I do not know why, but perhaps the Minister will be able to enlighten us. Obviously, the statement of principles ran out last summer and it has had to have a temporary extension until the new Flood Re scheme comes into place in 2015, even though this needed to be sorted out as quickly as possible.
Let me return to the issue of the exclusions. Leaseholders are excluded from the scheme, as are council tenants and small businesses, including people who run a bed and breakfast from their home. Landlords are not covered, even where there is a jointly owned freehold with each flat owner as a leaseholder. It is not clear whether tenants wanting contents insurance will be covered. There is no answer from the Government on the position
of home owners or builders who acted in good faith, following all relevant planning guidelines and Environment Agency advice, but find themselves with homes that will now not attract home insurance cover under the Flood Re scheme because they have been built since 2009. Under Flood Re, a home built on 31 December 2008 will be covered whereas a house next door that was built on 1 January 2009 will not be. The scheme seems very arbitrary, and it is also not clear whether Flood Re covers the surface water flooding which we had a problem with in Hull in 2007.
Worse still, one part of the Government does not seem to know what the other part of the Government is doing. The Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government are promoting their Help to Buy scheme heavily in Kingswood in my constituency, an area hit by flooding in 2007; large Help to Buy posters are plastered everywhere. The problem is that the Treasury and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are also signalling that those thousands of new homes being built and sold under their Help to Buy scheme should not have been built in the first place and will not be covered by Flood Re. The Government are getting themselves into real difficulty on this, and the people buying homes under the Help to Buy scheme at the moment will be shocked to know the position the Government are putting them in.
Clearly, there are some flood-risk areas where building should not happen—areas where there is coastal erosion and outlying areas that will not be helped by flood defence infrastructure.