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Flood and Water Management Bill

It is a great privilege to bring forward what I hope will be, both figuratively and literally, the final Act of this Parliament. Bringing the Bill forward was a good choice; the business managers know my reputation for brevity. The Bill benefited from further changes in the other place, and we are considering those this afternoon. In all, a further 25 amendments have been made in the other place, three of which are purely technical. Of the remaining 22, 18 resulted directly from the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. We believe that all those changes are unobjectionable, and improve both this Bill and the Reservoirs Act 1975. We were more than happy to make the changes in the other place and we hope and expect that they will find favour in this House this evening. I should mention briefly the issues outside the Bill on which I undertook to take further action. I undertook to address funding concerns for local authorities with the Local Government Association, and terms of reference for that work have been agreed. I also said that I would bring together the relevant interests to address concerns that had been expressed about the impact of flood risk on household insurance. I have had initial discussions with Members, including Opposition Front-Bench Members—I thank them for their courtesy in taking part—and with the Association of British Insurers with a view to having a wide-ranging discussion of this issue at a floods summit later in the year. That is indicative of the co-operative and open approach that we have taken to developing this legislation and I thank Members of this House and the other place and the bodies outside Parliament that also operated in that way. The result has been a Bill that was in very good order before it went to the other place; the scrutiny that it has received there, and the further amendments that have been made have, however, made it still stronger. We should not lose sight of why the Bill is important. Floods can be massively disruptive to people's lives and to businesses, sometimes for a prolonged period. The events in Cumbria in the autumn were a vivid reminder of that, and climate change is likely to make both floods and droughts more frequent. The measures in this Bill will make a real and tangible difference; that is why the Government made the Bill a priority. I commend the Bill, and the amendments made to it in the other place, to the House.