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Flood and Water Management Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, thinks that £2 million is chicken feed; it depends how many chickens you have, he says. Perhaps that is why he is a Conservative and I am a Liberal, but there we go. To use a different metaphor; it is not tuppence ha’penny. It would be extremely helpful if the Minister could write to all of us who are interested in this matter of organisations, such as mountain rescue and the wider services, to set out what he has been saying in some detail so that we understand it. We will obviously read what he has said very carefully in Hansard. Let me briefly put the basic point again. The people who, by and large, fund mountain rescue are those who make donations and bequests. A lot of people put what I was going to call their two-bob bits, but they are probably their pound coins now, in the tins on the bars when they go and have a drink after going out on the fell. When they do that, what they expect to be doing is providing a rescue service provided voluntarily by their peers and colleagues within the mountaineering and walking community—because those genuinely are communities—in order to provide a service which they may need at some time, and which their colleagues, or certainly some of them, will need all of the time. When we see those services providing the kind of service that they did after the flooding in the Lake District and in other areas, when they went to rescue people stranded in their remote farmhouses up on the edge of Saddleworth Moor—somewhere that the Minister knows—we are very proud of the fact that they are able to do that, and that their expertise is being used. We would like the costs that they incur in providing this wider public service to be recognised by the state in some way and reimbursed. I think the Minister suggested that a little bit of this £2 million may trickle in that direction, but we will be interested to see how it all works. That is the fundamental problem. It cannot be solved but some of us at least in this Room will keep raising the matter until it is sorted. On that basis, when we reach my amendment, I shall not press it.