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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has properly tabled amendments to allow us to debate regional flood and coastal committees. The Environment Agency is obliged to set up these committees, which will each cover a segment of England, yet the details of how it is to do so are rather left to the imagination. The noble Lord is therefore quite right to try to get some detail into the Bill and I support his amendments. The regional committees must be concerned only with flood and water management and coastal erosion. That is what this Bill is about. It is not a local government Bill, so the committees must be based on regions, which makes sense from a water management point of view. My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith should be happy that the vision that I gathered from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was a basin catchment arrangement and it was meant to represent a river system. The Government have tried and failed in the past to divide England into artificial regions for political purposes. The Minister knows as well as I do the unpopularity of that idea. It would be quite wrong for the Government to try to bring back any such attempt under a different guise. That said, however, there is a very sensible case for organising regional groups on the basis set out by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, if they are catchment-based and basin-based. It is the catchment areas that will determine what decisions need to be taken, which will have knock-on effects downstream and which therefore need to be co-ordinated. Amendment 53 is therefore a very practical suggestion, which is really refreshing. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, with his Amendment 54, builds on that. If we have communities based on catchment areas, there is some possibility for some overlap as higher areas, for example, may have run-off in more than one direction. It therefore makes sense to have a mechanism in place to ensure co-operation. Co-operation is the name of the game in this Bill, be it in the hills and dales of Yorkshire or around the table of this Grand Committee. We are therefore sympathetic to what the noble Lord is proposing. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has a second amendment in this group. Amendment 56 is very important and would make sure that membership of the flood committees set up by the Environment Agency is controlled by members of the local authorities that are affected and that there must be representation from the IDBs and farming and landowning organisations. As I have said before, the Bill has an admirable synchronicity to it, which balances the duties of the Environment Agency with those of local authorities. However, the Bill is silent on local authorities’ roles in the regional committees, except that, under Clause 24, the Minister may at some point make regulations about membership. That is not good enough. There ought to be democratic accountability to these committees, and it would be best if this was in the Bill. I hope the Minister will respond positively to the noble Lord’s amendment. With her Amendment 56A, my noble friend Lady Knight of Collingtree has raised an important point that is of concern to many—namely, the construction of buildings on flood plains. I know that the Government have considered these matters, and I look forward to reassurance from the Minister. I live in an area in which building on the flood plain is the only alternative available, because 15 miles in any direction that is not sea is a flood plain. I am aware of the amount of liaison between planning authorities, local drainage boards and the Environment Agency to ensure that any development is properly flood-proofed from the beginning. I hope the Minister will reassure my noble friend on that point, and I am glad to add my support to the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron.