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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, when I first considered the Bill and the implications of these two clauses—which are essentially identical but refer to different authorities—I wondered whether, in order to provoke a debate, we should table amendments which would set out in the Bill the circumstances in which the Environment Agency might act and in which local authorities might act. I worked on some amendments which would make sense—to me, at least, if to no one else—and I found it very difficult. I came to the view that, other than using vague words—such as "small" and "large" or "less significant" and "more significant" and so on—it was impossible. I thought it was a waste of time and so I did not do it. However, this clause stand part debate, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is useful because it provides the Minister with an opportunity to answer the questions I was trying to sort out in my own mind. I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about the nature and scale of schemes in which the Environment Agency might want to get involved directly and the ones it will leave to the local authority. I say "leave to the local authority" but it may well be the local authority that is promoting a scheme. I mean schemes in which the local authority will act. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, appeals to my localist instincts by saying that it must always be the local authority, but I can see circumstances in which the Environment Agency might well be the better organisation to do it, with the consent of people locally and the local authority. The local authority may well prefer the Environment Agency to undertake a project, rather than doing it itself, particularly if it was on a larger scale—I will come to that in a moment—or if it was an important project under the habitats directive, or the kind of thing that the noble Baroness, Lady Young, was talking about.