It is a pleasure to follow my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson). We both have experience of the 2007 floods—she as a Member of Parliament and myself as a councillor—and a good understanding of flooding in our area.
It has been an interesting debate, and I have liked a number of contributions. However, some Opposition Members have been more interested in trying to make political points about flood funding rather than in dealing with the recovery in which we are engaged. If they were honest, the reality is that after the devastating flood in 2000, which affected a large part of my constituency, the Government at the time increased flood funding but not to the level that they should have done, although we saw another boost after 2007. If we look at the history of flood funding, we see that we tend to get a boost after a major incident, and then it starts to taper off over a number of years. Sadly, that has been the case for decades. If anything comes out of this, it is perhaps the need for us to take a more long-term sustained approach to flood funding.
It is also a little bit incredible for Opposition Members to talk about flood defence funding as if they would not have made the same reductions had they won the last general election given their own commitments to cutting the deficit. We just need a bit of honesty from all parts of the House on this.