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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, this debate is happening against the background of a failure to reach agreement on climate change negotiations in Copenhagen and a co-ordinated response around the world from climate change sceptics attacking climate change science. I have looked at the details of this for the past three or four weeks, and my conclusion would be that this has made no impact. It has no consequence for the bulk of the science, which is robust and extremely well founded. It means that we are on track for an increase of at least, on average, 2 degrees centigrade, and possibly much more in the next 20 to 30 years. That will bring more extreme weather patterns of all types. That is part of the background of the Bill. The sceptics tend to say that we exaggerate the risks of climate change, but on the other side of mainstream science there are some scientists who say that we radically underestimate those risks, and that they are much greater and more proximate than the mainstream scientific community says they are. Noble Lords who want to be truly frightened should read James Lovelock’s most recent book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, which says that much more extreme climate change is already stacked up into the system, so the kinds of floods that we have been seeing will be more extreme than orthodox scientific opinion thinks. The Government have put in place an impressive array of innovations over the past few years to try to combat climate change, of which the Bill is a part. I add to what other noble Lords have said in paying tribute to the Environment Agency, to the noble Lords and Baronesses who have led the agency and to the impressive work it has done since it was set up. Against the backdrop of the likelihood of more extreme weather, it is clear that we have to be proactive and long-term in our thinking. It is not enough to wait until such weather comes along before we try to build the resilience to deal with it. This, I take it, is the background to the Bill. However, the origins of the Bill do not lie in that approach; as has been said, they lie in the floods of 2007, the shock that those produced and the subsequent report written by Sir Michael Pitt. Those floods teetered on the edge of a larger catastrophe. If they had spread a little further, whole areas would have lost electricity in addition to the other woes they suffered. Obviously we cannot say of any single weather event that it is the result of climate change, but it is almost certain that we are in for more extreme weather, in an accumulative way, over the next several decades than we have ever experienced before. The Thames barrier was closed four times in the 1980s; it was closed 75 times in the last decade. The Environment Agency, quite rightly, has the Thames Estuary 2100 consultation going on at the moment. There was an excellent discussion of the Bill at its Second Reading in another place and I do not want to reiterate what was said there. However, I would ask the Minister to comment on four issues, some of which have been alluded to in previous contributions to the debate. First—to add to what other noble Lords have asked about responsibility—if we are talking about long-term, proactive adaptation, as we are, we are obviously in the business of long-term planning over a 20 or 30-year cycle and beyond, which is quite different from what we have been accustomed to in the past. The Environment Agency has rightly been given a central role in such planning. It clearly has to co-ordinate with the Committee on Climate Change, and especially with its adaptation sub-committee. Are effective arrangements for liaison in place, as this is different from the other areas of responsibility which have been mentioned? We are talking about responsibility for long-term planning, with adaptation being at the centre of this. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, mentioned, flood and water management, on the one hand, and drought and heat waves, on the other, seem to be opposites, but they are closely linked. We are in for much wetter winters than we have had in the past and longer periods of drought in the summers. The Bill contributes to these issues because it discusses dams and, as was mentioned, emergency restrictions on water use. We need a large-scale proactive attitude on the connection between floods and drought. Given the background to the Bill, are the Government following and learning from forms of water management in periods of drought that are being experimented with in other countries? For example, in India and Bangladesh, which have had more extreme versions of weather than we have ever had, a system of proactive conjunctive water management has been developed, and interestingly so. That is very important for farming because it is farmers who are most menaced by the new conjunction of flooding and drought. It would be worth while for the Government to take a direct interest in such experiments and to try to build them into the backdrop for further elaboration of the Bill. Thirdly, I am not sure that enough work has been done on insurance, which is a key aspect. The Minister alluded to it in his introduction but did not say much about it. One has to recognise that it cannot be wholly statutory, but there is a crisis of insurance in relation to flooding. The concordat that existed for some 40 years between the UK insurance industry and the Government, who provided flood cover for all homes without regard to risk, broke down in 2002. Negotiations continue between the insurance industry and the Government, but so far all they have is a list of general principles which could leave large chunks of our assets uninsured. Total assets at risk from sea flooding, inland flooding and coastal erosion are calculated at £228 billion, which is a truly formidable sum. Does the Minister agree that more work needs to be done on this? Fourthly and finally, I shall allude briefly to the European Union, which was mentioned in a slightly critical vein. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, mentioned his home in south-west France. That region has experienced more extreme weather during the past four or five years than it has at any other time in its history. A terrible storm swept right across Europe, through the south-west of France and on to other parts of southern Europe. It is plain that we need to co-ordinate with the European Union on extreme weather. As an island, we do not have the same relationship to principles which apply to the Continent, but the European Union has developed a water framework directive which is a proactive water management scheme. It makes eminent sense for the UK to give direct attention to, and monitor, the efforts of the Commission to deal proactively with long-term adaptation. Extreme weather conditions do not recognise national boundaries.