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Flood and Water Management Bill

Perhaps as I am intervening for the second time I should declare my interests. I am a farmer and landowner in Essex. I have a reservoir—although it is nothing to do with what we are likely to be discussing today—which I caused to be constructed on my land. I also have very long experience of local government and local authorities, although I left that in 1993. I no longer have any technical interest in that, but it does give me a certain amount of knowledge. I join the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, in what he said about the other services that get involved in an emergency. He spoke very ably on behalf of the fire service, and I wholly agree with what he said, but we need to remember that other services are involved in local emergency planning. I find the Government’s drafting of this part of this Bill to be rather conservative. Local government is not what it used to be. In the olden days, if you went to talk to county authorities in particular, you would be talking at the same time to the police authorities and all the emergency planning authorities. In the sort of situation to which the noble Lord refers, we are dealing with emergency in the widest meaning of that word. I remind the Committee that it was a policeman who lost his life in the flood in Cumbria. The police, equally, need to be very much involved, because it can get to the scale when a flood ceases to be a flood and becomes an emergency—and, as we saw last autumn, that can be an emergency on a really major scale. There is still a local emergency planning system somewhere in local government, I think, but I am not sure; there certainly was in my day. We had to deal with everything from the possibility of a major collapse at a nuclear power station to oil refineries exploding, even right down to small, very sophisticated chemical or medical establishments, which, if they had a fire and things started to escape, could affect a very wide area. All these services need to be co-ordinated. In fact, generally, if you look you will find that there are plans around to deal with that sort of issue. But we need to take the debate a little wider than the particular remit of the fire service, because other services are involved. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned the mountain rescue people. You do not know exactly what is going to be involved when there is a flood, particularly a major flood. One thinks back, as I shall later on in this Bill, to the tidal surge that caused such chaos in the Thames Estuary in 1951; that is not a matter for the Environment Agency alone, or anyone else alone. We need to think about events that can involve all services very thoroughly. We should really take note of that. I plead that the Minister thinks about this issue before any further stage in this Bill, whatever that stage might be, because it requires very serious thought.