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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for introducing the amendment. The new clause on safeguarding critical infrastructure is identical to one that was discussed in the other place. The Government have set up a new Cabinet Office team to ensure that critical infrastructure sites—for example, water treatment works and electricity sub-stations—are resilient to flooding. The Welsh Assembly Government are also engaged in this work. The Cabinet Office team is co-ordinating the efforts of the lead government departments across all sectors to assess the vulnerability to flooding of their most critical sites. This analysis and supporting evidence is helping to produce the sector resilience plans. We take the view that utility companies should take full account of the present climate in developing their infrastructure, and the first versions of the sector resilience plans demonstrate that those companies have responded to the need to improve resilience to flooding, supported by the economic regulators. A summary of those plans will be made publicly available. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, there are also powers in Sections 62 and 67 of the Climate Change Act 2008 for the Secretary of State and the Welsh Ministers to require reports from reporting authorities, including utilities, assessing the effect of climate change on their operations and explaining what their policies and proposals are for dealing with it. The noble Baroness raised the question of communications companies, which, she said, were left out of this process. They will be covered by the Civil Contingencies Act enhancement programme, which is effectively a review of that Act, and phase two of that process will consider whether additional duties are needed for all sectors. That could include the communications companies. There has already been a significant amount of action under the natural hazards programme. For example, flood defences have been provided for the east Hull and west Hull sewage pumping schemes; there is a critical site in Exeter where the electricity distributor has replaced switchgear at a substation and installed a new installation above the level of potential floodwaters; Humberside fire and rescue service has raised IT and communications equipment 1.5 metres above ground level to ensure continuity of service in future flood events; and National Grid has invested more than £1 million in flood defence capabilities. We take the view that the reports that will come in from the reporting authorities, including the utilities, will consider a range of hazards. Together with the sector resilience plans, they will be much more useful than individual reports from individual utility companies, which we feel would present only a limited picture and could impose a bureaucratic burden on those companies and indeed divert them from the main effort. I hope that, with that explanation, the noble Earl will feel able to withdraw his amendment.