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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I also declare an interest as a commercial horticulturalist. I support my noble friend in his proposal. I chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology’s report on UK water management in 2005-06. We took evidence from Australia. We thought it would be instructive to see what happened to a country which had a 10-year drought—the "big dry"—and how it reacted to it and managed its own water supply issues. In many ways, while it was impressive to see how aware Australians are and how well the bills describe their comparative situation with other households, the one area in which I thought they failed lamentably was in adapting their horticulture to cope with the big drought. In other words, throughout Australia, in cities such as Melbourne and Canberra, you see gardens which would not look out of place in Surrey. The message that I would give my fellow horticulturalists is that, given that periodic droughts and therefore temporary water pipe bans are going to be a fact of life, the horticultural trades should be urged to look at this as an opportunity rather than a threat. After all, many horticultural systems do not make heavy use of water. You can use things such as mulches rather than irrigating, and you can of course go for succulents and suchlike if that is your idea of a beautiful garden. However, I suggest that there are opportunities to reduce water use in gardens without making such dramatic changes to what we would consider to be a normal English garden. Having said that, I entirely agree with my noble friend that codes of conduct which allow people to recognise the practicalities of their gardening systems and of the production systems in their gardens and which do not criminalise people for acting in a way that protects a very important asset—in other words, acting in a reasonable way—would be enormously helpful. At the moment, there is a danger that the very rough justice imparted by blanket bans will criminalise whole sections of society, and that surely cannot be right.