Flood and Water Management

I will take that opportunity to bring forward my comments on floods insurance. There is an urgent need for the Government to agree with the insurance industry that when the statement of principles expires in 2013, there will be an insurance regime in place. Flood protection and resilience measures taken by householders and businesses should be reflected in a lower premium. The Government and the insurance industry both have a role to play in reducing premiums where that work has been done. A number of challenges remain. Central to the White Paper is taking forward the three reviews that I referred to earlier: to ensure regulatory stability; to keep down the cost of capital while ensuring maximum efficiencies in the industry; to introduce changes to charging and embed the wider value of water prices in a way that is acceptable to consumers; and to meet a raft of environment challenges, including EU requirements. Of all the directives—on water framework, on urban waste water and on river basin management requirements—it is the water framework directive that is causing most concern. In the Committee's view, there is strong evidence that it does not offer an effective means of delivering environmental outcomes within such tight resource—that is, funding—constraints. As ever, we need to work with our European partners to find agreement on how to improve the framework directive regime. The Minister needs to respond to conclusions 45 and 46 and recognise the role of farming and agriculture in flood defences. There was a clause permitting arrangements for financial support for flood protection measures, and the Minister himself has acknowledged that proper compensation is owed to landowners. How will the role played by farmers be recognised? We are concerned about the transitional arrangements for the phasing out of regional development agencies. What are the arrangements for future payments under the rural development programme for England for those types of protection measures? There is concern about who to apply to. The RDA teams are still in place, but do farmers apply to DEFRA or to a regionally located unit? We need clarification. These are challenging times for all those involved in flood and water management. We welcome the Government's taking an holistic view and their attempts to link the strands together, but we have expressed concern about resources, reservoir safety regimes and the need for their reform, SUDS and flood insurance. I welcome the opportunity afforded by today's debate and look forward to hearing what other hon. Members have to say and the Minister's conclusions. What is most important, however, is the cross-party support and recognition of how significant floods are to local constituencies, and how much work we still need to do to prevent future floods from happening.