Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, at the previous stage, my noble friend Lord Greaves said that the important words were ““resilient”” and ““resistant””. That is right. It seems that, increasingly, we will have to plan to adapt to flooding and be resilient to it because it cannot be wholly avoided. I would say that the HCA’s work on flooding would need to go rather wider than I read the amendment. It now seems to be generally accepted that it is important, when we are talking about flooding from rivers, to allow—to use layman’s terms—for a river to expand and to leave space for that. That is also the case when laying permeable hard surfaces in a development. I distinguish between the two because, in a sense, this is a development that is not a development. That is the point. Moreover—this is very much an urban reaction—this is not only about flooding as we know it but about the lack of capacity in our sewerage systems to deal particularly with the rather different monsoon-type weather that we get now, with its very heavy bursts of rain rather than the more gentle sort that fills up the aquifers and keeps us all happy through every season. This is hugely important. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, who looks as though he is about to respond, will tell us that the HCA must carry out these barrier assessments as well as lots of other things, but an acknowledgment of it all would certainly be appropriate.