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Mr. Gummer: The Minister does not disagree with me. The problems can be tackled in that way, but such a rotation is not possible on all land. That is one of the difficulties that we must face. I do not suggest that there is an easy answer. The Environment Agency should be involved in that matter, but it is the one agency that is not involved. Evidently, because the problem did not happen to occur in juxtaposition to the river, the Environment Agency could not take it on. The effect of new agricultural practices on flooding must be looked at carefully.
I shall make two last points, the first of which is that of punishment. I do not believe in there being excessive numbers of court cases. I agree with the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish that court cases represent an admission of failure--the Environment Agency has failed to ensure that people have done what they should do voluntarily, or even under pressure or threat. That is a pity.
If we are driven to take a case to court, the punishment must have some connection with the crime. We learn about such matters in the unfolding of a policy. The
problem is not that the maximum fines are too low, but that the courts have not imposed fines that are near enough to the maximum. The House determined the range of fines and perhaps they should be increased, but the fact is that people can be fined small sums for doing things that have netted them significantly large gains. We need to approach that matter with some vigour.The Government have sought to ensure that magistrates are aware of the effects, but that is not good enough. Perhaps we need ensure that such cases are held in a higher court. That might be the issue. I do not want to encourage them, but if people knew that being caught would cost them more than they have saved by not obeying the law, they would be more likely to do the job better. I hope that the Government will deal with that matter because, unless we get it right, the Environment Agency will feel entirely unable to do its job properly.
The worst morale in the Environment Agency is found among those responsible for taking people to court. They find that the fines imposed are derisory and those who leave the courts put up two fingers because they know that they have saved themselves several hundred thousand pounds in the process. That also reduces the morale of the decent companies that have done their job and paid their money, but find that their competitor down the road has £300,000 on its bottom line. That is unacceptable.
I return to research and advocacy matters. The Environment Agency is a powerful body. It would be a better and more powerful body if it were to concentrate on ensuring that it really knew the answers to the problems and on advocating those answers effectively to the Government and the public. Therefore, it must look at its organisation more carefully. It would be a better organisation if it employed fewer people directly and if it put out to others many of the things that it does directly. It does a huge range of things, from collecting boating fees in some places and patrolling rivers with water bailiffs in others to undertaking the vast responsibility of implementing European Union legislation and the national additions to it that our Government have placed on it.
Within its large ambit, the Environment Agency should concentrate on the holistic business of ensuring that our environment improves all the time; on the research that is necessary to keep it ahead of the rest of the world; and on the advocacy that its experience and knowledge makes credible. It should increasingly seek to have a tightly driven and extremely efficient staff. I suspect that about 5,000 or 6,000 is much nearer to the number necessary for its core job. It could then control more effectively those who work for it indirectly through other agencies and organisations.
If we put all that together, we can make matrix management work. The matrix would be simpler, the explanations clearer and the route by which the money is spent more obvious. That is not to tell it how to do its job, but to say that an organisation as big as the Environment Agency has increasingly failed to meet the specifications that it was given in the first place.
I wonder whether we should return to the proposal made when we first launched the important change, which was to combine the three organisations to create one holistic agency and then to fine it down so that it would do the job that was essential for it to do directly and share its tasks with those on the ground who were more able to do the job as agents. If we did that, many of my criticisms
would soon be overcome and the work, enthusiasm and vocation that one sees in the activities of the very dedicated staff would begin to bear the fruit for which we all long.In many ways, the Environment Agency is the most important non-governmental agency that we have. It reaches into every part of our lives. It ought to reach further and to be more powerful and its voice ought to be heard more widely. It is up to the House to ensure that that happens.
10.50 am
Dr. Desmond Turner (Brighton, Kemptown): The debate so far has been extremely interesting. No one would want to criticise the Environment Agency's basic aim or the expertise and energy of many of its staff. It is a valuable resource to the nation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) made clear in his opening remarks, however, we can make it much more effective if we check its relationships with other agencies, and planning authorities in particular, and sharpen its focus.
I shall illustrate the point with some examples from my constituency, in all of which the Environment Agency should have a crucial role. The most obvious issue is flooding. I am glad that both my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish and the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) spoke about the relationship between flooding and agricultural practice.
Flooding has been a serious issue in my constituency. I would not normally be banging on about flooding in Kemptown, because it is built entirely on chalk downland. We do not have a flood plain in my constituency to worry about--but we do have flooding. One simply does not expect houses halfway up a chalk down to get flooded, but in practice they do, and it will happen with increasing frequency unless we do something about it. The Environment Agency should have a clear role in that, but although it has the expertise, it does not have the effective powers to control the situation.
In the 1930s, Brighton spread a bit. It cannot spread too far because of the confines of the downs. Building spread up some of the dry valleys, or deans, as we call them in Sussex. They are areas that do not have rivers but drain, albeit slowly, large areas of rolling downland. The water comes down the valley and often feeds a dew pond. An estate that was seriously flooded recently was built over an historic dew pond, so it was unsurprising that when trouble came, that was where water collected.
There was no serious problem with buildings on the downland fringe until relatively recently, after the war. Before then, the downs were used almost entirely as pasture land, and run-off from such land is relatively slow, because it holds water well. Chalk is highly permeable, so the water soaks into the ground and does not present much of a problem.
During the war, the downs were extensively ploughed because of the need to produce more food, and that continued afterwards. More recently, arable production on the downs changed from predominantly spring crops to winter crops. There were economic pressures in the farming industry, and the way to get the best economic yield from the land was to grow winter cereals--and that is where the problems really start.
The ground has been not only ploughed but harrowed and seeded. It is sitting there, with a fine tilth on it, just as the equinoctial rains come. When they come with the force and severity of this year, and several years past, the run-off is dramatic: it is 10 to 100 times faster than it would be off pasture land or stubble. Not only is there a rush of water--great gullies are carved through fields, where rivers have suddenly grown from nothing--but soil is swept down with it, and houses are invaded by a wall of liquid mud. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the houses rely for their surface water drainage on soakaways. As soon as silt goes into a soakaway, it blocks and ceases to drain, so there is a real mess.
The problem results from a common, but bad and unsustainable agricultural practice, which not only brings hazards to buildings and people but destroys the basic landscape, because chalk downland has a fragile soil system that is easily destroyed by ploughing. The only way genuinely to sustain a chalk soil system is by keeping the land as grassland.
The problem is not confined to my constituency. Large areas of the south of England are affected, as there is chalk downland in Hampshire, Kent, Sussex, Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire, in all of which counties there is also severe housing pressure. Wherever houses have to be built on greenfield sites, those sites will almost inevitably be on the downland fringes and will be subject to the same sort of hazard as Bevendean in my constituency.
There is an imperative to examine agricultural practice and change it. I have discussed these issues with Environment Agency officials in my area, and they are in total agreement with my analysis.
Mr. Rowe: Implicit in the hon. Gentleman's important comments is the thought that houses built in flood risk areas should be designed in exactly the same way as those in other parts of the country, yet there are many places in the world where flooding is a regular danger so houses are built with a cellar, for example, or a garage underneath, so as to protect the main body of the house. Does he agree that it is time for the building industry to consider seriously the design of houses built in flood risk areas?
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