UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1060-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

environment, Food and rural affairs committee

 

 

flooding

 

 

Wednesday 10 october 2007

BARONESS YOUNG OF OLD SCONE, DR DAVID KING and MR DAVID ROOKE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 100

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 10 October 2007

Members present

Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair

Mr Geoffrey Cox

Mr David Drew

Mr James Gray

Lynne Jones

David Lepper

Dan Rogerson

David Taylor

Mr Roger Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Environment Agency

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Baroness Young of Old Scone, a Member of the House of Lords, Chief Executive, Dr David King, Director of Water Management and Mr David Rooke, Head of Flood Risk Management, Environment Agency, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to see so many people here taking an interest in the Committee's first session after the summer recess. Can I just deal with one small but important piece of housekeeping before we start? As some colleagues here may be new to the Committee or may have forgotten how we operate, it would be very helpful if you could make certain your mobile phones or other alert mechanisms are turned off. I welcome our first witness in our inquiry into Flooding, the Environment Agency: Baroness Young, their Chief Executive, Dr David King, their Director of Water Management and Mr David Rooke, the Head of Flood Risk Management. You are all very welcome and thank you for your comprehensive submission and offers to the Committee of further briefing to enable us to understand in even greater detail some of the lessons learned from the summer's flooding. I would just like to say at the outset that this particular inquiry has attracted an unprecedented response, particularly from members of the public. On behalf of the Committee I would like to express my thanks for those people, some of whose lives were blighted by flooding, but nonetheless have seen fit to share with the Committee their own thoughts and indeed posed some very pertinent questions which I hope, as we proceed with these hearings, we will be able to reflect and reflect upon when it comes to reaching our conclusions. I would like to start, Baroness Young, if I may, by asking you a question borne out of the fact that there do seem to have been an awful lot of reports on the subject of flooding and flood management with lots of very good advice. I looked back to the successor committee of this and I think it was in the session 1997/1998 when they published a report on Flood and Coastal Ingress and in their recommendation they made an important observation that there needed to be integrated management of flooding issues. They concentrate on main rivers, non-main rivers and internal drainage board areas and made the distinction between that and coastal activity. In the case of our own Committee we published a report, Climate Change, Water Security and Flooding on 16 September 2004 in which we made a number of pressing recommendations, including asking the Government to publish a White Paper on the subject of the Foresight Report which very accurately predicted the onset of more extreme weather conditions and made some very important recommendations about should be protected, including vital infrastructure. The Government's own activity in terms of their response to Making Space for Water for example had conclusions which said (and I quote): "The aim will be to manage risks by employing an integrated portfolio of approaches which reflect both national and local priorities." Their first thought was that these were all aimed at reducing the threat to people and their property. With so much advice how come it went so wrong?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Thank you for giving us an opportunity to say that we do not think it went wrong as a result of the advice. The reasons why these floods were so severe was because the weather that prompted them was indeed severe. There was an unprecedented amount of rain in June and July, more than ever before.

Q2 Chairman: Just to interrupt, you say it was unprecedented but Sir David King's report alerted everybody - albeit on a long timescale - to the onset of more extreme weather conditions associated with climate change. If you look at the scientific evidence in volume two of his findings a lot of the kind of the things that we saw happen in the summer - for example the lack of protection for vital infrastructure - were flagged up as work areas in that document. What did you, as an Agency, do when Sir David published his findings in terms of giving advice to the Government?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We have looked, as you have, at all the reports that have been done on floods since 1938 and if you look at all the recommendations coming from these reports a considerable number of them have been acted on and implemented. Some of them are currently part of a process of implementation as part of Making Space for Water which is the Government's strategy for flood risk management. I think the issue really, as far as the previous findings are concerned, is the pace at which they are being implemented. In some cases this is as a result of the pace that can be achieved through funding; in other cases it is changes in legislation; sometimes it is cultural and a change in hearts and minds. It is a big and complicated process of implementing all of these reports. I believe we need to move faster and I do hope that the reviews that are currently taking place - your own and Sir Michael Pitt's - will in fact reinforce the need not to come up with new conclusions but to implement the ones that have already been reached.

Q3 Chairman: Let us get to the heart of the matter. It is refreshing to hear you say that things should move faster and this is borne out of, if you like, a reaction of some very harrowing situations which occurred in the summer. Going back to 2004 when that report was produced - indeed, you are continually working in the area of dealing with flood prevention issues - did you sit down formally with government and in 2004 deliver a hurry up message in the context of the then available resources?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: There has been a huge amount of sitting down with government on the Making Space for Water strategy, which is the primary vehicle for changing the way in which flood risk management is delivered. That has achieved a whole variety of changes including the work that has gone on to take a risk based approach to flood risk management for the future. We have delivered more techniques of assessing risk, we have made considerable progress in delivering our mapping and warning systems. As a result of that report there was also the injection of additional funding into the system through the spending rounds and there are a number of things that are currently underway, including giving us a role on the coast to integrate (you made the point about integration) and consulting on whether we are going to have a role in flooding in-land from all sources of flooding. So some of these things have been done and some of these things are currently out to consultation and some of them remain to be done. I do not believe that any of the messages from previous reports or indeed from the report that you are referring to have not been worked through in the Making Space for Water strategy.

Q4 Chairman: You made a very telling statement at the beginning, a candid statement in which you said that things should happen quicker. When did you start to deliver to Defra the message that things should accelerate? Was it as a result of what has happened this summer or was it as a result of study and thought at an earlier time?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: It all depends very much on which of the elements of the report are taken into account. One of the things we have done in the review of all the various reports is to work out who, in fact, was responsible for taking the lead. Some of those things we were responsible for taking the lead in, others it was parts of government, others it was local authorities, others it was individual agencies, parts of government, whatever. I think the important thing is that we have pressed on as fast as we possibly could with the things that we were responsible for. We have urged government to move forward on the things that they are responsible for and there are quite difficult conundrums to face in terms of the wide variety of responsibilities, particularly for surface water and urban flooding where Defra was consulting prior to the floods on a minded to do basis about our role in co-ordinating all of the organisations that are responsible in the urban and surface water areas, for example local authorities, water companies, the Highways Agency, highways authorities, the development and re-development process where clearly at the moment there is huge confusion to the public and a lack of co-ordination.

Q5 Chairman: I think it would be helpful to the Committee if you could lay out in writing and in more detail, bearing in mind the reports to which I have referred, to give us some kind of time line of activity in terms of your exchanges with government to see the type of recommendations that you were making to ministers, what degree of urgency you, as an Agency, attach to them; the kind of response you were getting from Defra as to whether, in your judgment, they were motoring fast enough in the light of the advice that you were giving.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I am certainly happy to do that as far as our responsibilities go, but I would not want it to be left on the record that we are responsible for all flood risk policy. That is a Defra role and that is one you will have to put to them.

Chairman: We are going to come on to who else may be responsible because in your evidence you put forward some quite candid conclusions about better coordination of bodies. You alluded to them in your remarks a moment ago and we will want to probe that in detail. Before I go on to look in more detail at the June and July floods I want to bring in David Taylor.

Q6 David Taylor: In your comments a moment or two ago I think you were suggesting that you were going to take a risk based approach to flood risk management. What on earth other approach would you take? I do not understand that.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I can probably turn to David King or David Rooke on this because they have been around flood risk longer than I have, but my understanding is that over the last ten years or slightly less we have been increasingly able to map and assess flood risk and to direct our activities and our resources towards the areas of higher flood risk than we have been previously in the past. History played quite a large part and indeed if you remember the 2000 floods to some extent history played a bit of a part there in that the prime minister of the day went around standing on bridges, looking at flooded communities and saying "This must have a flood risk management scheme". So it was very much that if somewhere had flooded we tended to say that we should look at what needed to be done to resolve that situation rather than stepping back and saying, "Where, in these flood risk management areas, are the highest priorities? Where are the places that are most at risk? Where can resource and focus save the most in the way of property and risk to human life, rather than simply going on the basis of where had previously flooded. The two Davids may want to comment.

Dr King: I think it is worth saying that certainly in the last decade the underpinning philosophy in the 50s and 60s and right up through was about flood defence. Almost implicit in that was that you could build defences that would stop flooding. The reality is, of course, that you cannot do that; you can only be better prepared against the impact of floods. Therefore it is a change of view; it is about looking at how you manage the risk down and it is also accepted that you manage the risk down by a basket of different interventions which on one side might be about development control, keeping buildings away from inappropriate development of a flood plain to, of course, building and maintaining defences. It is a whole different thought process that now exists around managing floods.

Q7 Chairman: Let us look briefly at what happened in June and July because the view has been created that the floods that we experienced both in the rural and the urban settings were unprecedented and very different from anything that we had had before. Perhaps you could comment on that.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: They certainly were different from what we have experienced before to an extent that there was a huge amount of rain in a very short space of time. They were the wettest June and July ever recorded. Much of the flooding came not from what we would regard as a traditional flood, as it were, from the rivers or the seas but from the huge volume of water simply overpowering the surface water drainage systems and causing fairly instant flooding, quick flooding. That might later on have been complicated by flooding from the rivers in many cases as well, but the initial flooding was very much surface water flooding. For those of you who remember seeing some of our motorways running like rivers, that was certainly the cause there. I think there were some big lessons to be gained from that about these heavy rainfall events if they are going to become increasingly common with climate change. The other complicating factor was, I think, that it was a summer flood rather than a winter flood and indeed there were two events very close to each other so that we had a series of very saturated catchments and very little capacity either in the river systems in the second case or indeed in the ground itself to take more water. So that made the situation worse. Generally speaking in terms of a traditional flood, as it were, the systems that were in place worked well. We had good collaboration with the Met Office, although we have to make the point that the capacity of the Met Office to predict to very fine grain that helps us then predict floods to very fine grain is not yet technically there. We issued warnings for flooding from the river systems pretty well. There were a few occasions when it did not quite go right but mostly it went well. The big problem was of course that the majority of floods were not from the river systems, they were from surface water systems which are not currently subject to flood warning and indeed are not currently able to be mapped. They are very unpredictable and the title gives a clue on occasions in that many of them are very flash floods so there was not much time to warn even if the technology had been there. Our defences generally stood up well in that we did not have catastrophic collapse or failure of defences other than a few where structures that are mechanically operated or electrically operated failed as a result of their power supply going out. There were a small number of defences in that category but of course the majority of our defences that were implicated were simply overwhelmed by the volume of water because the sorts of design standards to which they had been designed were insufficient to take this unprecedented flood. We did have a number of flood defences that worked extremely well and did defend communities and worked well to their design standards. The message from us for the floods and what makes them so different was very much the huge volume of water in a very short space of time and the fact that it was the surface water systems that failed to respond. I think the third thing is the critical infrastructure issue.

Q8 Chairman: We are going to come on to discuss that so you will be able to go into it in more detail, but there is a concerning point I want to conclude on this. You said that at the moment you do not have a model that can deal with the kind of urban flooding situation that we saw and yet you as an Agency, in defending your position about responding to these floods, have made great play about your flood risk mapping, about your helpline and your Floodline (the information that can go to people). It does beg the question that if we are looking forward what you are going to do to try and address the impact of what we currently regard as unprecedented but which might become the norm. One of the things that worries me about the modelling arrangement is that you do it on a frequency basis of one in 50, on in 100, one in 200 or even one in 1000 year events but nobody seems to have actually gone back and said, "Well, if this kind of rainfall occurs anywhere, what would the flood risk map actually then look like?" We have had a lot of focus on coastal and river flooding in terms of your mapping, but you have admitted that there is a gap in terms of the urban environment and there seems to be a dearth of mathematical modelling to say that if we get so-called unprecedented events anywhere, not trying to predict when it is going to rain but just to look at the country as a whole and say, "If this lots drops anywhere, what are the risk factors?" What are you doing to improve the modelling and the anticipation of this type of event in the future?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can I make some points of principle and then perhaps pass to David Rooke to talk about the whole issue of characterising urban flood risk? We are not working on modelling of urban flood risk at the moment because we do not, as yet, have a responsibility for urban flood risk other than from rivers.

Q9 Chairman: Why not?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Because as yet the Government has not given us that responsibility. They were consulting on whether they should put together a proposition before the summer events but we are not responsible for urban flooding from all sources.

Q10 Chairman: So at the moment it is local authorities, is it, who are supposed to be responsible for that?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: At the moment it is a very complicated mixture of responsibilities of local authorities, of owners of land, of the Highways Agency, the highways authorities; in circumstances where it is the water company assets that are involved - sewers and drains - it would be the water companies. So it is a very mixed and uncoordinated picture. In some areas there has been a degree of coordination, for example following the floods in Carlisle there has been very good work to bring together all the parties and put together a surface water drainage plan and flooding plan combined. However, in the vast majority of urban settlements at the moment that will not have been done. As yet we are not looking at modelling floods from surface water issues within cities. Let me just take one point of principle also about your extreme events happening anywhere. We could in theory look at our flood mapping and risk approach and work out what was needed to protect everywhere against the possibility of a very extreme event. I personally do not believe that that would be the best use of public money because it would be highly unpredictable. Where some of these very extreme events will happen, although they may be increasing in frequency with climate change, only once in a lifetime or two lifetimes or three lifetimes in some locations. To engineer the whole of the country to that standard would be quite expensive.

Q11 Chairman: I am not suggesting that that was the outcome I was seeking, it was "do the modelling and then decide from the response the approach" which seems to be lacking.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I certainly think that nationally there needs to be a discussion and debate at government level about the standard of protection that we believe is important and how frequently we would regard as acceptable an event that would overwhelm the traditional defences. We also need to look at other ways of making sure that if these extreme events occur that proper contingency planning is in place and that generally speaking we build our buildings and our settlements with more resilience.

Chairman: We are going to come onto that but Mr Williams wants to come in here.

Q12 Mr Williams: You have talked about the consultation that is taking place as to whether the Environment Agency should take the legal responsibility in urban flooding from surface water. How did that consultation arise? Was it because of a ministerial announcement?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: It is part of the Making Space for Water strategy and this was the beginning of the process of looking at integration. We have gone through the process of Defra consulting on integrating the roles in coastal flooding and coastal protection. That has now been agreed and we are going to have a combined role in coastal flooding and coastal protection. This was now moving onto consulting on the inland role integrating surface water drainage with flooding from the rivers as well. It was partly the process of implementing Making Space for Water.

Dr King: Making Space for Water is the Government's strategic framework for handling flood risk over the next ten to 15 years. Sitting under that strategy document are somewhere between 15 and 20 programmes of work which largely sweep up all of the recommendations that the Chairman made reference to. Many of those have progressed but it is true to say that most of the focus over the last number of years has been on fluvial and coastal flooding. However, the issue of urban flooding, for example last December the Government set a number of pilots looking at urban flooding, surface water flooding, specifically to try to understand how we might best manage the surface water issue. In addition to and as part of that as well they were then consulting on this strategic overview. There are five or six different organisations involved in it. They all have an important part and must continue to have an important part, but there is this strategic overview and that is why you have no characterisation of national risk. My belief is that in terms of characterisation mapping surface water flooding, which is a lot more difficult for a whole variety of technical reasons, we are significantly behind where we are with our understanding of characterisation and mapping of fluvial and coastal.

Q13 Mr Williams: Can I just ask how far the consultation has proceeded? What conclusions have you come to?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: It has gone through the consultative process and Defra now has the responses, they are not going to act on those until the review, chaired by Sir Michael Pitt, has come to some conclusions.

Q14 David Lepper: Could I concentrate on your responsibilities for flood warning systems and public information. There is no doubt at all these have been under very heavy during the summer. I think you talked of some 43 million hits to your website during that period, but you concluded in your evidence to us that the current system stood up to the challenges of increased usage. On the other hand, we have a number of those organisations and individuals who have submitted evidence to us which suggests differently, for instance Sheffield City Council say that severe flood warnings were only given when the water level was already up to the windscreens on vehicles. The National Farmers Union says that farmers who had been signed up for a flood warning did not receive the warning until it was too late for them to rescue their livestock. Residents in Oxford complained about incorrect and confusing information. Would you agree that you do need to review the processes of warning - accepting the fact that this was perhaps a once in however many years occurrence - that pressures were put on the system and many of those individuals who were relying upon the Agency's own warning system and information felt that they were let down.

Dr King: The first thing I would say is that when you get an event of the severity that we did clearly there will be lessons learned and there will be improvements that we will make. The second point that I would make is that our warning system is exclusively associated with fluvial, so flooding from rivers. In the dissemination of warnings we use the Floodline Warnings Direct which enables you to give a warning either by fax, phone or pager. We use the Internet and obviously we use the local radio as well as Floodline. In terms of warnings, we gave out 45,000 warnings and we strive to give a two hour warning. We know that about 75 per cent of warnings were given with at least two hours, but obviously there are 25 per cent where we did not. Given the nature of the flooding that unfortunately has happened. In terms of our website, you mentioned we had 43 million hits from 4 million people and although there was some minor slowing of the system we are talking about seconds. Normally 95 per cent of the enquiries are within three seconds, it went down to a minute in some periods.

Q15 David Lepper: We had Tewskesbury Chamber of Industry and Commerce telling us that in relation to Tewskesbury, where the flood happened on a Friday night (or at least the worst part of it), they tell us over the weekend it was impossible to connect to the Environment Agency website. That is not just a matter of the slowing down of the process because of the number of hits, but they are telling us they could not get any connection at all to your website.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We can certainly give you the evidence from our own logging process that shows that the website was active throughout. If people were not getting onto it obviously we need to look at it. Perhaps I could just comment on one or two of the examples you gave. Sheffield, for example, was one of those areas where there was considerable, very rapid flooding from surface water drainage issues and that was the primary cause of most of the flooding in Sheffield and therefore it was very difficult to give warning at all. We currently do not have a warning system there. The NFU issue, if there are farmers who were signed up for a warning and did not get one, we need to explore that but my understanding is that in many cases it was that they did not feel they got it in time. Our standard is a warning, if we can, two hours beforehand. I think the one point I would want to make about the farmers is that we still have remarkably few farmers and others signed up to the warning system. Only 41 per cent of people who are eligible have signed up and we would very much like to press for more people to be signed up to it so that we can, where possible, give warnings. Again we can look at instances where farmers are saying they did not get a warning in time and see whether it was within our standards and whether, therefore, the standards are not going to be sufficiently long in advance for farmers to move stock which may cause us technical problems. It may not be possible, we would have to look at that. In Oxford the situation was very complicated. It is a very complicated river system in Oxford and I must confess at one stage when we were trying to predict the peaks of flooding points through Oxford somebody said to me that we had more peaks than the Himalayas because they were coming through in a very complex fashion and there were occasions when, having warned people that there was a peak, we then had a higher peak and they felt they had been short changed as it were because the first slug of water coming through which we would call a peak was obviously not the peak, if you see what I mean. There are a whole load of complicated issues about these flood warnings. Our local lessons learned reviews will be looking in detail at how every single flood was caused, what the issues were around forecasting these, around the warnings, taking on board the issues that people have raised locally. Generally speaking the reality of these floods is that the vast majority of our warning systems worked well. We dealt with a huge volume. There was a strong possibility that our systems could have fallen over with the degree of hits that they were taking and they did not. Part of the issue is that many of the floods that occurred were indeed not floods that we would normally warn against because they are from surface water issues. So there is a complicated picture there.

Q16 David Lepper: Just to take up one point, Baroness Young, that you made a little earlier and that was about cooperation with the Met Office. From what you have said I get the feeling that maybe some of the information the Environment Agency was receiving was perhaps not always as accurate and as timely as it might have been. The Institute of Civil Engineers tell us in their evidence that they believe the Agency and the Met Office should work more closely together. You have talked about the need to improve cooperation between the two bodies, could you tell us a little bit more about the extent to which it is lacking at the moment and what you are intending to do about that?

Dr King: I think the cooperation with the Met Office worked extremely well. As soon as the Met Office were picking up depression they were talking to us from the Monday. During the week we had some forecasters embedded with the Met Office forecasting. What is important to point out is that the Met Office did extremely well in some of their forecasts in that they were giving an 80 per cent probability that you were going to get heavy rainfall over a county. That is very good except a county may have a number of different catchments in it so, for example, if the rain was 20 miles north of where it fell in Warwickshire the floods would not have been in the Severn they would have been in the Trent. That is the issue. It is not a criticism of the Met Office; they are working at the limits of their forecasting at the moment but we must know where it falls in order to translate it into a flood warning.

Q17 Lynne Jones: Could I just explore that a little more? Just after the floods I put down some parliamentary questions and what was conspicuous by its absence when I got replies was the lack of response to the "when" question. Dr King, you have just referred to the fairly accurate predictions of the Met Office and at 1006 on Thursday 19 July they were predicting an 80 per cent chance of floods in areas centred around Tewkesbury. They were spot on in terms of the area they were identifying as having a very risk of flooding. When after that did you start issuing warnings through the Floodline and through your press releases? You issued press releases the next day but referring to the weekend. It seems not to have been really timely in terms of the warnings. I know you say the surface water system is not subject to flood warnings, but you had this information from the Met Office and it should have informed the information that you already had in terms of your own systems.

Dr King: My recollection is that we issued a joint press release with the Press Office on the Thursday and we have a tiered system of warning which goes from flood watch to warning to severe warning and we were certainly issuing flood watches on the Thursday and then we would have led into warning and severe warning. There is a big difference between a severe weather warning and a severe flood warning because a severe weather warning is issued for a whole series of different purposes and quite often a severe weather warning, even when it involves rain, may not involve flooding. We have to translate the rainfall into a flood forecast and that really does mean that we need to know on what river system it is going to fall. We use the Met Office weather radar, we use our own flow forecasting and we use a whole system of rain gauges, but all of that needs to be modelled in and as I said 20 miles makes a big difference as to where the flood is going to happen.

Q18 Lynne Jones: I accept that it is difficult to be absolutely spot on, but you have this quite localised area where the Met Office were predicting widespread heavy rain and it still appears from the evidence that we have that people were not getting warnings, so much so that you had your own flood defences trapped in traffic on the Friday. I still have not really got any perception of how you translate the information that you have from your own evidence and the information from the Met Office into warnings and the timescale for those warnings to be issued.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can I just comment on the point that Dr King raised about the difference between a severe weather warning and a flood warning. Our flood warnings generally are based on our monitoring systems from rivers.

Q19 Lynne Jones: It was widespread heavy rain.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes, but what we had been doing was keeping in close touch with the Met Office all the way during that week. Indeed I spoke to them on the Tuesday, there was regular contact with them. By the Thursday we were aware that this was going to be big and they were beginning to be able to tell us approximately where. Up until then we could not get much information as to absolutely where until Thursday.

Q20 Lynne Jones: Thursday morning at ten o'clock.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: At that point we agreed jointly with them that we would issue public information about a severe weather warning and its location and that we would contact our partners - local authorities and others - about the fact that there was a severe weather warning on the way. As soon as a severe warning goes out the public begin to get information through the media. Our regions issued press releases and generally speaking we were able to up the tempo of the fact that there was a severe weather event on the way. The process of moving from that to actually being able to say in detail how these surface water systems would react is not currently part of our remit, nor are we able to do it with current technology. The process of that then resulting in river levels going up and us being able to activate our flood warnings in the way in which our modelling systems trigger particular flood warnings at particular times was very much the back end of the process because most of the early flooding was in fact from the surface water impact. I think that that continues to highlight the issue of the fact that we have not at the moment got a coordinated process for dealing with flooding from all sources but that is a fact and we cannot deny that.

Q21 Lynne Jones: The flood warnings that went out, were they going out throughout the day? How did they work?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think you have to differentiate between a warning that there may be flooding to the public as a whole.

Q22 Lynne Jones: The 45,000 Floodline warnings, when did they go out?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: They would be going out throughout the event depending on where the particular flood was likely to happen.

Q23 Lynne Jones: When did they start going out?

Mr Rooke: For the River Avon we issued our first warning on the 20^th at 1513.

Q24 Lynne Jones: But you had had warnings on the 19^th early on that there was going to be these excessive rainfalls.

Mr Rooke: Yes, and we fed that information into our models. We were talking to what we call professional partners - the local authorities, the police, et cetera - on the Thursday. I was talking to the Met Office on the Thursday and we got the warnings out before the properties flooded in good time on the River Severn and the River Avon.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think we have to make this distinction between the warnings that we give jointly with the Met Office that there is going to be severe weather and the individual warnings which go to the public at large and to our professional partners. The individual warnings that we give to members of the public through their mobile phone or through there pager or through their landline or whichever way they choose to have it, they are about what is going to happen in their particular flood area and we have a commitment to give them that warning two hours before they flood. So we give the general warning to the public in a particular area that we think there is going to be very heavy weather that could result in flooding and then as the rivers respond we can give individual and particular flood warnings to people based on our modelling of how the rivers are responding.

Q25 Lynne Jones: You should have had plenty of time to get those warnings out to give people the two hours since you had had this warning from the Met Office on Thursday, and yet people are telling us that they were not getting these warnings in time.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Only where they were able to be warned about flooding from rivers because we do not have a responsibility to warn from surface water flooding. Nobody at the moment has a system in place to warn about surface water flooding other than in a very general way to say that there is going to be a lot of water and we could find some surface water flooding.

Q26 Lynne Jones: People might say that it is difficult to distinguish between the two because if there is heavy surface water that affects the rivers and then we get river flooding, so I am not quite sure of the distinction. People will say, "We signed up to these floodlines; we thought we would get advanced information rather more advanced than what is being given out generally".

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think what you are saying very much reinforces the fact that we now have to get a proper coordinated approach and proper coordinated role and clarity about who is actually responsible for coordinating. Let me just take Hull as an example. Ninety-five per cent of the flooding in Hull was from surface water flooding rather than from river flooding and it is actually quite possible to determine which was which because the amount of river flooding in Hull was comparatively small and quite localised compared with the vast majority of flooding which was from surface water drainage.

Q27 Lynne Jones: What needs to be done to improve public information and what role should the Environment Agency play? Do you expect to have responsibility for issuing flood warnings about surface water flooding?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think that is one of the things that needs to be clarified if we are given a role in having an overview of flooding from all sources in urban areas. The fine grain of what happens in terms of drainage systems is very much a local issue. You can understand that when you are looking at flooding from rivers you are looking at the whole river system because it is one system. If you are looking at flooding within the urban area you are looking at the rivers but you are also looking at some very, very complicated and fine grain drainage and surface water systems and sewerage systems as well. This is very heavily influenced by the development process and also by things like roads and what water companies do. We believe we should have a national overview which would put in place advice, guidance, tools and techniques for being able to do the risk assessment and the mapping but that there needs to be a key role for local authorities in individual localities because they are the folks with the levers in their hands. They have the planning levers that can impact on drainage systems and surface water systems and the whole process of getting permeable and sustainable drainage systems, not building too much impermeable concrete, making sure that urban settlements are planned in ways that allows drainage to be sustainable.

Q28 Lynne Jones: You mentioned earlier that there had been one area where you had had more successful coordination. I forget where it was but what was the impetus? Who took the lead in developing that sort of strategy?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: The example I used was Carlisle, following the two sets of Carlisle floods which were quite complicated combinations of river and surface water flooding. David Rooke may want to comment on the whole issue of surface water drainage, including the whole issue of sustainable drainage systems. Working with Defra at the moment we have 15 pilot projects looking at how this issue of surface water drainage systems and floods from surface water can be dealt with. They are trying out a number of different techniques and also different ways of collaborating and having governance of that to see what works. Our anticipation is that once Defra have completed those pilots there will be some models there that emerge that look as if they are successful and can be applied across the country as a whole. Just going back to the issue of predictions of flooding and what we would like to see, if we do get this overview role we will want to look at what mapping and modelling of surface water drainage looks like and whether a warning system is possible. However, to be frank, at the moment we think that technically it will be extremely difficult and financially incredibly expensive and so it may not be the best way of dealing with surface water drainage issues. The best way of dealing with surface water drainage issues may be to start rapidly getting surface water planned and in place for those areas that we know are prone to surface water drainage issues and resolving some of the hot spots, making sure that new development takes account of these issues and actually has got better flood proofing in its water drainage systems.

Q29 Mr Drew: If we could now move on to the actual emergency itself, as someone who had a fairly interesting role through it, there is just one thing that I suppose surprised all of us. When the Mythe water treatment centre went down (and obviously the Environment Agency were key to Gold Command in Gloucestershire) what was the response of the Agency when Gold Command turned to Severn Trent and said "You have lost your treatment centre; what is Plan B to get drinking water to thousands of people?" and the answer was, "We do not really know". Has the Environment Agency played through in some of your roles what happens when you lose key establishments like a water treatment centre or an electricity sub-station? To what extent are you now re-thinking the whole way in which you would work in an emergency and prior to an emergency?

Dr King: In terms of the critical infrastructure and utilities it is very much the responsibility of the operator of that facility to have a business continuity plan in place. Severn Trent Water in that case have responsibility under the Civil Contingencies Act and indeed I think under the Water Services Act to ensure that they have emergency plans to put in place. The Agency does not actually have a role in that at all, but there is legislation that covers it.

Q30 Mr Drew: What level of discussion did you have with water companies and electricity companies prior to this season of floods and have you had a lot more chatter since then on what should be done to protect some of these key establishments?

Dr King: Clearly one of the lessons coming out of the floods is the vulnerability of the critical infrastructure and it is certainly unacceptable and the operators of those installations do have to flood proof the installations. There is a role undoubtedly for government in putting a duty on them to do so. We can certainly help in characterising the risk but at the end of the day it is the operator that will have to make the flood risk assessment of that particular installation and prioritise where they want to put the investment in.

Q31 Mr Drew: What happens if they will not? What happens if you have a clear case where a particular important facility that you know is in the wrong location because you know how risky that particular location is, you have done all your measurements, and they do not come to you, do you have any powers at all to go to them and say, "You have to get hold of this because if it did go down you will have major problems"?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can I just pick this one up because I think there is a real issue for the Committee here. We have done the work to map the flood risk to a whole set of public services and critical infrastructure - not just water but telephones, roads, railways, healthcare facilities, power distribution, energy installations of all sorts - and our role is to provide information to these installations and the people who run them about their degree of flood risk through our flood mapping process. That is our role. The Civil Contingencies Act lays upon them a requirement to be contingent and we take part in local contingency fora where all the players get together to try to establish what the biggest risks locally are. On occasions flood risks have been pretty low down the pecking order. Many of the civil contingency fora have been very, very obsessed with the threat of terrorism and other issues like that and I think that it would be good if flood risk comes up the agenda now.

Q32 Chairman: Have you actually discussed the recommendation in paragraph 7.2 of your evidence that an amendment to the Civil Contingencies Act to address this deficit should be included in the Climate Change Bill?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We have done a number of things. One is that either through the Civil Contingencies Bill or through the Climate Change Bill to get a duty laid on what would be category one responders and category two responders under the Civil Contingencies Act to have a duty to take account of adaptation in their plans.

Q33 Chairman: Have you specifically discussed this with Defra?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We have indeed, yes.

Q34 Chairman: What have they said?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think we are not clear about their response yet; you need to ask them. The other thing I think the Committee should note again the mixed responsibility here. I was asking who should now write to all of these services that we have identified as being in the floodplain and at high risk and say to them, "If you have not already got your act together, you need to start thinking about it sharpish". That is a moot point. Is it Defra with their role in flood risk management? Is it the Cabinet Office with their role in civil contingencies? Is it BRR with their role as the industry sponsor? To be frank, I think it is probably all of them so again I think we need a clarification on who is actually going to drive through getting our infrastructure resilient for the future. It is not just about people being alert to the issue; there will be investment issues for these businesses.

Q35 Chairman: Who is responsible for these creaking reservoirs you have mentioned in paragraph 9.1 of your evidence?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Creaking reservoirs are even more complicated. I am beginning to get depressed about this evidence. If you were reading it cold you would be thinking "Who are these people? They are supposed to be responsible for floods and every time you ask them a question they are very simply telling you it is not their job." However, that is the reality. It is a hugely diverse set of responsibilities at the moment. If you want to hear the story about reservoirs David is a world expert.

Q36 Chairman: You have 30 seconds to enlighten us on reservoirs without repetition or deviation.

Mr Rooke: We took over the enforcement authority for reservoirs across England and Wales in October 2004 so we have some three years' experience. Ulley Reservoir which was on virtually every television screen across the country in June highlighted some of the issues. We do think that as a result of our experience of being the regulator and what happened at Ulley and elsewhere - there were a number of other reservoirs which were adversely impacted - that it is timely for a review of the legislation. The legislation goes back to 1930 and it is still basically in force today. It has been updated through the 1975 Act and some amendments since then, but primarily it is back to the 1930 Act which came out of a number of reservoir failures that led to the deaths of quite a large number of people. We want to move it into a modern risk based approach. We have ageing research stock and the average age of reservoirs in this country is 110 years. With climate change we need a modern risk based regulatory approach in place before those risks start to increase.

Q37 Mr Drew: Presumably you were happy with the way in which - I can only talk my own experience in Gloucestershire - the Gold Command structure worked.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Broadly speaking we feel that the Gold and Silver command structure is the right structure.

Q38 Mr Drew: There were some issues about how Gold related to Silver.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes and one or two issues also for us about just how we get the right sort of input into this, but generally speaking I think the model is a good one.

Q39 Mr Drew: I think everyone would agree from all the evidence we have received and from all the personal experience that Gold and Silver command worked very well. However, a lot depends on people being able to deliver once decisions have been taken and in one respect there is a very good story that there was a lot of helpful intervention by BW (which is quite close to our heart) but if there had not been the ability to pump water through the Gloucester to Sharpness Canal the potential flooding in and around Gloucester and Tewskesbury would have been even worse. On what basis were those decisions taken? They were certainly taken and I am interested in that which is a good news story but also what is not such a good news story where there were water courses where flooding could have been prevented if other private individuals or private organisations had also been acting in the same way because so much depends on people opening the sluices, people making sure that they maintain under riparian ownership their responsibility. Can you take me through what I see on the one hand a good news story but what potentially is not very helpful where you may not have the ability let alone the capability to be able to instruct people to do some of the things you need them to do?

Mr Rooke: I support what Barbara said in terms of the Gold and Silver which worked extremely well. The Gold takes the strategic decisions and the Silver takes the tactical decisions. There is also a Bronze level as well which is actually on the site; people on the site can take local decisions. That command structure is well tested; it is used for all emergencies, not just flooding. All the players generally know each other and come together and they exercise when there are no real events as well. The exercising is an important part of being a member of Gold or Silver. When you attend Gold or Silver you bring with you your organisation's resources and put them at the disposal of the Gold or Silver or Bronze commander and that enables resources to be prioritised. It enables additional resources to be brought in from outside if necessary and certainly during the flooding the military played a key role in coming into Gold and Silver to help and that was very valuable indeed. Trying to get that replicated at a very local level with private individuals is maybe something that needs to be looked at. Often parish councils could play a role in this. We do have flood wardens who we use to issue flood warnings. There may be a role for flood wardens to coordinate very local specific activity but it is at street level, it is at farm level, it is certainly not at county level or beyond that at regional level.

Q40 David Taylor: Can we turn to the question of flood defences. In your opening remarks on that, Baroness Young, you said that with virtually no exception the majority of flood defences performed to the design standard and did not fail; they were simply overwhelmed and overtopped by the sheer volume of water. You went on to say in the evidence that many communities were satisfactorily protected by flood defences which, in one or two cases, had been recent investments. For a flood defence to be effective it needs to be deployed in time if it is a temporary flood defence. Norwich Union's suggestion about the performance of the Agency in the Worcester area was that the failure to react quickly to changing weather conditions in June - the decision by the Agency not to erect temporary flood defences in Worcester - resulted in severe flooding in that area. Do you accept that charge?

Dr King: I cannot specifically comment on Worcester.

Q41 David Taylor: Would you write to us later with a detailed reaction to that.

Dr King: Yes.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: My understanding of the issue of temporary defences is that in some places where we did not get our temporary defences up there was substantial flooding but not necessarily flooding that affected property, it was mostly affecting gardens and roads which is a nuisance but nevertheless less severe.

Q42 David Taylor: Are you suggesting that was the nature of the Worcester flood?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We need to come back to you on the Worcester ones but I know there were a number of places where people were unhappy that we had not deployed temporary defences where the flooding that occurred was extensive but not serious in that it did not actually get into houses. There were other cases where, had we deployed temporary defences, we would not have held back the floods because the size of the floods was sufficiently large that even temporary defences would not have been overwhelmed.

Q43 David Taylor: Are you telling us then that the situation in Worcester was a concrete decision not to deploy defences and not a slow reaction to swiftly changing weather patterns?

Mr Rooke: I think we will provide you with a note on that.

Q44 David Taylor: There is another example that I would like to put to you which I know you are familiar with, I saw you on the day. Three members of this Committee - David Drew, James Gray and myself - spent a day in Gloucestershire and South Worcestershire and we went to Upton-upon-Severn where we encountered one of those who had been affected by the flooding of that community and asked what his views were. He was utterly speechless and disappeared indoors muttering language that I have not heard for a long time. The substance of his case was that flood defences had not been able to reach Upton-upon-Severn because they were stored 23 miles say at Kidderminster and were being transported to the region as their community was being flooded yet again. Is there a lesson to be learned from that?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: There certainly is a lesson to be learned from Upton. The question of where the barriers could be stored had been the subject of considerable discussion between ourselves and the local authority and community in Upton. Upton is, as you saw, quite a difficult town because it is waterfront; that is what makes Upton so special. The size of the barriers is such that they would need a substantial building to be stored in and that was not thought to be the best solution. Under normal circumstances, where we are able to give warnings long in advance of the river rising we would have plenty of time to get the defences from Kidderminster. The fact that there was so much surface water flooding blocking the roads because of the sheer scale of the event long before the river came up meant that we could not get through even with the best support from the police and emergency services. I think there are questions about storing closer but there are also questions about how far in advance of events we put barriers up because the other thing that the barriers in Upton do is disrupt the town quite considerably and for a town that is dependent on its waterfront, having a whacking great barrier across it on a kind of prophylactic basis just in case it floods is not something that the community wants. We did in fact make the decision to deploy the Upton barriers some four hours earlier than we would normally do because we were aware that there was severe rainfall coming. That, in retrospect, was not early enough but even had we got the Upton barriers up it would not have stopped the town from flooding because the floods would have overwhelmed the barriers.

Q45 David Taylor: To paraphrase what you have just said, it was something of a leaden footed reaction by the Agency to the needs in Upton which led to an unnecessary flooding of that town.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: No, we do not accept that at all. We believe we acted in advance of our normal trigger point for taking the barriers to Upton and that even if we had been able to get through we would not have been able to save the town from flooding. I think there are issues for the future that may give more reassurance to the people of Upton, but faced with a flood of the nature of the one that we had no amount of temporary barriers would have saved it.

Q46 David Taylor: How long does it take to erect and deploy in Upton, do you know?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Quite a number of hours. We would normally set off at the trigger point that would allow us plenty of time to get the barriers up successfully before any flooding risk occurred. Because of the fact that the roads between us and Upton were full of water as a result of surface water flooding and in spite of the fact that we set off early - considerably earlier than we would do under normal circumstances - we were just unable to get through in company with a very large number of folk who were stuck as a result of the same flash flooding.

Q47 David Taylor: You referred to the overwhelming and the overtopping of the flood defences. Presumably that caused some damage to them. Do you have any assessment at this point of the cost of the damage that was done to flood defences by that overwhelming and overtopping and will that cause you unsustainable pressures within your budget?

Dr King: Specifically Upton?

Q48 David Taylor: In general.

Dr King: Across the country?

Q49 David Taylor: Yes. You have had damage to your flood defences caused by the fact that they did not fail but they were just overwhelmed by the volumes they were trying to handle.

Dr King: The total cost for us managing the flooding, including the damages to the defences, is in the order of £20 million.

Q50 David Taylor: The damage was not £20 million but it is included within that £20 million.

Dr King: Yes, it is included within that £20 million.

Q51 Mr Gray: I do not think anybody would disagree with your broad thesis at the beginning of your evidence that these were exceptional circumstances and extraordinarily heavy rain which, certainly in urban areas, caused surface water flooding. Would you accept that there might be slightly different circumstances in some rural areas less badly affected perhaps - one thinks of my own constituency in Wiltshire - where there was severe flooding of quite a different nature and quite a different type to what we saw in Gloucestershire. If you accept that, do you accept what a number of people who have given evidence to us have said that it was not only to do with exceptional rainfall in those areas, it was actually to do with lack of maintenance of the waterways and rivers in rural areas. I saw myself in East Tiverton, just outside Chippenham where the Avon flooded because of the lack of activities of the authorities. One or two parish councils just south of Gloucester said the same thing. The rivers had not been dredged, there was a lack of maintenance, there was blockage. The Environment Agency was not performing as it should have been in previous years and that caused the flooding in those rural areas.

Mr Rooke: We have only got so much money that we can spend on flood risk management and so we have to prioritise. Most of our money goes into urban areas because that gives the greatest return on the investment to the tax payer. We do a considerable amount of work still within rural areas to protect rural areas and to protect agricultural areas. However, we have to prioritise and in prioritising we choose the most appropriate maintenance. We have cut back in some areas on some of our maintenance activities; in other areas we are still carrying out maintenance activity that we have carried out for a number of years. So people vary across the country on this risk based approach where we look at our high risk, our medium risk and our low risk systems and we make the investments accordingly. There will be variations across the country but I can assure the Committee that we still spend some £3 million a year on dredging; we are still spending some £8 million a year on cutting weed and we are still spending a lot of money on grass cutting, tree removal and that type of activity. There is a lot of activity going on. In terms of our risk based approach the bulk of it now goes into urban areas.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Could I just comment before we move on from that point. There are two issues, one is that it was complicated by the fact that this was the height of summer which is probably the worst time to have a flood like this because there is at that stage the biggest amount of weed growth in rivers and therefore they are less able to carry away water. Under normal circumstances where the flooding season is the winter, by the time our maintenance programmes have been carried out at the back end of the summer and into the autumn we are ready we are ready for the rain as it were. However, this of course was a summer flood. The second point I want to make is the sort of cleanliness is not next to godliness point. There was a tradition in flood risk management in the past that routine bank clearing, tree clearing and dredging were carried out almost as an act of faith, that it was just what flood risk engineers did. Now with our risk based approach we do look at where the £13 million or so that we spend on dredging and bank maintenance is best spent to make sure that it is focussed on reducing flood risk. Probably the biggest mail box following the flood has been about clearance of obstruction, weed clearance, bank maintenance and generally the belief that if only we had dredged the rivers harder the water would have been able to run away more quickly. We do not believe that that is the case. In many cases dredging systems simply erodes banks, it moves water further down stream and floods urban areas more quickly and very often simply corrects itself very rapidly. If a river wants to silt up it will silt up.

Q52 Mr Gray: There is a slight difference between what you have said and what David Rooke said a moment ago. He said, "We do our best within the resources available to us", the implication being that presumably if there were more resources more would be done. What you are now saying is that even if you had more resources you would not want to do it.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think there is a middle course. The reality is that if we had more we would probably do more that was effective in reducing risk; in some of the lower risk systems we could do a bit more. However, I do not think we want to go back to the routine dredging and clearing that was carried out as an act of faith in the past because it is simply not good value for public money.

Q53 Mr Gray: You have been given a strategic overview of coastal flooding and you are bidding for strategic view of inland flooding as well. For those of us concerned about rural areas, is there not a risk that if you do that you are becoming increasingly strategic, your focus on urban areas will become worse and your interest in rural matters - of key concerns to MPs such as myself - will become less.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I hope not but there does need, I think, to be a discussion and a policy decision made at government level about just exactly what the balance between urban and rural needs to be. At the moment with the risk based approach that we take and the cost effectiveness approach that we take it will automatically mean that the majority of funding goes towards urban areas. If, as a nation, we want to make sure that the rural areas also get a fair whack it may well mean that there needs to be a policy decision that that is the case. At the moment we have an agreed process for assessing priorities under a process whereby we assess the cost effectiveness of individual interventions. If that is to change we would need that to be a government policy decision and indeed a treasury policy decision because much of the assessment that we do is blessed in terms of the rules by the Treasury.

Q54 Mr Gray: Can you talk us through how you would see this strategic overview role with regards to inland flooding actually working in the event of another very severe event of the kind we saw in the summer happening again? What would be different?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Just before I leave the last point, I should advise the Committee that the Public Accounts Committee gave us a very bad time because they felt we focussed too much on protecting what they called empty fields, ie the rural stuff.

Q55 Chairman: Can we just be clear that the criteria which currently determine how you assess and respond to risk is something which is, in terms of history, agreed between the Agency and the Government or did the Government say, "We have looked at it, these are the ground rules, now you guys carry out a policy"?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I do not quite know how to respond to that one. Certainly the processes by which we choose priorities are agreed with Defra.

Dr King: There is clear government stated policy that the Agency, in carrying out maintenance, should move away from maintaining uneconomic sea walls and there is the expectation that that same approach should apply to inland. If it is about reducing risk and best economic return then that automatically guides you towards more urban interventions than rural.

Q56 Chairman: I just want to pursue this question of the definition of risk because if you talk to the people in rural Britain who have been affected by the recent flooding, in the light of what you have just said they might feel a bit let down that somehow the risks that they, as individuals face, seem to have been downgraded in some way in relation to the higher score which is put to dealing with risk in an urban situation. I suppose the question we ask, given what has happened, is: does there need to be a re-assessment of relative risks in determining how the resources ultimately are to be used to deal with the results of potentially more extreme weather conditions? Is that a fair assessment of the way the debate at least has to go?

Dr King: At the moment we would define risk as the probability times the consequence and the consequence would be a measure of what is the risk to life and property, so the greater number of people and the greater economic value will be in urban areas. As Barbara has pointed out perhaps there should be a debate following this: what is the value we put on agricultural land?

Q57 Chairman: You used the word "should", are you going to be specifically asking the ministers in Defra for clarification of the risk criteria which underpin the work that you do in the light of these recent events? You have raised some interesting questions about it but are you going to specifically say to Defra ministers: "We would like you to review the instructions you have given us on these relative risk issues?"

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I do not think we would. Unless there was hugely more funding provided I still think that, as a tax payer apart from being Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, at the moment we still have a very large number of densely populated communities with big economic value at stake.

Q58 Chairman: You are almost saying, "I am not going to ask the question because I know I do not have the resources to deal with a possible change in the answer". Do you not think that your job is to pose the difficult question to ministers and then make it quite clear who bears the responsibility if ministers say, "No, the risk scenario stays where it is". At least the ball is firmly in somebody's court as opposed to bouncing backwards and forwards between you.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I am sure that the many, many people who have been in contact with us and indeed with you about the issue of protection for rural areas, particularly for agricultural land, will be making that point in spades to ministers.

Q59 Mr Drew: Can we just turn this on its head because obviously in the various reports we have done one of the points that we have been arguing is that there should be a policy of managed flooding, that we should be recognising that some land will flood on some occasions. We have argued very clearly that people who face that threat, when it happens, should be compensated, but also recognising that this is something that is going to be increasingly happening we should be using the single farm payment to compensate those people for the risk as well as the reality. Where have we got to with this? You seem to be backing away from that and I do not understand that. I thought we were all as one saying that this was a very sensible way to take forward how we could manage that flooding risk.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Whenever we are putting forward a flood risk management scheme we will look at the options of using land for flood storage as an option and if it is a sensible option and gives us a good return on investment we will deploy that. For example, Lincoln has two major flood storage areas round it which are operated at times of flood and indeed saved Lincoln this time round. They were the result of an agreement with farmers 14 or 15 years ago to do so and they were compensated for that. Indeed, in terms of issues around the coast we have also got a number of areas where we have agreements about using agricultural land and we will continue to do that, but I think that is a different issue from farmland flooding fortuitously or as a result of heavy rainfall where we do not have a proposition that that land is specifically there for flood alleviation. I think one of the things we do need to get better research on is the concept of using land as a sponge to hold water back in order to reduce flood risk further down the catchments. There is a lot of support for that but there is not, as yet, much research evidence for what the possible is. There are some groups going around saying that if we had simply got land management up the catchments better we would not have these floods. That is clearly not true. It may make a contribution and we need to assess what its contribution is, but it is not the panacea, particularly in the case of these flash floods where quite frankly what was happening in the catchment was immaterial to what was going on in Sheffield or Hull or wherever. There are a number of areas where the whole issue of land management needs to be properly evaluated but I do not think we should be using single farm payment as a kind of recompense system for flooding of farm land in general. I think the single farm payment needs to be targeted at where we really believe it is going to make a significant flood reduction impact and these payments that we make from our flood risk management budget to use farm land in a very specific way need to be absolutely because they are the best option for a particular flood risk problem.

Q60 David Taylor: A moment or two ago you said that the Agency needed hugely increased resources to be able to respond to flood risk management in a way which would satisfy more people. I think that is what you said.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: What I meant was that you would have to have an awful lot of money around in the flood risk management system to be able to do everything in the rural areas that people ideally want us to do. We think that the amount of funding that has come into flood risk management which has doubled since 1997 is going in the right direction and the £200 million that the prime minister announced in the middle of the floods is extremely beneficial.

Q61 David Taylor: Your budget for flood risk management in this year, 2007/08, is £600 million and the Secretary of State for Environment, Rood and Rural Affairs today announced in a written answer that that would go up to £650 million next year, £700 million - both leaps of about eight per cent - in the year 2009/10 and in 2010/11 it will go up £100 million to £800 million. They seem very substantial increases with the backdrop that we heard announced yesterday by the chancellor. They are hugely increased resources are they not? Does that mean that the future is set fair to be able to respond to some of the concerns my colleague James Gray referred to?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We are very pleased with the way in which funding has increased over each of the spend reviews and we are very pleased about getting additional funding for the next three years and also to see what is going to come in year one and two as well as year three because we need to get planning to use that money. However, we do not think it is the end of the road by any means. This will allow us to tackle the backlog of flood defence schemes that have been waiting for communities that are inadequately defended, for example Leeds which is not defended particularly at the moment and is a huge economic asset for the nation if it went under. It will allow us to improve the amount of maintenance we do on our high risk and medium risk assets to make sure they are all up to the standard that they ought to be, but there are still pressures for the future both in terms of creating new assets and in maintaining the growing body of assets, in coping with the fact that climate change is going to mean that we need to increase the standard of protection in many of our flood defence systems. If we take the Thames barrier, for example, and the whole Thames Estuary system, we could be looking at several billion required to invest in bringing that up to scratch for climate change. Of course we have more properties being built as a result of the development boom, all of which are going to require some flood risk assessment if not flood defences. We think that the assessments that were made by the Foresight study which said that we should be aiming for a billion pounds a year investment by 2015 are in fact in the right ball park and we would want the following spending review (the one after this) to continue that upward trajectory of investment. I do not think it is Christmas and birthday yet; it is good but it is not the end of the road.

Q62 Mr Williams: Those of us who have contacted the Environment Agency from time to time about the maintenance of water courses have been told that the Environment Agency responsibility is only for main water courses. Is that an arbitrary decision that has been taken by the Environment Agency or does that rest in legislation?

Mr Rooke: It is written in legislation and we have only got powers to do works on what are called main rivers. A main river is a river that is marked on a map that has been approved by the secretary of state.

Q63 Mr Williams: Where do we see those maps?

Mr Rooke: They are available on the Defra website and they are also available in our offices.

Q64 Mr Williams: It does seem to me that a lot of responsibility for maintaining water courses does rest with private individuals and it is not very encouraging for those private individuals to be involved in very expensive work if they see that the water courses that they are responsible for which flow into the water courses that the Environment Agency are responsible for are not going to be maintained in a way that is thought to be acceptable. I am not promoting scouring out water courses but as Baroness Young said there is a middle way here and the Environment Agency have a responsibility to play their part in what is a private/public responsibility.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I would agree and where we have internal drainage boards that represent particularly agricultural riparian owners of these smaller water courses, we do have quite an intense relationship about how the funding that they provide to us for carriage of water away from their area most effectively works. I am sure you have had a submission from the Association of Drainage Authorities on that one. Where it is more complicated is where there is no internal drainage board and where we are dealing with a very large number of riparian owners and that becomes extremely complicated. It may well be that there needs to be this debate about what the relative priorities between urban and rural are. As I said, I would not want us to get back to a point where we were simply carrying out maintenance for maintenance sake rather than truly reducing flood risk.

Q65 Lynne Jones: You were referring earlier to the need for mapping and modelling of urban drainage systems and you said this would be extremely expensive and you started talking about concentrating on hot spots. Could you perhaps elaborate further on what is exactly a workable risk based methodology for characterising urban flood risk that you envisage?

Mr Rooke: That is a piece of work that we would want to take forward once we have the green light from government in terms of giving us the overview on urban flooding. There is some work that Defra is undertaking with the Met Office that we are involved with on characterisation of extreme flood events, the types of rainfall, and there is various work being done by some of the universities and some local authorities. I think in Scotland Glasgow is a good example of where there was urban flooding some years ago and the local authority, with loads of other partners, have got together to come up with solutions. At the urban level a solution can be down to what height is a particular kerb on a road, what green spaces can be used to store water or to channel water if the sewers cannot take it, so it does get very local. In terms of our ambition were we to be given this England overview, working with the Met Office we would be able to forecast where these so called pluvial events - as opposed to fluvial being rivers - would take place and provide a warning for that, and to be able to provide a mapping of those areas so that you could go onto our website where you can at the moment see whether your house is on the floodplain or not, you would be able to go onto our website and see what risks there were from surface water flooding. Then the local authorities, water companies, the Highway Agency and ourselves involved in urban areas would again be working together under our leadership to provide solutions.

Q66 Lynne Jones: How feasible is such an approach in a very widespread manner? What input does the insurance industry have into this work because they have their own mapping system for flood risk?

Mr Rooke: We want to work with the insurance industry as we do at the moment. We provide information to the insurance industry that is also available to the public on our website. We provide that to the insurance industry we envisage that we would do the same, but this will need powers from government; it will need funding from government to enable us to put in place all this new technology and there will be some groundbreaking stuff. It is done in some other parts of the world and we want to learn from that.

Q67 Lynne Jones: Which other parts of the world?

Mr Rooke: Certainly parts of Europe where they are taking forward urban flooding and experiencing urban floods. Also, interestingly (Barbara had an e-mail from a company the other day on this in terms of intense, heavy rainfall) in parts of the Middle East.

Q68 Lynne Jones: What about individual responsibility? A lot of people are concreting over their gardens, even their back gardens; should there be some control over this?

Mr Rooke: There is an interesting statistic; we can give you a note on it in terms of the number of gardens that have been paved over in London over the last five years and it will be having a significant impact in terms of water no longer being able to get into the ground and be stored in the ground and is running straight off into sewers. We are advocating what we call sustainable urban drainage systems such that where there are new developments taking place we would want them to drain through SUDS before they come into a sewer system or before they come into a river system such that you would try to replicate the run off had it still been agricultural land.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Could I just comment on the overview role because I think what David has described by way of mapping, forecasting and warning is ambitious. I do not know whether it is doable quite frankly. I think technically you could do it ultimately, but whether as a nation we are able to afford to do that is a moot point. The second issue for me is in terms of actually taking action to make sure that urban drainage and sewerage systems are actually as flood proof as possible and there it has to be the local authority in the lead coordinating the local partners, including us, using our information but very much taking the lead because they are the people who are the planning authority, they are sometimes the highways authority, they are certainly in touch with developers and re-developers. Just looking at the task, as it were, of re-draining our cities I do not think we are going to see a scale of investment that would allow that to happen wholesale. I suspect that what we need to press for is first of all to make sure that no new development goes ahead with inadequate drainage and sewerage and we have some powers under PPS25 in that, and secondly to make sure that re-development re-develops the sewerage and drainage systems as well as the actual properties themselves. Thirdly, focussing on the priorities - the hot spots - where traditionally we know there have been problems. If we can make fast progress in solving those three priorities the remainder of urban drainage systems can come along behind that.

Q69 Chairman: You have given us the Barbara Young "if we can make progress" shopping list, have you specifically made formal recommendation to Defra that those items be actioned?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: All the policy proposals and changes that we have outlined in our evidence have of course gone to Defra as well.

Q70 Chairman: Specifically to ask local authorities to start, for example, a scoping study on the capability of their own drainage systems to cope with the types of event that we have been discussing. Have you asked for that to be done?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We know that some local authorities that were involved in the flooding this year are now beginning to look at that as an issue, but Defra's position at the moment is, having consulted on the role that we should have in overview, they want to wait until they get the Michael Pitt recommendations before they work out, as it were, what the system will look like so that it is clear what our responsibility would be and what the local authority's responsibility would be.

Q71 Chairman: Do local authorities have the resources and expertise to do that work?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I do not think at the moment anybody really has the resources and expertise to do that work. The few places we have done it are beginning to develop that expertise and the 15 pilots sponsored by Defra on urban drainage and urban surface water issues are beginning to develop track record in that so it can be spread more widely.

Q72 Mr Gray: Why do we not just have one major agency for flooding? What is wrong with that?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: There have been two sorts of one-stop shop proposed really and I think there is a third emerging. One is a kind of emergency floods agency that does everything from predicting the weather down to restoring individual houses and sorting out benefits for people which I think is clearly not on because the numbers of different functions that need to be included in that need to be done by the specialist folk. What you need is good coordination and through the Cabinet Office and subsequently through BRR the coordination of that in terms of handling the emergency and then recovery post-emergency is already the responsibility for coordination of these two elements of an event are already fairly clear. Then there is the proposition that we have a sort of single floods agency that all our floods responsibilities are taken off into a separate agency. I think there are two concerns about that, one is in the urban setting, like it or not, the water companies, the local authorities, the Highways Agency and a number of individual owners and developers will have to be involved so it is never going to be a kind of single bullet. The other issue is, as this Committee well knows, the integration of management of water is extremely important and rivers are not just about floods, they are also about water resource, water supply, water quality; they are about the wide diversity of our rivers and the wetlands and indeed the Water Framework Directive brings together the management of land with the management of water bodies. Our view is that our integrated role which takes land, air and water together and particularly takes an integrated approach to the management of our rivers and river basins, is a very important one. We have had that role in the UK - not the Environment Agency but its predecessors - for several tens of years. Europe as a whole is only coming late to that as a proposition. Indeed, many countries in Europe are having to adopt a much more integrated approach than they have had previously. We believe it would be a backward step for the environment and for flood risk if the rivers were being managed for flood risk by one body but managed for all sorts of other purposes by another body. The third little bit of tittle-tattle that is coming out of the system at the moment is whether you need somehow to split off the regulatory role of the Environment Agency and the doing role of the Environment Agency. Our view is that we are not hugely a regulator in this although obviously if we had an overview role in an urban setting we might be conveniently put in the box of being a regulator, but we do not think that is the role that we want in the urban setting. The role that we want in the urban setting is to set a framework to provide advice, to provide tools, to provide expertise on a national basis that the local authorities can then take forward.

Q73 David Taylor: One of my most vivid memories of that day in Gloucestershire is when we were on the minibus leaving the badly hit town of Tewkesbury. We were splashing along and we saw the yellow developers sign to the Riverview Development or something like that. You said a moment or two ago that you doubted whether or not the £800 million in 2010/11 would be sufficient to meet the pressures placed on you for flood defences. You explained that a little by saying in the light of developments that will take place between now and then. Do you think you have the powers to influence the building of properties on the floodplains? Are they adequate? Are you trying them out? Is your eye on the ball on this one?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Perhaps I could ask David to respond on the issue of development and control, but you are obviously right. The one that I dine out on is Swan Pool in Lincoln where there is a whacking great proposal to develop in the floodplain. There is a bit of a clue in the name, if it is called Swan Pool and if you are living in a house in the middle if it you might not want it to be a swan pool. I think there are real issues about development on the floodplain that still exist but David will tell you more about that.

Dr King: I think I would say that we are not where we would like to be in terms of development control but having said that there has been a significant tightening and improvement of the legislation under PPS25. Our most recent analysis is for the period April 2006 to March 2007 which was under the old PPG 25. If you look at performance there we still had 13 major cases that went against the Agency's advice. We had five appealed decisions which were determined contrary to our advice and something like 63 per cent of our objections were because there were inadequate flood risk assessments carried out. In December last year we had a change in the legislation which was to PPS25. That has improved things in a number of ways. Firstly the Agency is a statutory consultee. Secondly, if a local authority is now minded to go against our advice there is the power of direction for us to request call in first to the government office and then to the secretary of state. Thirdly, in terms of the actual guidance of steering development away from high risk areas, it is a lot clearer and a lot tighter than previously.

Q74 David Taylor: Collectively you feel you probably do not have the authority necessary to adequately control.

Dr King: I think the PPS25 is actually a good piece of legislation. What remains to be tested is how rigorously it is applied. We are still in the first year of that so it is difficult to say. I think PPS25 is a big step forward.

Q75 Mr Cox: Baroness Young, you said it yourself I think but what has been striking me as I have been listening to your evidence and those of your colleagues, is that it seems to me, summing up your evidence, one conclusion could be that you are an institution that has only partial responsibility for the overall problem, that is too weak to influence government agencies and local authorities to take appropriate pre-emptive action. Almost on every occasion when a problem is confronted to you by a question you answer that you either do not have the power or the legislation is not in place or it is a very complex problem. What we need, do you not agree, is an agency that has the power to take a real lead in this and provide genuine leadership which I think was the perception that people had at the time of these floods, that there was an absence of some single directing body that could take a lead with the urgency required to address the problems. Surely what we need is either a flood defence agency with genuine powers to compel authorities, even possibly private individuals, to take the action that is required if we are going to be faced with a serious succession of these floods, or your own Agency needs to be given the powers to deal with these problems.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: First of all if I can take the issue of the many agencies involved, I think it is a complicated picture and it is distressingly complicated not only for those of us who have to operate within it but also for the public in understanding. I am not sure that you can magic that one away by a single agency because the reality is that it would have to operate by getting other agencies to do things and governments are notoriously anxious when faced with the prospect, for example, of laying costly duties on local authorities for example but at the dictate of a government agency. I think there will continue to need to be an agreement between parts of government about who does what and a tasking down governmental/departmental lines of individual bits of government machinery.

Q76 Mr Cox: You do not have the responsibility for so many aspects of the overall problem, do you?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: If this had been a winter flood I think you would have seen ample examples of leadership, if this had been a flood that resulted in rivers rising and flooding being primarily from the systems for which we are responsible, ie the rivers or on the coast. We have revolutionised our approach to flood risk management over the last ten years and indeed I think it is a sign of confidence in what we have been trying to do that the Government has given us substantial additional funding on every occasion when the spending review came round. There is a very, very confused set of responsibilities and accountabilities in the surface water urban area and that is becoming more pressing as a result of climate change so I do believe that one of the things that must come out of the various reviews following these sets of floods is a greater clarity about what government cites, about what the Environment Agency's role is and about what the role of local authorities and providers of critical infrastructure are.

Q77 Mr Cox: Planning is an example, is it not? I hear what you say about the progress made in PPS25 but as you rightly point out there are still major developments going ahead in spite of your objections. Some developments are going ahead, certainly in my own patch in Devon, without significant Environment Agency involvement despite them being on floodplains (these may be smaller developments). What can be done in your view to improve your ability to get local authorities to heed the need to take these issues seriously when it comes to planning approvals?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think there are a number of things we have already done. The annual reports we produce on local authority performance have had an impact. We are seeing an improvement in the performance of local authorities and PPS25 will help with that. I think the current floods will have woken up a few local authorities to the fact that building on the floodplain against our advice is not good news. The insurance industry we would like to flex more muscle but it is quite nervous of that. The insurance industry does point out that development on a floodplain against our advice will mean that insurance will only be achievable at very high premium but that is not to say they are not prepared to insure which would be the most successful way of persuading local authorities.

Dr King: PPS25 is less than one year old so I think we need to have the opportunity to test it. I would just reiterate that it is significantly stronger than PPG25 in that we are now a statutory consultee, local authorities have to consult us and we do have the power to request flooding direction. I think it is significantly stronger and we will see at the end of this year how things have panned out.

Q78 Lynne Jones: I would like to come back in here about planning guidance. There was recently a consultation on permitted development. I want to go back to the point I was raising earlier about the propensity for people to concrete over gardens which I think is having a significant effect. Apparently the consultants recommended that there should be a requirement for planning permission if more than 50 per cent of the garden was being concreted or tarmacked or covered over and yet the Government did not include that in the consultation paper. Is this something you think ought to be looked at because it is happening all over the place?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Certainly we believe there needs to be an assessment of the permitted development rights of concrete. The figure that David referred to was 22 parks' worth of concreting of front gardens alone in London as assessed by the mayor.

Q79 Lynne Jones: This is not going to be covered by the planning guidance for new developments and it would be a very simple thing for the Government to do which might help some of the problems that we have been talking about.

Dr King: The other point worth making is that if people are concreting over for parking or whatever there are other ways of doing this using gravel or membranes or porous pavements that is as effective but at the same time allows the water to go through.

Q80 Mr Cox: As my colleague says, it is not just concreting over gardens, it is of course building in gardens which is happening on a massive scale now. That is what I meant, in fact, where in my own patch we are seeing a lot of small developments going ahead often in green spaces within urban areas - market towns, coastal towns and so on - without interaction or involvement of the Environment Agency but which manifestly cumulatively are going to have an effect on the ability of the land to soak up the water and could cause a real problem. What are we to do about that unseen and hidden problem? You are dealing, I know, with several thousand a year and are objecting to them (4000 I think in 2005/06) but of course that is a fraction of the applications that are going forward to use up green spaces and gardens and other pieces of land inside urban areas. Cumulatively this is going to become a massive problem; in my own patch it is a serious problem. What can we do about that? PPS25 is not really dealing with that, is it?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think this is one of the areas where the whole question of risk assessment in the urban setting is going to be crucial. David may want to talk about the hierarchy of plans and strategies that we envisage under a system that would mean that eventually carrying out the flood risk assessment for a local authority for its own areas would mean that they could pinpoint where some of these issues were actually creating flood risk and then develop the strategies to include that within their flood risk assessment and where there were flood risks there should be a requirement on developers to undertake the risk assessments and submit those with their planning applications.

Q81 Mr Cox: You agree with me that the building on gardens which we are seeing on an increasing scale is a potential problem. You are nodding; is that right, Baroness Young?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think there are number of problems associated with it. One is that if it is in a flood plain and it is diminishing the amount of flood storage, that is an issue. The second is that if it is increasing the amount of concrete and therefore the run-off issues. There are a number of things we would be concerned about. David may want to say more about the way in which we would plan for that in the future.

Dr King: I think there are a number of things that could be done. We would like to see the mandating of sustainable urban drainage in new development and also there is currently a right to connect to a public sewer and we think that again should be modified and that sustainable urban drainage should be considered part of that, so there are things that you can strengthen and encourage in planning law. PPS25 does indicate that SUDS should be considered but that needs to be strengthened.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Could I just comment briefly on other things to do with development? We would be particularly keen to see a change to the building regulations to improve the flood resilience of properties and also to encourage the insurers to reinstate properties post-floods to a level of resilience rather than the level that they were before the flood occurred.

Q82 Mr Cox: Can you provide some examples of the kinds of resistance and resilience requirements you would like to see in the building regulations?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: The sorts of things that we would be envisaging are water resistant plaster, solid floorings rather than sprung flooring, electricity supply being brought in at a higher level rather than at ground floor level and also simply appliable gadgets to block airbricks and block doors and entry points. The estimate is that the average cost to a property after flooding is about £26,000 and that could be brought down to single figures with the right sorts of resilience measures providing the flood is not so huge that you are up to the top of the first floor which is clearly a different kettle of fish. Where the ingress of water would be comparatively low these simple resilience techniques could make a huge difference to the bill being faced by householders and indeed by the insurance industry in the country as a whole.

Q83 Mr Cox: How would you enact them?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Building regs.

Q84 Mr Cox: Applicable to high risk areas? Applicable to all new buildings? How would you do it?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: To be frank I think these days with the surface water drainage issue and the flash flood issue, it may well be that we simply have to recognise that you can flood on top of a hill these days which is not the traditional approach we have had which is very much to focus on the floodplains. I do think there are issues of simple, more resilience that we could look at that might be cost effective generally. Certainly some of the more heroic stuff would only be appropriate in areas of high risk. Personally I would like to see the kitchen manufacturers making a non-exploding kitchen. At the moment most of the kitchens that are made from chipboard if you add water they simply turn into grey goo quite quickly.

Q85 Chairman: We have had an indication now of the way in which money will flow to the flood defence budget up to 2010 in the form of a parliamentary answer but the ABI came out today indicating that their £1 billion figure is something which they think ought to here now rather than later. It was a position they adopted in 2004 when this Committee did the Foresight Report. Can I ask you to respond to some evidence which came to the Committee from the Norwich Union, part of the ABI, who said the following: "At present Defra's budget for flood management is not accompanied by any clear rationale to justify allocation of flood defence resources in one area as opposed to another. The UK's flood defence budget must be spent appropriately and directly related to flood risk posed. A clear assessment of flood defence is a key element in underwriting flood risk for insurers." So place versus place, no rationale. In the same evidence they go on to be critical of your points system in determining where investment is made and they cite the following: "Under the terms of the points system that currently exists some communities such as Upton-upon-Severn and Lewes which are regularly flooded do not have flood defences in place and it is unlikely they will receive them in the future." That is a direct challenge to the fact that your points system does not deliver the flood defences when the insurance industry thinks they ought to be and in terms of giving comfort for them to maintain their cover clearly they are looking for burden sharing between government and the industry in terms of investment. Norwich Union do not think much of the current investment criteria. Can you comment on how you think this money that you now know is going to come and the phasing of it is going to be spent, and how the way you will decide that money's use stacks up against the industry's criticism?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I am rather mystified at the Norwich Union criticism because we do have a system for allocating funding that takes account of risk and increasingly prioritises our maintenance towards high and medium risk systems and provides a nationally consistent process for deciding which new flood defences and improved flood defences should go ahead. They may take issue with the points system but it is the fairest way we have at the moment. We are looking at the moment to see whether we can develop a revised prioritisation process building on the experience we have had with the points system. However, the points system does not just take how often people flood. Let me take the one I know best which is Pickering. Pickering floods regularly but we are unable to put together a flood risk management scheme that provides the right return on investment that would give it sufficient priority to go ahead. The new funding will help with that in that some of the schemes that previously were too low priority on the points system will now be able to go ahead because we have additional funding. Gradually, with that increased level of funding, we ought to be able to catch up with some of those communities where a flood risk management system is viable but is not at the moment able to get a sufficiently high priority. I am rather bemused by the Norwich Union's approach to that. Certainly there are two things underway that will also help. Our catchment flood risk management plans are a catchment based approach to look at what the risk and priorities ought to be within each catchment and we are working on a long term investment strategy looking forward 20 years over what needs to happen both by way of maintenance of the existing assets and creation of new assets to look at what the scale of that should be and therefore how we can anticipate over a longer timescale how much we are going to be able to get done with the level of investment that we currently have or a future level of investment.

Q86 Chairman: You said at the beginning of your evidence that we should be moving faster in a number of areas in responding to flooding. Does that mean that whilst you welcome the money it is still going too slowly?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We welcome the money and we will put in place measures to take rational risk based decisions about spending it. If we had more we could probably do more. If we had a million tomorrow we would have some difficulty because it does take some months or even in the case of some complicated schemes several years to put them together, to consult on them and to get planning permission. However, I do believe there needs to be an uplift for the future.

Q87 Chairman: I did a little calculation. I applied a 2.5 per cent inflation rate to the current £600 million budget and by the time I got to 2010 the actual net extra that this money worked out was £115 million above what you need to inflation proof current spending proposals. It does not sound like a lot of money to me.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: In fact the 2.5 per cent inflation rate is probably inadequate because construction costs are going up much more dramatically.

Q88 Chairman: So the actual net extra by the time we get to 2010 is actually quite small really.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes, but that has been offset by the fact that as we get bigger programmes and as we get better at the risk based approach and at the work we do with our contractor partners, we are able to get better efficiency from the money we have so we are improving our efficiency by about £15 million annually on the current budget so some of that inflation is offset by our improved efficiency.

Q89 Dan Rogerson: I am trying to get to grips with the size of the task that is there. Obviously as you said there are schemes which would be nice to do if you had the resources to do it, but in terms of those that are there and ready to go subject to funding what would be the total cost in today's prices of those sorts of schemes, not those that hypothetically we might do but those which are drawn up and ready to go?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We try not to do that because we know from bitter experience if we put a scheme in place and consult on it widely and have it ready to go and then the money is not available, (a) the scheme ages quite rapidly, and (b) it raises expectations within local communities which are then dashed and it is very hard for them. What we are trying to do now is in fact to anticipate over a longer period what we believe the basic funding will be so that we can get moving on schemes that we know will go ahead and then use any additional funding to accelerate that pace, but we do not want to have a huge backlog of schemes stacked up ready to go because it is really hard on people to say that we know we can do this for you but we are not going to be able to do it and we do not know when we are going to be able to do it. We want to have those schemes in place so that we can say to people that we have this scheme, we know we can do it for you and we will do it in 2012 or 2009 or 20-whatever.

Q90 Dan Rogerson: In my constituency there was a scheme that was in that particular bracket, it was doable but because of the points system other schemes were higher up the priority order. There must be a point at which a scheme moves from being a "Yes, we could to something in this area" to "Yes, we could do something, we know what it is and this is how much it would cost". You have to feed it into your points system and go through that process so you may not be consulting on it publicly but there must be a batch of schemes that are at the moment beyond funding. I would like to get a picture of how big that is.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We did a piece of work to look at how long with the level of funding we were anticipating it would take us to work through the schemes that we have got to a point where we know we can do them but I cannot remember what the timescale was but it was comparatively short. We have not backed up a huge backlog to the point where they are all ready to go and buildable. Something like four years I think.

Q91 Dan Rogerson: You said that the existing schemes by and large worked quite well. Of that money, extra money being made available, how much of that would need to go to deal with those schemes where they did not quite work as they should have done?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Sorry, I do not quite understand the question.

Q92 Dan Rogerson: Where schemes have failed in some ways or not failed but you have looked at the extremity of the event and because of climate change you think those defences might need to be re-visited, how much of that budget would need to go to make those schemes future-proof rather than looking at new schemes?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: That is where our long term investment strategy is going to be really important. What we are looking at there is what is going to happen in the next 20 years, including the impact of climate change and including what we need to do by way of maintenance and improvement of schemes. Also we have been modelling what would happen in terms of investment if the decision was made as a nation that we wanted to go to a higher or lower standard of protection. However, we are long way from having completed that work.

Q93 Lynne Jones: Does your points system, which is driven by economic impact, favour affluent areas as suggested by the Institute of Civil Engineers?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We do not think it does. It has social and environmental points in it as well as economic, but the economic ones tend to be quite strong. One of the things we are doing as a result of the work we are doing on looking at alternative ways of prioritising is to see whether in fact there needs to be an adjustment of the relationship between the environmental, the social and the economic.

Q94 Lynne Jones: So there could be something in it then?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: It favours property but it also has social issues attached to it. One of the things we are very anxious about is not to penalise people at high risk of flood for whom it is more devastating than if you are rich. If you are rich and you lose stuff and you are insured you buy some more, you get the insurance company in. If you are poor like we saw in Hull and places like that and you have no insurance and you lose everything, it is devastating.

Q95 Mr Drew: Going back to critical infrastructure, in your evidence to us you identified that 57 per cent of water and sewage and treatment works are in flood risk areas. I was not totally clear earlier whether you would be asking for additional powers or indeed you would take on more duties to really say that somebody has to do something about this. I know David King did say, "Look, sorry, that is up to the individual companies and so on" but after what we have learned from Gloucestershire or what is likely to come out in the report, somebody has to do much more in this area. A final area really is, if you were asked to take it on what would you want as your bottom line in terms of the support and the authority to be able to deal with this?

Dr King: There is a way forward and there is the opportunity with the draft Climate Change Bill and what we would advocate is that there should be a duty on those operators to consider adaptation.

Q96 Mr Drew: Do you not want a power yourself?

Dr King: No.

Q97 Mr Drew: Why not?

Dr King: At the end of the day it will be the operators of those critical infrastructures that will have to undertake the work.

Q98 Mr Drew: That is very risky. We were talking about evacuating 550,000 from the county of Gloucestershire, that is pretty high-risk, tightrope walking work that somebody has to evaluate. Surely there must be a power that you would welcome to insist on some of these important infrastructure places being properly maintained and protected.

Dr King: The Agency would have a role in terms of provision of advice and mapping and risk but I think if you put a duty on an operator and if you make regulations you can define standards and then there is a clear responsibility on that operator to put in defences to whatever standard is decided is acceptable. We can advise on that but it is very much the operator of the infrastructure.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: We do also recognise that flood risk is a contingency that the Civil Contingencies Act is aimed at helping coordinate much as any other civil contingency. If we were going to cut across that flood risk then fine, but I think we would need to make sure that we are not in a position where umpteen different people are involved. At the moment the mechanism that government has chosen is to give people a responsibility for collaborating with local contingency fora and I believe that is the best way forward for flood risk as well as for other risks that communities are facing. We could be given a role with some installations to check their plans, but again it would require considerable resource.

Q99 David Taylor: When you say in your evidence that some of these strategic control centres and some of the regional fire control centres were said to be in floodplains and were at risk of flooding, what level did you set that risk at? Are you talking about one in a thousand, one in a hundred years or what?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Many of the figures we have been quoting are one in 75 years. We categorise by one in 75, one in 100 and one in 200.

Q100 David Taylor: So when you said "at risk of flooding" you mean a greater risk of flooding than on in 75 years.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It has been a long but useful session and you have given us a very good start to our inquiry. Can I thank you again for your written contribution and for your offer to provide further technical briefing to the Committee should it be necessary as we proceed with our inquiry. I think it is an offer that certainly some of us will want to take up. Thank you very much indeed for coming.