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Flood and Water Management Bill

As I say, I am sorry that he is not in his place because this is where the question of what powers this House has comes into play. I maintain that an order which might be introduced under this provision changes the whole nature of the application of the Bill. As we discussed earlier, when such a change is introduced by order, we have the opportunity to comment and to ask the Government of the day to think again but, by the conventions of this House, we do not countermand or reject it. If my amendment is accepted, a revision of this scale will, once again, be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny, as it should be. That is where the power of this House lies. I must apologise to the Committee as my next amendment, Amendment 84AA, contains a misprint. By rights, it should insert the word "property" after "human life" and so follow the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. I shall be very interested to see what he has to say on the subject. My concern, which I expressed at an earlier sitting of the Committee, is that the provisions of the 1975 Act will be found to be extremely effective. The reason is that, although no criteria appear in that Act, the Institution of Civil Engineers produced its own categorisation of risk factors which were based on the danger perceived to life and property downstream of a dam. That was divided, according to the risk of both of those factors, into four categories and the engineers requirements were graded according to the risks. That is critical if our present record is to be maintained, and there is a danger that, if the second category is not included, it might lead to a watering down of the supervision that there has been up to now. We now have a Bill that is intended to be risk based. At present, it merely wishes to categorise dams into large raised reservoirs and high-risk reservoirs, whereas experience has shown that risk can, and must be, defined with greater exactitude. I ask the Minister to tell the Committee, now or if we ever get to another stage of the Bill, whether the Government will explain to us whether they intend to produce some further categorisation of high-risk dams which will enable suitable measures to be applied to the various categories that have so far applied. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will try to persuade the Minister on similar issues when he speaks to his amendment. Amendment 88AA applies to Section 22 of the 1975 Act, where it deals with the criminal liability of undertakers and their employees. That is obviously a serious issue and the present wording in the Act says that a crime is committed unless there is unreasonable excuse for the default. Obviously, the more serious the importance of the default, the higher is the criteria of what is reasonable. Throughout the Bill, we are toughening the penalties on the operators of reservoirs and it seems to me that this is one area where the provisions of the present Act should be perfectly adequate. I beg to move.