Energy and Climate Change and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

That is a fair intervention, and I agree that there is a lot wrong with the Bill. It is inadequate in many respects, but it is on the table and it is significantly better than nothing. We will scrutinise it throughout its progress through this House, but we believe that it will be better for my constituents, for his and for the whole country if we end this Parliament with a Flood and Water Management Bill on the statute book. I hope that it will be better than the one in front of us at the moment. I shall give some reasons why the Bill would be a positive step. The presence of a single co-ordinating body across the country—it makes sense for that to be the Environment Agency—will be a huge improvement. There is far too much confusion and buck passing, and not enough backside kicking, when it comes to preventing flooding from happening and dealing with it when it happens. One area of my constituency that thankfully did not flood this time round is Grange-over-Sands, although it often does flood in the Windermere road area. Fixing that problem is a nightmare, when the Environment Agency, local authorities, United Utilities, Network Rail and others all pass the buck to each other, no doubt because solving it would cost money. I want to see a single entity that has the power, the authority and the resources to knock heads together and ensure that we solve such problems. That single co-ordinating body should have the muscle and the inclination to tackle such problems. I observed this morning that Severn Trent Water was celebrating—or perhaps apologising for—record profits. I think of the record profits that United Utilities and other water companies have been, shall we say, fortunate to amass, thanks to an infrastructure paid for by the taxpayer—an infrastructure that is also elderly, but which they have been far too complacent about. Again, it was an irony—or a coincidence; I do not know—but six days before the catastrophic floods last week, I was in Burneside with representatives of United Utilities and the Environment Agency, at the epicentre of the floods there. We were trying to deal with flooding that happens just about every fortnight, never mind once in a thousand years—flooding at a lower level in Burneside, but nevertheless at an appalling level, because it involves foul sewage as well as everything else. The response of United Utilities was, "We know what the problem is. The problem is that the Kendal and Burneside drainage system is inadequate, but it is a low priority to us." The Environment Agency representatives stood there and sort of nodded. However, I do not want the Environment Agency to stand next to United Utilities; I want it to apply shoe leather up backsides to ensure that those things get sorted out. The complacency of the water companies was shown up for what it was just six days later, when the residents in that area had to deal with the devastation. I also welcome the elevated role of local authorities, as a potential consequence of the Flood and Water Management Bill. It is right that they should have single responsibility for the local flood risk strategy, but they must also have the resources to do that job. One of the other success stories, as it were, in our area that we would like to talk about is that in Kendal, even with a deluge, say, a quarter of the size of the one that we have experienced in the past few days, the Sedbergh road area would have been flooded and about 250 homes would have been under water. Indeed, with that particular deluge, I suspect that we would have had 500 to 700 properties under water. However, that area of Kendal did not flood because two years ago the local district council built the Stock beck flood relief system, which has worked, even in this most dramatic of situations. That came about after I chaired a meeting of about 11 different agencies, sitting them round a table at the Castle Park primary school. It is wonderful what getting people sitting round a primary school table on those low chairs with their knees underneath their chins can do to, let us say, interfere with their dignity and ensure that they address the issues. We banged heads together and ensured that a successful flood relief scheme was built. However, I do not want to go through the same process every time. I want local authorities to have the power to make things happen, but money is power, and they have to have the necessary resources. If the resources do not follow those powers, they will be absolutely pointless. I look back on the experience of my constituents last week. I talked to the Environment Agency earlier today about early warning. I appreciate that it has done a tremendous job these past few days and deserves praise for its work. Indeed, it has improved the standard of the warnings going out to people, but many of my constituents either did not receive text message warnings at all, if they were on Aynam road, Lound road or any of the streets off those roads in Kendal, or, in the case of Burneside, they received a text message six hours after their homes had flooded. I understand that that is all down to mobile communications and so on, but frankly we have to look at the issue in future, because that is not a good enough excuse. Also, although the generalised flood warnings put out by the Environment Agency were excellent, timely and accurate, we now have the know-how, particularly in the national flood forecast centre, to give specific targeted warnings to homes and businesses well in advance to allow them to take the necessary precautions, move furniture upstairs, evacuate if need be or sandbag themselves in to ensure that they do not get flooded at all. I am also concerned that the warnings are given only when homes or businesses are at risk of flooding because of rivers bursting their banks, because the majority of the homes flooded in my constituency were flooded because of surface water and ground water. All those things are just as predictable—or potentially predictable, using different models—but at the moment they are not in the Environment Agency's remit. That is wrong. I want to ensure that the Bill makes provision to put that in law, although they are things that can also be fixed without legislation. I would like the Secretary of State to take steps towards addressing that right away, because we have the know-how to sort it out. As other right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned this evening, we also need to be able to strengthen the hand of local authorities to say no to development on flood plains and in other flood-risk areas. I am absolutely committed to developing new, affordable homes for local families, particularly in my area. It is a tragedy that we have a waiting list of 5,000 people for council homes in social rented properties, but only 4,000 social rented homes available. I will not go into why that might be, but we all know the reasons why—the failed policies of the past, shall we say? That is a tragedy, so I want more social rented and other affordable homes built as an urgent priority. However, I do not want the families who get those homes to be subject to almost instant misery because the houses have been built in areas where we will be dealing with flood risk year after year. We surely have the capacity to deal with that in this day and age. The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) talked about the names of places where such developments have been built, perhaps giving away the fact that they should not have been built. My previous home in Milnthorpe, before we moved to our current house, was built in a place called Grisleymire lane, which once won a prize on "Nationwide" in the '70s for having the quirkiest name in the north-west. We were never flooded, but perhaps that is another story—it was probably because the Kent silted up. I have two more quick points to make arising from my experience these past few days. My great concern is that residents and businesses will have their insurance premiums hiked up or their excesses increased to the extent that, in reality, they will become uninsurable. We need to put pressure on the insurance companies, now and in future, to ensure that that does not happen and we do not allow people to become effectively uninsurable. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) rightly pointed out earlier that there is a principle of shared risk, and that must continue. If it does not, the whole principle of insurance is blown away. I am also experiencing problems with residents, particularly in Burneside, where private landlords are refusing to take the action that they need to take, on the electrics and so on, to make homes habitable. Where homes belong to local social landlords, for example, it is much easier to take action. I want there to be provision for private landlords to be forced to take action to make homes habitable and to take reasonable steps to prevent future flooding. I mentioned earlier that those areas in my constituency that have been under most pressure, at least in the past couple of days, are, as it were, the business centres of the south lakes area, particularly in Bowness, Windermere and Ambleside. It is worth pointing out that the tourism economy in Cumbria is worth £1.5 billion a year. To the Exchequer, therefore, it is worth some £500 million a year. I spoke to a businessman friend of mine in Grange-over-Sands last night who told me that his takings in the past week had gone down by 90 per cent.—and that is in a town that has not flooded—because the general message being put about out there was that the Lake district and Cumbria are closed for business. I want to take this opportunity to say that we are not. If the Government are coming up with money—I would encourage them to come up with yet more funds to support us in this endeavour—they could spend that money successfully and profitably by investing it in the marketing and development of the Lake district and Cumbria brand over the next few weeks. Cumbria Tourism has an annual budget of just £1 million per year—annual budgets tend to be per year. That is clearly inadequate, full stop, but it is absolutely inadequate for trying to rebuild the reputation of a part of our country whose economy has been enormously damaged by the devastation of the past few days. We need to be able to sell our communities and our tourism product, especially in the run-up to Christmas, and we would appreciate some financial support in order to do that. The Exchequer would get more than its money's worth if it were to invest £10 million or £20 million in marketing for Cumbria, because of the benefit to the Exchequer of tourism. I also want to emphasise the importance of the uplands. One of the reasons that Kendal did not flood more seriously than it did was the work of the upland farmers in the Kentmere valley. We need to look at the role of the uplands in the retention and storage of flood waters. We have the fastest falling water in the country. The source of the river Kent is only about 15 miles away from the sea, and it can fall extremely rapidly, as we have seen in the past few days. It falls rapidly at the best of times. We need to invest in the work that upland farmers do to disperse and contain the waters in the uplands. They have done more than almost anyone else to protect our towns and villages in Cumbria from flooding, yet they are an endangered species. Only two weeks ago, Natural England released a report entitled "Vital uplands: Natural England's vision for the upland environment in 2060". The reality is, however, that hill farming could be dead by 2020 if we do not act soon. The average income for a hill farm is £5,000 a year, and the average age of a hill farmer is 59. You do not need to be a genius to work out that that income base makes it unlikely that the profession will continue for much longer, yet the economic, environmental and social value of those people in Cumbria is immense, and we need to support them and pay them for the work that they do. I pay tribute to the emergency services—the police, the fire and ambulance services, the bay search and rescue and mountain rescue teams, the coastguards, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and all the others who have made such immense efforts over the past few days. It is important to point out that many of those agencies are voluntary in nature. In particular, the equipment and vehicles that the mountain rescue service has been using to save lives and protect and rescue people over the past few days will have been paid for by voluntary donations. The service also has to pay VAT on those donations, and pays vehicle excise duty. Across England and Wales, however, the cost to those volunteer mountain rescue teams is less than £200,000 a year. If I could ask the Secretary of State for one additional thing—it would not require any legislation—it would be to reimburse the mountain rescue teams that relative pittance of £200,000. So far, the Treasury has refused to do that, but it would represent an immense vote of confidence and be seen as a thank you to the communities of Cumbria that are struggling so manfully at this time.