromise between that priority and the desire to have local democratic accountability whereby the buck stops with somebody or some organisation that can be voted out of office when they let down their constituents. The Bill recognises that there are a host of activities largely controlled by local authorities, such as planning and highways, that impact on water management. The Bill rightly arranges for the reskilling of local authorities—I shall leave the proposed financial arrangements for others to discuss—so that they can devise and implement their local flood risk management strategies in line with the national strategy devised by the Environment Agency. Various clauses in the Bill encourage local authorities to co-operate with one another under the guidance of the Environment Agency, but while co-operation is encouraged I am concerned that there seem to be few powers for the Environment Agency to drive catchment co-operation. I am not certain whether the EA even has the power to mediate between an upstream and a downstream local authority. Above all, it is not clear that the EA has the power to ensure that the river catchment system actually works and that the series of flood-risk management plans in a large catchment will work together. I believe that the Environment Agency should have some overarching power in that respect. Maybe the co-ordination of the river catchment is the responsibility of the new regional flood and coastal committees. After all, if the current arrangements apply, they should have a majority of local authority members which could ensure better co-operation. But will they still? Clause 24 is remarkably unclear about membership. The Minister in the other place indicated that guidance on this issue would be forthcoming in due course—I think autumn was mentioned—but at any rate, under a new Parliament and when we have all taken our eye off the ball. Furthermore, these regional flood and coastal committees could be organised on a catchment basis, which would help, but again there is doubt on this issue. Reading between the lines of the Minister’s reply in the Commons, we are unlikely to know how they will be organised territorially until guidelines emerge—maybe in the autumn again, I cannot remember. In any case, he made it clear that catchments are only one of many criteria to be considered. That again gives me mild cause for concern. Sticking to my theme, the art of flood management on a catchment basis is all about flood prevention rather than flood defence. By that I mean that you do not want large concrete defensive walls and pipes in the upper reaches of a river, which prevent the flood water covering your land and the streets in your town, but which thus channel the water quickly downstream and out of your administrative area where it becomes someone else’s problem. Instead, you need voluntary contracts with upstream land managers to hold the water back and reduce the speed of flow and run-off so the whole catchment benefits from your action. There are various loose references in the Bill to these so-called softer defence mechanisms and phrases such as "maintaining or restoring natural processes", and how authorities, ""must aim to make a contribution towards the achievement of sustainable development"." There is also Schedule 3 on SUDS—though this is not quite the same thing, and in any case leaves some unanswered questions. It may be that the explicit references to soft flood defence systems I seek are not suitable for inclusion in the Bill. If this is the case, I hope that any guidance on the matter will, first, come out before the autumn—which seems to be the aspirational timescale for most of the guidance needed to make this Bill work—and secondly, that such guidance will spell out how to achieve the sort of soft flood defence systems I seek. I say this because I am well aware that there is still an overwhelming tendency among drainage engineers to fall back on their training and experience which makes them favour a hard flood defence route, based on a risk analysis system they can understand, rather than taking a more imaginative and preventive holistic approach. I have a couple of other points. In the discussions in the other place about Schedule 1 and the designation of features, I am glad to say it became clear that the appeals system was going to include the right to appeal not only against the designation and its terms, but also against any refusal of consent to alter or remove, et cetera. As far as I can gather, guidelines will also emerge on this matter in due course—no doubt in the autumn. However, I am slightly concerned that the only criteria that seems likely to be considered is whether the feature, ""would affect a flood risk"." Can we please have a duty to assess the actual risk involved, so that a small risk—for example, if the feature is only relevant in a one-in-10,000-year flood—does not automatically outweigh any economic, social or environmental gain to be achieved by the alteration? All too often, experts deciding on these issues believe that their area of expertise is paramount, and they tend to get things out of perspective. For instance, if you try to get planning permission which would create 100 new jobs but disturb a badger, you will come up against a brick wall: for the person granting the licence, the badgers reign supreme and that is the end of it. I hope in this case that considerations other than those purely of flood risk can be taken into account. Finally, I gather that we have been promised a regulatory impact review of the reservoir safety clauses to take place 12 months after the legislation has been in place. This is a good idea, because although the Environment Agency says that managers of low-risk reservoirs will not incur any extra costs, it is important that those farms and golf courses which practise sustainable water management should not have to suffer extra costs because of the new rules. All in all, my concerns about this Bill are negligible, and I feel sure that a few probing amendments answered by the Minister will probably be sufficient to alleviate them.