Energy and Climate Change and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. To be honest, introducing the Bill in recognition of what is taking place in Cumbria is the least that we can do for the people who are suffering there. Another reason I want to introduce the Bill early is that I fear that it is somewhat lacking. I am afraid that I am not as enthusiastic about it as the hon. Lady is. It seems very strong on requiring people to produce reports, assessments and all these other buzz words. I am not sure that there is the detailed requirement for action that we need. One of the actions that we need was briefly mentioned by my hon. Friend. When we had the floods in Tewkesbury and Gloucestershire, one of the great difficulties that we had in trying to help people and to get things fixed was determining who was responsible for which waterway. It was very difficult, if not impossible, to determine who was responsible. There were two reasons for that: partly, those involved genuinely did not know; and, once they had accepted responsibility, they had to pay to put it right and they claimed to be short of money. For those two reasons, defining responsibility was very difficult. However, it was crucial and we must address that. I am not sure that the Bill does so fully. I hope that it does, and perhaps if there is sufficient time in Committee we can explore that and the Bill can be strengthened at that stage for that reason. It is also important to ensure that whoever is responsible for which waterway does not just repair things when something has gone wrong; it is important to maintain the waterways on an ongoing basis each and every year. That simply is not happening. I was not flooded in Tewkesbury, but my house was full of people who were. They lived further up the hill than I do, so they should not have been flooded. However, a drain was broken. The problem did not show up when there was ordinary rainfall, but it did when there was heavy rainfall. The drain had not been maintained and we then went into the process of working out who was responsible for it. The county council denied responsibility, but it was then proved that it was its responsibility and it had to fix it, but it was too late—the family had already been flooded. We must have maintenance as well as repair work. Of course, repair work is involved in maintenance. Nobody would have a car that they never serviced and expect it to run for ever until it got to the point where it absolutely broke down. The job is far more expensive then than if services are carried out every 15,000 miles or so. We would not do that and we should not do it in this respect, either. Another issue that I want to mention is one that I have brought up many times, which is building houses in flood-risk areas. Whenever we raise the issue, locally or nationally, we hear the old theories, such as whether it is a flood-risk area or whether it has flooded in the past 100 years. On the one hand, we are told that we are experiencing climate change, and I am not denying that, but if we are experiencing climate change, we cannot use the old figures of once in 100 years, once in 500 years and once in 1,000 years. We cannot have it both ways. We do not know when the rain will fall in the way that it did in 2007 or the way that it did in the past few weeks.