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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I hope that the Minister is convinced that the only reason we pursued the debate on the last amendment was that we liked his answer so much, we wanted to hear it twice. I am very grateful to him for his response. This is a similar amendment. It concerns the way in which information is distributed, in order to give people the opportunity of feeling that they are in the picture. It is a simple amendment that has a great deal of merit. It would place a duty on the Secretary of State to publish and update a report on the month-by-month progress being made, or not being made, after a major flooding event. As a good Conservative, I am in favour of adding to bureaucracy and paperwork in Whitehall only when it is strictly necessary. However, there is a good reason for my suggestion in this amendment: it will assist the Secretary of State to make the most of his powers to help people who are in need. We have already discussed the devastation wrought by the flooding in Cumbria last year. I make no apology for returning to it. Anybody who has visited the area, as I and other noble Lords have, will be well aware that, despite the sterling work being done by the authorities and by local communities to get themselves back on their feet, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Any noble Lords who saw "Countryfile" on Sunday will have seen that there is still an enormous backlog. Robert Jackson, whose farm I visited, faced the devastation of all the stone on his fields. It was good to see the Minister from another place, Mr Huw Irranca-Davies, visiting at that time. The point of the amendment is to put in the public domain details of the progress that is being made. The Government still have little or no idea how many people are still waiting to return to their businesses and homes. If the Minister has that information, it would be good to hear it; but it has not been in the public domain as far as I know. To be flooded out of one's home is traumatic, and the work required to make it habitable again can be daunting. Housing is one of our society’s most basic requirements. It would be useful, to say the least, if the Government and the local authorities concerned were aware of any hold-ups in the recovery process after the flood. To be armed with this knowledge would not of course be a panacea, but it would allow the Secretary of State to use the influence of his office, and his powers, to direct assistance to where it was needed most. With this Bill we are setting up a system of co-ordinated co-operation in advance of flooding events. It would complete the circle if we inserted a mechanism that would assist co-operation and provide us with a record, as well as object lessons that could be learned by other flood risk management authorities in other parts of the country in how to deal with similar situations that might arise. I beg to move.