My interest in the issue of flooding started in 2007, when South Yorkshire was badly flooded. Of course, those events led to the Pitt review, which recommended better and more co-ordinated planning, improved resilience
and more strategic planning decisions by local authorities with regard to water and its potential impacts. However, weaknesses have materialised in the delivery of the Pitt review and, on top of that, the flooding challenges remain.
Peak river flows could be more than twice their current levels in some English regions by 2070, and some 5 million people in England alone are at risk of flooding. The national flood resilience review established, through Met Office modelling, that it is plausible that over the next 10 years we could experience rainfall that is between 20% and 30% higher than usual. It was always likely, therefore, that the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, of which I am a member, would return to this all-important topic. That decision was accelerated by the 2015-16 floods, which impacted so badly on Cumbria, Yorkshire and Somerset. The need to look again at the issue became imperative, especially in the context of the Government’s own flood resilience review.
I want to focus on one particular aspect of the Committee’s recommendations, namely the strategic approach that this country needs to take to flood risk management, with a special focus on the need for catchment-scale planning.
I was a member of the delegation that visited Holland, which was critical to framing the Committee’s recommendations. Our report focused heavily on that fact-finding visit, and every member was impressed by the rigorous approach taken by the Dutch to risk management. The Dutch system is clear and accountable—locally, regionally and nationally—and I am mightily disappointed that the Government were so quick to dismiss our recommendations, especially given the evidence we received that too much of what we do in England remains badly disjointed.
The Dutch model is particularly impressive in placing water at the heart of the country’s approach not just to water supply, but to strategic, spatial and economic planning. In other words, in Holland water—its management, its uses and its maintenance as an essential environmental resource—is seen as a No. 1 priority in the country, and so it should be in the UK. A start would be to have more of a catchment-scale approach to planning for flood risk management. That would involve integrating the widest possible range of both hard and soft engineering measures, including natural flood management.
Evidence presented to the Committee underlined that point. Some witnesses considered that the Environment Agency relied too much on constructing defences at the point of flood impacts on town centres, and did not give adequate consideration to preventing flood waters from building up at source and along the river path. The Government’s own advisory bodies, the adaptation sub-committee of the Committee on Climate Change and Natural England, told the Committee that downstream flood prevention and resilience measures must be accompanied by action upstream.
All the evidence is that the Government are not taking sufficiently seriously the need to consider larger, catchment-scale investment. For instance, their flood resilience review encourages bids for its core cities pilot, which refers principally to
“financing flood resilience in urban areas, harnessing private investment to design new defences while delivering economic development and regeneration for the local area.”
There is absolutely no mention whatsoever of the need for a catchment-scale response.
In that context, Sheffield is developing its own scheme. Although it is worthy in some respects, it nevertheless fails to provide a robust mix of hard and soft measures. For instance, it provides no evidence of how it will make its water storage proposals work, and it provides no evidence that landowners will co-operate with it. References to natural flood management measures, such as tree planting and catchment restoration at source, are perfunctory. More than anything else, there is nothing in the scheme that would cover Barnsley, Doncaster or Rotherham, so it is not a catchment-scale scheme. If we do not stop or slow the flow in Barnsley, what is the point of putting in place measures in Sheffield, because all we will do is push the water further downstream to Doncaster? The Don is the spine of the South Yorkshire water network and it would be ideal for a catchment-level response.
I will conclude by making the point that I do not blame Sheffield for the approach it has taken. It has been encouraged to take such an approach by the Government, who seem more interested in leveraging in private finance for the purpose of delivering traditional, narrowly focused flood risk management schemes and in finding other pots of money than in taking the holistic view emerging from all the evidence presented to us on the Select Committee. I call on the Government to think again, and to support our recommendation on the need for large catchment-scale schemes that would go with the grain of all the emerging evidence.
I would have liked to talk about other aspects of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report, such as resilience and the role of sustainable urban drainage systems in managing flood risk, but time is very limited. I look forward to the Minister’s response, and I hope that she and the Government will think again about the need to consider proper catchment-scale responses to this issue and the need for a more integrated approach to flood management in this country.
5.33 pm