Energy and Climate Change and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

One of the difficulties is that people's faith in the maps has been undermined, because they have seen inconsistencies. I have to say that those inconsistencies are sometimes driven by motivations much more along the lines of those mentioned earlier, when reference was made to some local authorities and greed, and authorities looking to develop much more than they need to. There has been a problem, but I understand that a lot of the maps have been redrawn. We have very sophisticated systems, but we need to ask people with local knowledge for advice, too. People may have seen fields flooded, and may know that there are regular occurrences of flooding in an area. We should also look at the effect that building in one area immediately has on another. In urban areas, we might be talking about concreting over a garden. However, when vast new housing estates are built, we have to think about where the water will go. That is yet another problem that we have to think about in advance, so that we are not paying for repairs when we could have avoided the situation in the first place.