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Mr. Wiggin: I wish it did. Probably the most significant crisis in my short career has been the foot and mouth crisis. The Minister was very closely involved with that, perhaps more so than anyone else, certainly anyone here today. Let us take that as an example of a crisis. Ideally, a plan would have nailed down principles such as to bring in a slaughter policy as quickly as possible. However, the detail is where the success or failure of the plan hangs. I find the situation a little bizarre. Unless the companies have such broad plans that they are only principles, or such narrow plans that unless the circumstances exactly fit they will fail, the statutory requirement on them to produce a plan should be more specific about the type of plan required. Laying out the principles and allowing the companies to do the detail rather defeats the purpose of having a plan in the first place. We want to know what everyone has to do in the event of a drought. We can have more than one plan if necessary. The purpose of planning is to foresee events, not to excuse actions if a body does not follow its plan or follows a plan that is not appropriate. It is not an excuse mechanism. It is designed to allow the decision-making mechanisms to be thought out ahead of the crisis so that the reactions that take place are logical, sensible and, most of all, effective. I am worried that this is not happening in this case. Obviously we are not in a drought yet. The Minister rightly noted that the weather has been better than we might have expected. Now is the time to ensure that the plans are fit for purpose.
Mr. Morley: I come back to the point that there is a statutory requirement to have the plans. I may have expressed this badly and if so, I apologise. Even the foot and mouth contingency plan, which is one of the most sophisticated, needs some flexibility. The epidemiology of an outbreak varies. It puts in place
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a series of responses that are followed according to different circumstances.
Before the drought plans are put in place the companies must consult with the Environment Agency. The Environment Agency is anxious to ensure that adequate provision is made. It is not a question of just drawing up general principles and hoping for the best. We must draw up the plans while accepting that procedures in them will have to be varied according to the circumstances. The details of the plans will have to be approved by the Environment Agency.
Mr. Lansley: Perhaps I am ignorant of the way in which drought plans have been constructed. I was surprised that there was no provision for consultation with local authorities in the preparation of drought plans. Of course one could add any number of bodies into the consultation process but consulting local authorities would be an effective way of involving the local community and understanding the way in which drought plans would work in practice. Local authorities would have quite a lot of responsibilities that might flow from that.
Mr. Morley: Indeed they do. Local authorities often work very closely on these matters. The last major drought in this country was in 1995. There were real problems with Yorkshire Water, and water had to be moved around by tanker and in some cases communities had to be served by bowser. Local authorities have to be involved; because that is not written in the Bill does not mean that they are not. I am sure that they are involved but I will make a point of checking because it is crucial. These plans are open to scrutiny. We expect them to be detailed and in place. I hope that I have not given the impression that the plans are simply a sketchy framework.
Mr. Wiggin: I am extremely grateful for the Minister's detailed response. I congratulate the hon. Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham), who clearly made sure that his Minister had a good lunch; he is in a much better frame of mind this afternoon. I will simply add one awful pun as a warning; if he gets his drought plan wrong, he will be hung out to dry.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 66 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 67
Drought orders and
drought permits: charges
Mr. Wiggin: I beg to move amendment No. 112, in
clause 67, page 88, leave out lines 1 to 14.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendment:
No. 113, in
clause 67, page 88, leave out lines 15 to 29.
Mr. Wiggin: I am probably being over-aggressive with my deletions here. I am trying to find out whether we are putting in costs for the sake of it. Subsection (2) reads:
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''Where a water undertaker makes an application for a drought order, the Agency may recover from the water undertaker any expenses it incurs (whether of a revenue or capital nature) . . . in connection with any local inquiry''
or
''in the exercise of the Agency's functions'',
and so on. The same is true for drought permits, as covered by another section of the Water Resources Act 1991.
I am trying to ensure that charges against the water undertaker are not too draconian. There seems to be a lot of provision for people to charge water undertakers, and there is only one place that that money could come from; the consumer. The amendment is designed to protect the consumer in the long term.
Water undertakers suffer most from droughts, and such fining or continual charging would put further pressure on them. Nobody wants a drought but once one occurs, the provision might make the situation worse. I hope that the Minister will provide assurances.
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Norman Baker: I agree that we should protect the consumer, but I am not sure that this is the appropriate way to do so. It is right that, if costs are incurred by the application of a drought order, they should be incurred by those making the order. One could argue that, if that were not so, the costs would be borne by the taxpayer, because it is all public money, whether from a consumer or a taxpayer.
Although water companies cannot be expected to control the weather, they can, to some degree, make plans to avoid drought orders; for example, by using water metering. I do not entirely sympathise with the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Leominster although, as always, he put his case beautifully.
Mr. Morley: The hon. Member for Lewes has identified the problems with the amendments. The costs must be borne somewhere, and it would not be fair for the agency to bear the cost of making an order. The hon. Gentleman was also right to touch on the fact that we expect water companies to manage their resources efficiently and effectively. Bearing in mind the extremes of the year's weather, they have done a good job, and there have been no restrictions in place over the summer. The problem is not yet over because we are having an exceptionally dry autumn, and water resources must be low. I hope that the winter rains will arrive in the not too distant future, because that might alleviate the pressure.
Drought orders allow a company to extract either more water from existing sources or water from additional sources not usually used. In some cases, the agency may incur costs. For example, if a local inquiry took place—although that is not common—charges would be made. The provision plugs a gap in legal powers to recover costs and expenses from the undertaker. Those costs would otherwise be recovered from all abstractors via the abstraction licence. Someone has to pay and, without the provision, the costs would be spread among the abstractors.
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The provision makes the system fairer, with water companies and customers paying for work on drought orders and permits in their area. That is reasonable, and I hope that the hon. Member for Leominster accepts the point and withdraws his amendment.
Mr. Wiggin: I am grateful to the Minister for his reply. I am worried because, as a drought approaches, one would want water undertakers to begin to plan when they would need to abstract from rivers or other unusual sources. It would be a shame if they were deterred from doing that by charges, bearing it in mind that they have had to make a plan and that that sort of provision will be in it. I was worried about that.
I do not think that the amendment is a peculiar way of dealing with the problem, and one imagines that we will not face a severe drought more than once every seven years, perhaps less. Given the choice of putting the provision in abstraction licences, which might be granted annually, this is clearly a better way of dealing with the matter. However, it is worth flagging up that it will be an extra cost at a time when water companies will already be in trouble. I am grateful to all hon. Members for the discussion that we have had. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 67 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clauses 68 and 69 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 70
Membership of regional flood defence committees in Wales
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr. Thomas: I want to delay the Committee for just a few minutes on this important clause, which is a further devolutionary provision extending the powers of the National Assembly over flood protection committees in Wales. The clause is vital for Welsh economic interests. It is estimated that more than 100,000 residential properties, more than 8,000 commercial properties and more than 107,000 hectares of agricultural land are located on the flood plain in Wales. Dealing with flooding in Wales, and deciding which areas will be protected and which will be sacrificed to climate change—the real choice facing us in Wales as in the rest of the United Kingdom—is hugely important to the economic life of Wales. The capital value of all those assets taken together is nearly £8 billion, which is the annual budget given to the National Assembly under the Barnett formula. That shows that flood prevention is not just a matter of clearing up every winter in one's back garden. It is absolutely essential.
It has been estimated that the annual economic cost of flooding in Wales would be about £2.5 million if there were not adequate flood defences or strategies in place. Facing climate change, we can estimate that in the next 50 years flood damage could increase by 50 per cent. from river flooding and by over 200 per cent. from tidal flooding, because the main effect of climate change through the melting of the ice caps is to raise seawater levels.
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It is important for Wales to work out a strategic approach to flood defence planning in the next few years. One problem to date is that Wales has had a two-tier system. The Environment Agency is empowered, as in England, as the primary body for flood defence on the main rivers, but there are also local flood defence committees and a limited number of other local committees, especially for such areas as the wetlands and the drainage ditches in Gwent.
The two-tier system has some real faults, so I am happy to see this clause. The Environment Agency in Wales is not devolved, although I hope that in time it will be, but it operates on a Wales basis, with a committee for Wales. That is a positive step forward. However, the problem is that local flood defence committees tend to be dominated by local interests. Everything depends on which local councillor or other local interest is on a committee. The approach taken, although laudable when considering how to protect a village or local piece of land, is not strategic and does not meet the real challenge of climate change.
Looking at Wales as a whole, and that £8 billion-worth of assets and the possible cost of yearly damage, we see that that challenge can be met only through a strategic approach; we cannot do it piecemeal, and to date we have been using a piecemeal approach. Local flood defence committees recommend work that is sometimes taken on board by the Environment Agency.
It is worth pointing out that the National Assembly's budget for many aspects of flood defence work has been underspent, which is incredible if we consider the difficulties that we face and the increasing risk of flooding. The reason for the underspend is that there is no strategic, overall view and we just react to local issues as they arise. Some local issues are not seen to be important enough and do not receive funding, while others receive funding but are not strategically vital.
One of the weird points on which we have to educate the public and ourselves is that climate change and the increased risk of flooding mean that certain areas will seem to flood more readily. We will therefore need to allocate land to be flooded and to protect the flood plain using methods different from those that we used in the past. Instead of building walls and shifting the problem downstream, we will have to think of more integrated ways of dealing with it. Many climate change scientists and flood defence experts are taking a more sophisticated approach, but the question is how we can achieve that in Wales without binding ourselves to purely local interests and having a system in which the local voice that shouts the loudest gets the flood defence.
The clause will allow the National Assembly to throw out the present system and introduce new arrangements for Wales, and there are three possible options. The first is to keep some form of regional defence committee, perhaps by splitting Wales into three or four single-tier geographic areas with a committee each, and the second option would be to have one flood defence committee for Wales. However, both those options would preserve the current arrangements based on river catchment
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areas. That means that a Wales flood defence committee would be a Wales and bits of England flood defence committee because a bit of England also comes into Wales. The Rivers Dee in the north and Wye in the south, including areas that the hon. Member for Leominster will know well, come under the remit of the Welsh defence committee, while the Severn Trent loops in from England and takes a bit of mid-Wales. Indeed, it approaches the border of my constituency, which is far into Wales.
There is the third option, however, which is to establish a Wales regional flood defence committee based on the border between Wales and England. In other words, we would have a Wales-wide regional flood defence committee. That would not change the Environment Agency's method of using river catchments. Rivers tend to form our borders between countries and counties but flooding never happens on only one bank, and that means that we must have river catchment approaches to flooding issues.
That is not a problem, but clause 70 addresses the democratic control—how are we approaching the issues strategically, and how do we decide where to allocate money? I believe that this is an ideal opportunity for the National Assembly to establish a Wales-wide regional flood defence committee based on the country's borders. The problems that the hon. Member for Leominster has mentioned would not stop the cross-border work, and as the clause makes clear, the National Assembly will liaise with the Minister in all its work and need approval for all cross-border issues.
I want to see the Assembly approach the issue with certain principles. There should be one regional strategy body for Wales, which should be directly funded by the Assembly. I accept that local accountability would be diminished, but there would be far greater national strategic accountability. That would also be a useful committee to relate with the structures in England, as I understand that England is likely to choose large regional flood defence committees. The Welsh body would be of a size and structure that could negotiate with those committees and agree on cross-border issues in a reasonable way.
Members should understand that the National Assembly could change the present system in which Welsh committees include parts of England and vice versa. We could have a much more accountable system. With devolution, and the responsibility and accountability that come from it, that would be a preferable option to the present ''mix and match'', which I am sure leaves many people in England and Wales amazed at who controls their flood defences. The National Assembly must decide on those issues, and the clause gives it that power. I am pleased that the Assembly has produced its report on those matters for consultation, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to give my response to that consultation in this forum.
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