My Lords, I particularly welcome Amendment 156C, moved so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, as it enables me to raise a series of allied issues. The first is that, Flood Re or no Flood Re, we are all on notice that the cross-subsidy of flood risk needs to be replaced by individual risk assessments. The reason for that is our better geographical knowledge and the unsustainability of the continued mutualisation of risk in those circumstances. I have absolutely no argument with that.
One issue of concern is the data produced by the Environment Agency. Obviously, those data are very important for the industry and for consultants, but they are equally important for individuals because, if we are moving to individual assessment, we must have some means of identifying the individual impact on a per property basis. I referred earlier today to my discussions with Philip Wilbourn, a very eminent environmental surveyor and valuer from the north of England. He allowed me to circulate an e-mail to a number of noble Lords setting out his views, which I have done, but there is a particular bit that I would like to repeat. He refers to,
“the data published by the various agencies, including the Environment Agency”.
Bear in mind that this is someone who carries out evaluations and does assessments on individual properties or groups of properties for a variety of different purposes.
In his e-mail, Philip Wilbourn says that he cannot use the data for commercial purposes because he is prohibited from doing so. Then he says that there is no online ordering service to acquire data for reporting purposes, and he is forced to acquire it from GroundSure or Landmark, two of the authorised resellers, at what he describes as high cost. He says:
“The data reported by commercial companies often varies depending upon the royalty return”,
which seems to be quite the wrong trigger for objective data. He tells me that the costs cannot be absorbed by residential valuers and that the banks, for which these
valuations are produced, will not allow such data as a disbursement for the reports that are sent to them. His e-mail continues:
“When data is ordered direct from the EA, it can take three weeks to be sent through depending on the region”,
and he says that he has tested that.
The scale of resolution on the Environment Agency website is 1:5,000, which does not enable a particularly accurate identification on a per property basis. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s website fares rather worse because the scale there is 1:25,000, so individual property analysis by the home owner is clearly going to be difficult. These are the data that are supplied to insurers to make decisions.
Of course, what happens? It gets boiled down to a postcode approach—the “postcode lottery” of which we constantly hear many examples. He says:
“The problem with postcodes is that many home owners/businesses may be paying more than they should”,
and he gives an example of a postcode—in I do not know what part of the country, but it is obviously an urban area—which is neatly bisected by a blue-ink line of flood risk.
There is a particular issue here as to whether the data that are produced by this public agency, for public consumption and for the benefit of society as a whole, will be available at reasonable cost—let us not say that it should be free—for the home owner and individual consumer. That is the question that I pose in the context of this amendment.
6.30 pm