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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I suspect that it will come as no surprise, in the light of my previously stated concerns about catchment cohesion, that I do not support this group of amendments. The role of the Environment Agency in co-ordinating catchment management is very important. If anything, I would prefer to see the role of the Environment Agency as overall arbiter between local authorities strengthened. Consistency within each catchment area is vital. If local authorities have a majority on regional flood and coastal committees, that is where they can exercise their control over the regional programme of the Environment Agency. However, they will have to do it as a co-ordinated body: they will have to work in concert to assert themselves over the agency. We will come to that later. For the time being, I would not want individual local authorities to have any excuse to ignore the co-ordinating role of the Environment Agency in any catchment area.