Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I was going to welcome and support the introduction of the Flood and Water Management Bill, but I think that the last speech may have diverted me. Perhaps I can at some stage address some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Tombs. I declare an interest as a former chief executive, until quite recently, of the Environment Agency and a current member of the climate change adaptation committee. The Flood and Water Management Bill is a really positive step to update some of the ageing legislation that covers flood and coastal erosion management and reservoir safety. It is a good step forward in providing clarity on the roles and responsibilities of a whole range of bodies, including the Environment Agency, local authorities and others that play a role in managing flood and coastal risk. It is poignant that the Bill is being introduced around the time when we would have been talking about the dreadful floods in 2007, which are already becoming the floods of the past. We now have our current, dreadful scenes from Cumbria and the real disruption to lives and livelihoods that they represent. There is a pressing need to get this Bill on to the statute book so that floods can be dealt with more effectively. The provisions that absolutely need to go through are the establishment of a lead local flood authority for county and unitary councils to give them responsibility for preparing local strategies for dealing with flood risks from surface water and groundwater, which, certainly, in the 2007 floods, were as large a part of the flooding impact as anything that came from the rivers. At the moment, we absolutely have no effective framework for those flood risks to be dealt with. The Bill also defines better the framework for managing surface water and for establishing sustainable drainage systems. It brings into the 21st century the legislation around reservoir safety, particularly looking at a risk basis for more rigorous measures to prevent reservoirs from posing a risk to life in the event of their failure. The Bill is important and it is vital that it goes through in this Session of Parliament if flood and coastal risk is to be managed effectively. It is a pared-down Bill: it was fatter in its draft form. Everyone has exercised a huge amount of self-restraint in bringing it forward in a slimline version. I call on all three Front Benches to work together to establish a cross-party consensus on getting the Bill through as quickly as possible. I urge all noble Lords in this House, when the Bill does come forward, to exercise a little self-discipline and avoid fiddling with it, a phenomenon that our House is very good at. In the interests of better flood and coastal risk management, please restrain yourselves from the pleasure of fiddling, at least in this case. Bearing in mind that we have remarkably little time to get the legislative programme through, this has to be one that makes it, I hope. Your Lordships can work together very effectively and I want to pick up one other point that the gracious Speech brought to mind: the effectiveness with which many of your Lordships worked together to bring the Climate Change Act into being and, in particular, to create the Adaptation Sub-Committee, of which the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Taylor of Holbeach, both of whom are in their places, were huge supporters. That committee was set up under the Climate Change Act to look at the Government’s programmes on adaptation to the impacts of climate change and to take account of the fact that, no matter how effective we are about carbon reduction, the reality is that there is enough carbon out there in the atmosphere to cause major impacts already. The likelihood of us achieving globally all the carbon reduction necessary is slight, in the view of the noble Lord, Lord Tombs. Therefore, the impact of climate change will be even greater. The committee, which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—it is a bit of a House of Lords bunfight committee—is now up and running and I hope that noble Lords across the House will lend support to its work as it scrutinises the preparation of the Government’s climate change risk assessment and the Government’s adaptation plan to ensure that they are genuinely fit for purpose and capable of protecting the people of this country from the adverse impacts of climate change. We have seen in Cumbria one of those adverse impacts—not only the flooding of homes and businesses but the total disruption to the infrastructure of this country that time and again we see as floods occur. In all the floods that took place while I was chief executive of the Environment Agency and in this current flood in Cumbria, we see transport routes, telecommunications, bridges and a whole variety of vital pieces of infrastructure at risk as a result of flooding. Yet flooding is only one of the impacts of climate change. We need to prepare this country adequately to take account of higher temperatures, heat waves, lack of water and the impact on biodiversity and on agriculture, as well as the clear impacts that we have seen in the past few days in Cumbria on basic infrastructure. I hope that noble Lords will support the work of the Committee on Climate Change Adaptation Sub-Committee and press the Government to make sure that the work on risk assessment and action plans to meet those risks moves on apace, as well as making sure that we show the real intent to work together that produced the climate change adaptation committee in pressing forward the Flood and Water Management Bill. The people of Cumbria would have every right to blame us if we did not.