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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the contributions to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is altogether too modest. He is far more of an expert on these matters than I am. I was grateful for his support and for the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart. I think we have got all that we could expect out of the Minister today—a clear statement, on the record, that the Bill will substantially be based on catchment area management. I do not think we will get more than that today, but it is very welcome and I thank the Minister for it. He said that the national risk management strategy will not be based on specific options or locations. However, the local strategies appear to be based much more on specific options and locations. Because they cover much smaller areas, even in large counties such as Lancashire and North Yorkshire, they will inevitably look at problems in somewhere such as Pickering or parts of Lancashire that are liable to flood, even up in the Pennines. I do not think they would work if they did not do that. My point is that if the local strategies are going to deal, as the Bill says, with surface runoff, groundwater and ordinary watercourses, how do the main rivers fit into this strategy? How will it work in practice? This is what I was trying to get my mind around in the question of main rivers. Main rivers may be what we call "proper big rivers", such as the Ouse and the Ribble, but they also include many quite small streams, some of which, in our part of the world, would just be called bits of becks. Clearly, they are the responsibility of the Environment Agency, but they have to be integrated into any kind of local flood risk management strategy that is going to make sense. You cannot say that a particular stream, which happens to be part of a main river, is to be treated differently from a stream that is treated as an ordinary watercourse. That is what the position is on the ground in many places. What is the responsibility of the two different risk management authorities that will be responsible for these in coming together for the local strategy? I am sure the Minister will tell me that everyone will work together in a sensible and co-operative way and that it will all work in practice. However, it is not clear from what is written in the Bill that that is the case.