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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I follow every other noble Lord who has welcomed the Bill. It is good to see, at last, an attempt to clarify the strategy and responsibility for flood control and management. There is, so far, an unmentioned and invisible elephant in the Chamber. We need to get it into the open because I am certain that, in due course, it will cause the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, who will have national responsibility for this beast, a great deal of problems. What we have not so far mentioned, in all this talk of management of risk, is the level of acceptable management which we are prepared to consider and fund. After major breaches in Essex in the early 1950s, the sea walls were raised. However, the passage of time and weather has now left those walls so that they are in a satisfactory guaranteed state for a once-in-25-years level of flooding. Once in 50 years is very dodgy; once in 100 years large parts of Essex will be under water. The same applies to flood plains. I know somebody who lives in a house that was built in the 16th century. It has never been flooded before. In 2001, that house was flooded, as were a number of others. The Environment Agency locally then said it was a one-in-800 year flood. Subsequently that has been amended to a one-in-500 year flood. But fundamental questions arise from that. Can one possibly rationalise building protection for a one-in-500 year flood? That would be extremely difficult to justify; perhaps it could be justified if the risk were changed to once in 100 years. These are important matters because they affect insurance for individuals. The resident in that house, because it has been flooded, has been designated as living on a flood plain, and the insurance premiums have risen proportionately. This becomes an expensive issue. Is it rational to insure against a one-in-500 year flood? That is a very difficult question to answer. The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, is back in his place. He, above all of us speaking tonight, will have to wrestle with this issue. He has my sympathies because this will become a very difficult problem, which will involve returning to the whole question of funding this area of work, what we are prepared to pay for and what we are prepared to do. The issue has not been raised and I really thought that this great monster must be brought into the open before anything else, because I am sure that it will engage us all on many occasions in the coming years. I was interested to observe that in the Bill there are 21 clauses establishing a clear and interesting structure for managing floods, flood risk and flood control. All of a sudden, Clause 22, almost as an afterthought, refers to the regions. One can imagine one of the people responsible for drafting the Bill having a momentary brainstorm and saying, "Oh, my lord, we have forgotten the regions". There is a clear structure that includes the Environment Agency and the lead local flood management authorities. Suddenly in the Bill we find a new category; the Environment Agency must establish regional committees for consultation, whose members may be paid. They have no executive function or responsibility for flood control. If my memory is correct, they may raise a levy, although I am not sure what that will be for, because there is no information in the Bill on that. I ask myself why this peculiar structure has suddenly been added to the Bill. I know that there is a regional structure, but that already exists. The Bill requires the Environment Agency to establish a different structure. We are in some difficulties. It would be entirely appropriate if there were to be the river basin structure that we have been calling for and to which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, referred. But that is not in the Bill. We shall have to devote some time to that tricky constitutional question. I should declare that I am a farmer in Essex, which is one of the driest counties in the country. Flooding may not be thought to be a huge problem there, but it can be. I wish to talk about Schedule 4 on reservoirs. I have a reservoir which I had built in 1961. It is far bigger than the 1,000 cubic metres that is talked about, so I have a vital interest in it. I built it for irrigation purposes. I am not a big farmer, but in the days when I was irrigating it was not at all unusual for me to use something pushing towards 3,000 cubic metres of water in a season. From the point of view of having a farm reservoir for irrigation purposes, the 1,000 cubic metres limit is remarkably low.