No, I want to make a little progress.
The budget has remained the same since then, meaning further significant real-terms cuts, year on year. Taking
into account the extra funding announced this month, there will still be £64 million less available for flood protection this year than in 2010. The figure is £606 million now, compared with the £670 million available under the previous Government. The chief executive of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Nick Baveystock, said in the past day that this level of spending
“provided neither the level of investment nor long-term certainty required to improve resilience against flooding... This under-spend has been detrimental to communities, business and infrastructure”.
The Government’s decision to reduce the commitment to flood protection was a deliberate one. When the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs rewrote his Department’s core list of priorities on taking office, he chose to remove the priority to
“prepare for and manage risk from flooding.”
He then stated in front of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that he had ordered civil servants to use his new priorities, which no longer included flood risk, when applying spending reductions within his Department. Ministers, including the Prime Minister, continue to claim that more is being spent on flood protection in this Parliament than in the previous one. In real terms, that is nonsense. Thanks to the complaint from my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) to the UK Statistics Authority, we now have an independent view on the Government’s claims. Andrew Dilnot said:
“Our analysis...supports the conclusion that the statement ‘over the current spending review period, more is being spent than ever before’ is supported by the statistics if the comparison is made in nominal terms and includes external funding, but is not supported by the statistics if the comparison is made in real terms or if external funding is excluded.”
That is categorical, so I hope that the Communities Secretary will apologise on behalf of the Prime Minister and all those Ministers who have repeatedly sought to misrepresent the truth on spending on flood defences. As the UK Statistics Authority has stated, the Government like to include external funding in its figures, or “partnership funding” as it calls it.
The figure that Ministers quote is £148 million, yet thanks to a recent parliamentary answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), the Government have been forced to admit that there is an £80.4 million black hole in this total because they have failed to secure the contributions anticipated. I hope that the Communities Secretary can update the House on how that will be filled.