Examination of Witnesses (Questions 524
- 539)
WEDNESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2007
MR RICHARD
BENYON MP, RT
HON DAVID
CURRY MP, MARTIN
HORWOOD MP, MR
LAURENCE ROBERTSON
MP AND MS
ANGELA C SMITH
MP
Q524 Chairman:
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to a further evidence
session in the Committee's inquiry into flooding. Between now
and whenever this session finishes, or four o'clock when we anticipate
that there will be a vote, we are going to be taking evidence
from some of our colleagues in the House whose constituencies
were affected by flooding and who were kind enough to send in
evidence to the Committee. May I formally and for the record welcome
Richard Benyon, the Member of Parliament for Newbury, David Curry,
the Member of Parliament for Skipton and Ripon, Martin Horwood,
the Member for Cheltenham, Laurence Robertson, the Member for
Tewkesbury, and Angela C. Smith, the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough.
Colleagues, what we plan to do is to ask each one of you if you
would be kind enough to speak for, say, five minutes and give
us the benefit of your thoughts. I know that you were kind enough
to send in some written evidence, and I am sure, on both what
you have to say and on the basis of the written evidence that
you have sent in, we will then ask you some questions. In the
case of Richard, I know that you have to go in a little while,
so I am going to start with you and then just run down the table
and ask colleagues if you would be kind enough to make a short
presentation to the Committee. Richard, would you like to start?
Mr Benyon: Thank you, Chairman.
I will be very brief. My constituency experienced the worst flooding
in the south-east on 20 July. Around 2,000 houses were flooded
in my constituency. In the small unitary authority of West Berkshire,
which looks after about 144,000 people, just over two and a half
thousand homes were flooded in all. There were two distinct types
of flooding that affected this area. Firstly, there was surface
run-off, overwhelming drains and flooding into houses, and, secondly,
there was impeded flow in small chalk streams in the Berkshire
Downs which affected four or five villages in that area. Very
quickly running through the areas I would really hope that your
Committee might be able to look at, Thatcham is a town of around
20,000 people sitting in the Kennet Valley just to the east of
Newbury. A huge quantity of rain fell that day—you are all
aware of that—but it fell sodden fields to the north and
on a ridge to the north of the town, and it ran off that, down
roads, through gardens and just overwhelmed the drainage system.
There are a number of issues that arise from this: insufficient
maintenance of some drains, and the local authority are carrying
out a very detailed survey and will, hopefully, identify that.
Thames Water is an issue here in Thatcham but also in Newbury,
where I spent a lot of time on the twentieth with families who
were being flooded. The drainage system was completely unable
to cope, and I think there is an issue with companies like Thames
Water. They go in there and deal with it when there is a problem
but I do not think there is an on-going maintenance programme
which is able to help with these situations, and I might come
back to that very quickly. There is another issue relating to
soakability. We have built over our towns, we build over gardens,
we are infilling on precisely that hill I was just talking about
above Thatcham on estates that were built 15 years ago, the local
authority is being overruled on planning applications that have
been refused and we are still building in gaps. Roofs and tarmac
driveways are now adding to this problem, and I think this is
a major issue. There is also the issue about who owns the problem:
whether it is Thames Water, the local council and in one case
Network Rail is responsible for the culverts that could possibly
have blocked and caused some flooding in certain areas, and, of
course, there are local community issues. I had a school in a
village called Aldermaston that was flooded by this sort of service
run-off and 10 years ago they had suffered similar flooding and
the headline in the local paper said, "Aldermaston suffers
once in 2,500 year floods." Ten years later the same thing
has happened. We need to know how to live with these floods as
well as mitigate them. Finally, to deal with the impeded flow
issue, the Pang and the Lambourn Valleys are down and chalk stream
river systems, both SSSIs, and have management plans which are
a mystery to me, frankly. The Environment Agency requires levels
of weed growth to be left, for environmental reasons, but this,
undoubtedly, caused flooding in these villages. The local communities
on some occasions took those matters into their own hands and
cleared the river themselves, and the water level in their houses
dropped immediately. We have got to sort out with the Environment
Agency who is taking responsibility for this. If they are going
to have these environmental requirements on the whole river system,
particularly around villages such as Bucklebury, Stamford Dingley,
Eastbury and Lambourn and Great Shefford in the Lambourn Valley.
These places are where people live, these are their homes and
they have to understand that environmental factors have to be
balanced against people's needs in the houses in which they live.
I could go on and talk about my dealings with the Environment
Agency on this and what the community, particularly the community
in Bucklebury, have done, which I would urge your Committee to
look at. There is a very good website—I will give you the
details—showing a very proactive approach which involves
assessing the cause of the floods, producing a high-level design
solution and trying to implement the scheme working with partners
such as the Environment Agency and the local authority. I will
come back and answer any questions you have on those matters,
but that is a very quick gallop through a really awful experience
for thousands of people in my constituency, and there are a lot
of lessons that can be learnt and that must be learnt from these
experiences.
Q525 Chairman:
Thank you very much for giving us such a dramatic word-picture.
I think some beautiful named villages are now seared into the
parliamentary record as a result of what you have said. David.
Mr Curry: Chairman, I would like
to focus on ways in which we can accelerate the flow of funding
to schemes and the timescale for schemes, and I take as my example
the flooding in the Ripon, which sits at the confluence of three
rivers: the Ure, the Skell and the Laver. In 2000 the Ure and
the Skell flooded 43 properties—so nothing like the scale
of my colleagues but for those who live in them dramatic—and
three peaks of water passed through the village. On 14 and 15
June 2007 more than 70 millimetres of rain fell in a 12-hour period,
96 millimetres in 24 hours, which is one month's average rainfall,
and 142 millimetres in 72 hours, and this was a week before the
big floods in South Yorkshire, so we were the sort of aperitif
for the main course! Flood warnings were issued to 350 properties
out of 442 which were registered to receive warnings, but some
of them did not receive a warning because the river which was
flooded was not the river which was expected to flood at the end
of the day; so 40 properties and businesses were flooded. Then,
one week later, the big floods bit South Yorkshire, and Ripon
escaped, literally, by half a millimetre from its third flooding
experience, as the Environment Agency calls it, within seven years.
The flood frequency prediction for Ripon has moved from a 100-year
flood to a 75-year frequency, and this has lifted our priority
score from to 17.3 from 16.3, and this is the nub of the issue.
A flood relief scheme was approved in Ripon in 2004, consisting
of flood walls and an upstream dam. It has got planning permission,
it has got a cost to it—£11 million—but because
Ripon's score is only 17, it has no chance in the foreseeable
future of being carried out because the score needed to trigger
schemes is around 30 at the moment, and the score is based on
economic return—that is properties and businesses spared—some
environmental factors and the feasibility of the scheme. Ripon
now sits at number 160 in the list of Environment Agency schemes
and, of course, higher priority schemes can come in at the top,
not just at the bottom. So the people of Ripon who have had these
experiences (and some houses are still evacuated as a consequence
of it) know that there is a recognised risk, know that there is
a scheme to deal with it, know that the scheme has got planning
permission but have not got the faintest idea when it will happen.
What can we do about it? Could local contributions advance the
project? Local authority parish rates, for example, or regional
flood defence committees. Just to give you an indication of that,
the Yorkshire Regional Flood Defence Committee last year levied
the rate of 34p per Band E property per year. This yielded £518,000.
You could hold a precept at below two pounds per year for a Band
E property and still raise three million pounds. The biggest levy
in the country, just out of interest, was Wessex, at £2.92p.
But the problem is that none of this makes any difference at all
because local contributions do not influence the Environment Agency/Treasury
calculation of the priority of the scheme or the eligibility of
the scheme and, what is more, locally raised funding through council
tax or precepting authorities counts against the capping totals.
So there is not only no incentive to try to bring local funds
to address the problem, there is a positive disincentive to try
to bring local funding to address the problem. Will it change?
The answer is hopefully. The Environment Agency is intending,
from next spring, to introduce what it calls "outcome measures",
which would permit local contributions to influence the cost benefit
ratios, which themselves would trigger the public funding. So
if Ripon could "find" contributions towards its scheme,
the Environment Agency contribution would reduce, its value for
money would increase and we would stand a chance of moving up
the league table of eligibility. Ripon is the second oldest city
in the country, but it is still a parish council constitutionally.
It does not have the resources to make more than a token contribution.
The yield of 1p on a Band D property in Ripon is the magnificent
sum of £65.92, and so you would have to be pretty heroic
to raise the sort of sums which would make a meaning, but larger
conurbations could certainly raise significantly more funds from
a relatively modest increase in the council tax. So, we do need
local funding which is raised by councils or by precepting bodies
(and the regional flood relief agencies are also precepting bodies);
they must fall outside capping purposes for recognised defence
schemes for which planning permission has been obtained, which
would limit the eligibility to schemes which are capable and ready
to be taken forward immediately. So you could envisage a package
of contributions being put together, something from the local
council, something from the regional flood defence committees
and perhaps use a business improvement district mechanism to raise
funds from business to deal with specific schemes. That would
increase the value for money, it would improve the score and it
would be for schemes approved and with planning permission. We
have been flooded twice in seven years and, as I said, escaped
a third time by a millimetre and yet there is no prospect of the
present scheme being implemented that I can see in the immediate
foreseeable future, unless we can tap new forces of funding which
both lower the Environment Agency cost and improve its scores.
Even in areas which could not lever in funds themselves readily,
the fact that other areas might be able to do so would (a) help
them and (b) would help us in that it would get schemes accomplished
higher up the league table from us and give us a better chance
of getting our scheme done. So, I hope, Chairman, you will find,
by the constructive contributions, possible ways in which we might
be able to accelerate funding into the schemes, not only for those
who are relatively precept rich, as it were, but for other areas
well.
Q526 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. I was interested that you identify
that the magic number in this case was 30 and not 42, as in the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Mr Curry: That comes from my local
environment. I contacted my local Environment Agency offices in
preparing this and that is the number they gave me.
Q527 Chairman:
Excellent. Thank you very much indeed for that very positive contribution.
Martin.
Martin Horwood: Cheltenham is,
I suppose, a little different from some of the other places that
you will have seen on the TV in Gloucestershire, because we are
actually on relatively high ground. We are just nestling beneath
the Cotswold Hills. It is very scenic, but it meant that there
was a crescent of hills around the town, all of which fed flood
water into the town; so we had flash flooding and surface water
flooding but we did not have the kind of scenic standing water
for reporters to stand in while they did their reports. We were
flooded twice. On 24 June, the Environment Agency tells me, we
had a once-in-80-year flood event. On 20 July we had, variously
estimated at a once-in-120 years to once-in-330 years. Broadly
speaking, we had two and a half months' rainfall in just over
a day, and that was an enormous quantity. It was above the specification
of the other interesting feature of Cheltenham, which is our brand
new £20 million flood alleviation scheme, courtesy of the
Environment Agency. That was only designed to cope with a once-in-100-year
flood, so in a sense you could not have expected it to cope with
what happened on 20 July, but it did not actually entirely cope
with what happened in June either, and well over 100 properties
flooded in the centre of our town due to weaknesses in the design
of the scheme. Having said that, it is right to recognise that,
had that scheme not been there and hundreds of thousands of gallons
of water not been held back, the devastation in Cheltenham would
have been much greater, but it does point out, from a budget point
of view, that just because a scheme has been completed it does
not mean to say all the money has already been spent, because
there may be refinements to these schemes. Once tested in real
life, they may have to have more money spent on them, and there
are various places where the Environment Agency has accepted more
work needs to be done even in Cheltenham, where we have already
a spent a lot of money. We had two crises. We had the initial
flooding, which although it was rapid devastated the town just
as much as it would have done if it had hung around, but we also
had the water shortage. I am going to treat those separately,
because there are different questions to be answered on each.
In terms of the basic flooding, I think the Government does have
some questions to answer about critical infrastructure, which
I know you have already talked about on the Committee, about the
kind of house-building issues that have been referred to by colleagues
already, and I endorse those, about the adequacy of the overall
flood defence budget, which I would agree with the ABI in saying
is inadequate, and about clearing up this tangle of legal responsibilities
for who maintains especially things like culverts and the minor
streams as well as the main rivers. The most extreme example I
had was a long culvert, which runs for about a mile underneath
various housing estates in Cheltenham, where I was seriously told
that ultimately the responsibility for maintaining that culvert
lies with each household that lies above it, which is clearly
a complete fiction in practice, and the Environment Agency and
other authorities simply step in when they feel the community
need is great enough; and we need to clear up that legal tangle
and, I think, act on the Making Space for Water report
in 2005, which said you need to give clear responsibility to one
agency, and I would say the Environment Agency is the one to give
it to. There are some issues for the Environment Agency, particularly
in its liaison with the Met Office and how specific and useful
the flood warnings it gave in advance were, because we seemed
to have a lot of advance notice of the July flood—we were
getting the flood warnings for about a week—but nobody realised
they were going to be on the scale that would devastate us in
the way they did. The main issues, I think, are around the response
of Severn Trent. I know they have already been before you, but
I think you perhaps let them get away a little lightly. In terms
of the response to the crisis, the critical thing that they failed
to do was to let Gold Command in Gloucestershire know in sufficient
time to do what National Grid did with the Walham Substation,
which was to warn Gold Command and Gold Command basically brought
in the Army and protected that critical piece of infrastructure,
not with much time to spare, but they protected it. Severn Trent,
essentially, according to the combination of their report and
the constabulary's reports to the Pitt Review, really called in
a fire appliance to pump water out but never let Gold Command
(which had been convened on the Friday) know until nine o'clock
on the Sunday that they, in fact, had lost the Mithe Water treatment
Works. They had actually evacuated it at six o'clock that morning
and they only told Gold Command at nine o'clock, three hours later.
There are reports in their submission to the Pitt Review of their
local staff being worried about the flooding, and they kept on
phoning the Environment Agency to see how high the water levels
were going to go but they never actually joined up the dots, and
I am afraid in a couple of other respects it does rather imply
that they had not got their resilience and their emergency planning
sorted out. As David will know from his constituency, the distribution
of bowsers was patchy at best. They missed out entire parts of
Cheltenham. Bowser hotlines were set up. There was a bowser that
was still there in one of the central shopping streets in Cheltenham
in mid August because, clearly, Severn Trent did not realise it
was there, and I think there were weaknesses. To be fair to them,
it was an event on a scale that they perhaps could not have predicted,
but their response did not seem to me to be very adequate, and
they did not even supply people with ten litres of water a day.
I was a volunteer on water distribution duty and I was handing
out strictly nine litres per adult, so that was not anything like
ten litres per person. Since the bowsers were at that stage largely
empty, they were not meeting that ten litre target. The blame
game with respect to the Mithe is quite important, because Severn
Trent had used the fact that there were circumstances beyond their
control to escape from the Guaranteed Standards Scheme, which
is supposed pay compensation at a set rate to anyone who loses
water supply. They have claimed that circumstances were beyond
their control and so they do not have to pay that money, and Ofwat,
in advance of all the results of the inquiries, of your inquiry
and the Pitt Review, has let them off the hook. I actually think
that is very wrong. I think there are, at the very least, questions
to be asked about whether they were really responsible for the
loss of water supply and they should not have been let off the
hook so quickly.
Q528 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. I cannot think it will have done you
a lot in the popularity stakes to see that you were "Mr Nine
Litres"!
Martin Horwood: We were all told,
very strictly, that we could only hand over nine litres. It was
interesting. The volume of water actually, nine litres, was quite
adequate in the sense of drinking water, and there were houses
in Cheltenham, to be honest, that had gallons of water for months
afterwards. The problem was the amount you needed to flush the
loo. If we had all had rain water harvesting and perhaps access
to less clean water, it might have solved some of those problems
a bit faster.
Q529 Chairman:
The water hoarders can now come clean, and we will move on to
Laurence Robertson.
Mr Robertson: Can I thank you
for the invitation to give evidence. I am very pleased that the
Committee is carrying out an inquiry. If I may, I would like to
go through it in three stages: what actually happened in Tewkesbury,
where we are now and where I think we need to go in the future.
It was very interesting. In June there was actually quite a bit
of flooding in my constituency, and I visited people who said,
"We have lived here for 40 years and we have never been flooded",
and it struck me as being very odd. There were areas of the constituency
which flood all the time but not to this scale; there were areas
which flooded in June which had not flooded before; and so when
we collectively say the rainfall in July was a complete surprise,
I am not entirely sure that it was, given what had happened earlier
the previous month. As everybody knows, there was tremendous heavy
rainfall on 20 July. One of the very quick, clear, noticeable
things was the mobile network went down pretty quickly. Everybody
is obsessed with their mobile phones these days, including me.
It was not actually possible to use them after a certain time.
People were stranded in council offices, in their own offices,
on the motorway. People actually slept on the motorway; some people
stayed in the pub or the hotels where they were, which was probably
the preferable option but not necessarily what they would have
chosen. People had to start being rescued. Part of the hospital
in Tewkesbury was evacuated and the town of Tewkesbury became
cut off, as everybody saw on the television screens across the
world in fact. Other areas, as well as Tewkesbury town, were affected,
which form part of my constituency. Some people's gardens actually
collapsed into rivers, 350,000 people lost their water supplies
across the country, we almost, as everybody knows, lost the electricity
supplies and, in fact, some people in my constituency did lose
the electricity supplies for about two days. The Emergency Services,
the Armed Forces, the councils and very many volunteers got involved
in distributing bottled water. It was a very successful operation.
The bowsers operation was impressive but not quite good enough.
There were not enough bowsers quickly enough and they were not
filled frequently enough. Nevertheless, there was a tremendous
effort. The sort of tragic story, though, in Tewkesbury is that
three people lost their lives as a direct result of the flooding
and possibly some more as an indirect result, but three people
actually died as a result of the flooding. Where are we now? People
are still living in caravans on their own drives or they are otherwise
displaced from their homes. I think the figure is in excess of
800 in my constituency, which is quite a lot of people, and as
we get towards Christmas it is an awful situation, and I am told
that they will be displaced for probably another three or four
months yet, or even slightly longer. Business in the town of Tewkesbury
has been affected badly, of course. People get the impression
that it is like New Orleans and it is not open for business. It
is not that bad, it is recovering, and the shops are open, but
they are suffering and continuing to suffer because of the effects
of the flooding. It is a very long process getting insurance assessments,
getting the building work done, of course. We are involved in
trying to get the drains and the ditches and culverts sorted,
which is a massive job, and one of the fears for the future is
will people who have been flooded or live in the area be able
to get insurance at all and, if they can get insurance, will that
mean inflated premiums? Anybody living in the GL20 post code area
is seriously worried about the future with regards to getting
insurance. What about the future? I would like to put forward
one or two suggestions as to how we may avoid similar difficulties
in the future. Obviously Tewkesbury, sitting on two rivers, is
going to flood sometimes—people accept that—but I
think there are things we can do which make things better or at
least reduce the risk of a very bad effect from heavy rainfall
in the future. I mentioned about clearing ditches and drains and
repairing culverts. We are having great difficulty establishing
who is responsible for what. It could be the Environment Agency,
it could be the Highways Agency, it could be the county council,
it could be the borough council, it could be the riparian owners,
and I suspect that the reason we are finding difficulty in identifying
who is responsible is because, when it is identified who is responsible,
they actually have to find the money to fix these things and they
are all complaining that they do not have the money to do that
work. What I really think we need to do is form some kind of agency,
maybe a new agency, which has an over-arching responsibility for
these kinds of problems. I have to say (and this is not the first
time I have said this, I have said this for many, many years),
I believe the Environment Agency is an inadequate agency. I think
it either needs more powers and more responsibility and possibly
more money, but if it is to be left as it is, I really do not
see the point of its existence. It is not a good agency to deal
with and I think it has showed itself to be very ineffective over
this issue and many, many other issues. I think we have to look
where we are building houses. There are a number of examples I
could give in my constituency where we have built houses and either
they have flooded, or they have caused the water to go into other
estates where they, in turn, have flooded. One particular housing
estate is not quite finished yet and it flooded and there is a
proposal to build another 100 houses on that site. That in itself
is bad, but it would also have to link into the existing drains
and sewage system, and I really do shudder to think what would
happen if that goes ahead. There is an appeal on the desk of the
Secretary of State at the moment for a project at Longford in
my constituency. Part of that land flooded, the access road flooded,
and yet the Environment Agency has withdrawn its objection to
building on that site for 600 houses. The Regional Spatial Strategy
is proposing something like 8,000 houses just north of Cheltenham
and just north of Gloucester, the very areas that are vulnerable.
This simply cannot go on. We had a very, very good performance
from the Tri-Service at Quedgeley, but there is a proposal to
regionalise part of that service. I hope that does not happen,
because they were able to respond straightaway, they knew the
local politicians, they knew the local people who deal with water
and electricity and so forth, and it was really a great advantage,
the fact that they could work together locally, so I really do
hope that is retained. We need a priority list of vulnerable people
and vulnerable buildings should such an occurrence happen again.
I myself stumbled across a number of people, old people, people
who were disabled or in wheelchairs, and number of us had to literally
push them out of their premises in wheelchairs. The water was
coming through the floor. We could not get ambulances because
they were evacuating the hospital and yet that building did not
appear on anybody's radar screen. Goodness knows what would have
happened to those people if we had not stumbled across them. I
do not say that to bull myself up in any way, Chairman—a
number of other people did similar work—but it was just
a matter of coming across these people who were in very difficult
situations. We also need, of course, to protect the Mithe Water
Treatment Plant, which is just down the road from where I live,
and, indeed, the electricity substation at Walham. Both sites
now have HESCO bastions, which are another two words I had never
come across before the flooding, but as well as protecting them
I think we need to network the system so that, if we have a situation
like this again, electricity can be obtained from elsewhere and
water can be obtained from elsewhere. I think it is very important
that we do learn these lessons, because although people say this
is just a once-in-a-150-years flood or 100-years flood, firstly,
how do they know that and, secondly, we are forever, and probably
quite rightly, talking about climate change. Does that mean that
it is going to happen next week, next year, ten years' time? We
do not know. I do not think we can assume that we will not see
rainfall like that again. Can I finish, Chairman, by very briefly
paying tribute to the Emergency Services and the Armed Forces,
the media, who did a tremendous job, Tewkesbury Borough Council,
the parish councils and very many individuals who worked so very
hard. It was actually the biggest peace-time operation in Britain.
As I say, my constituents know they live in a vulnerable area
but what is of primary concern to them is that the lessons are
learnt. That is what we are talking about today. We owe to it
those who died; we owe it to those who worked so very, very hard;
we owe it to those who are still displaced from their houses to
learn those lessons.
Q530 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. I do not think anybody will ever forget
the very dramatic pictures of Tewkesbury when it was cut off.
Thank you for filling in some of the detail behind those unforgettable
pictures. Angela.
Ms Smith: Thank you, Michael.
I would just like to take this in two parts. First of all, I would
like to talk about the nature of my constituency in order to explain
why the flooding in Sheffield took the form of a raging torrent
rather than a static flood, as we saw in some other places, and,
secondly, to draw attention to one or two other things that I
think need to be done. My constituency is in the north, north-west
of Sheffield, which was actually the source of the flooding in
the city, and 55-60% of the land mass in the constituency to the
west is in the Peak District National Park, so it should come
as no surprise to find out that there are ten reservoirs in my
constituency, I think about nine of which are in strings across,
feeding three of the rivers or, in effect, by three of the major
rivers in the area. I have got half of Howden Reservoir, which
neighbours Tom Levitt's High Peak constituency. The electorate
is concentrated on the eastern flank of the area, which should
not surprise anyone, and, as a result of this, the majority of
the population live very close by to moor land such as Broomhead,
Howden and Bradfield, so it is characterised by urban density
and surrounded by Peak District moor land. The River Don rises
at 1,500 feet in the Dark Peak and flows through Penistone, then
Stocksbridge in the Upper Don and then flows through the city
and on bordering the Lower Don Valley with Rotherham. The river
is fed, as I said in my letter, by a number of tributaries. The
Porter, or Little Don, which I omitted to mention in the letter,
is one of those, and the Ewden and Loxley are two others. As I
have said earlier, they all feed a series of reservoirs and flow
into the Don as it moves into what has been described as a deeply
entrenched course through its steep, wooded upper reaches, and
it is the very wooded, steep nature of the valley and of the Ewden
Valley as well and the Little Porter in the Don Valley, which
helped to create, I think, the conditions which we saw in Sheffield
that terrible Monday evening. Sheffield, of course, built its
industrial strength on the basis of the sheer power of its rivers,
including the Loxley, which flooded in 1864. The Loxley flooded
then because of the bursting of the wall of the Dale Dyke Dam
and 270 people died that evening. The Loxley had been the source
of much of the industrial development in Sheffield, but, of course,
in latter years it was the Don that was the principal site for
the large-scale development of the city's steel and engineering
industries. This has produced a very different river, one which
all of us who live in Sheffield are very used to but it is one
which has been heavily squeezed, if you like, into channels and
culverts, so it does not feel like a mighty river any more. It
feels, more often than not, to be honest, like a pretty major
stream some of the time; it does not feel like a big river any
more at all. This was the context for June's rainfall. We had
90 millimetres over 48 hours around 15 June and, of course, parts
of my constituency flooded that weekend. On that Friday it took
me an hour and a half to get from Sheffield to Barnsley, a trip
that takes 20 minutes most of the time. There was pretty severe
flooding in Chapeltown, a village in my constituency. One young
boy had to be pulled from the brook in Chapeltown. He had been
swept into the culvert, banged his head and nearly died. When
they managed to pull him out he had just a T-shirt, boxer shorts
and one sock left on because of the power of the water—it
had swept all his clothes from his body. He was very lucky to
survive. The flooding on the fifteenth was very difficult to deal
with, and then we had 100 millimetres over 24 hours over Sunday
24 and Monday 25 June. We were fearful on that Sunday evening
of what was going to happen. At the side of my house a river had
formed. I live high up on the Don Valley and a river had formed
down the side of the hill on 15 June and had disappeared once
the waters had subsided. It formed again on Sunday 24, and I can
remember thinking and saying to my husband, "This looks pretty
bad. We have already got very high water levels from ten days
ago. We have now got the river at the side of our house."
It was literally like living by the side of a river. I just wondered
what was going to happen. Even so, I do not think any of us expected
to see what did happen in Sheffield the following afternoon at
two o'clock, and the ferocity of what happened, I think, took
everybody by surprise. I do not think any of us will ever see
the city in quite the same way again. It feels like a different
place, to be frank. The River Don effectively broke free of its
now very constricted course and became a powerful, fearful life-threatening
force. It swept away Livesey Street Bridge, it nearly swept away
a major bridge in the city centre, Lady's Bridge, and all that
happened in the course of two or three hours. Twelve hundred homes
were flooded, not just in my constituency but across the city,
and a thousand businesses were affected, including Corus steel
works in my area (and Corus's move back into profitability, I
think, has been delayed because of the flooding, quite frankly),
Georgia-Pacific, a paper-making plant at Oughtibridge and Hillsborough
Stadium—Sheffield Wednesday is a business at the end of
the day—went under six foot of water. Lots of jokes went
around about how Wednesday were probably better at water polo
anyway than they ever were at football, but we have got over that
one as well, as you will all be aware. What do we need to think
about for the future? I think the point made about the better
co-ordination of the management of the waterway courses is a good
one. Whether it is the Environment Agency that should take that
overview role, I would not like to say. I think that is for the
Committee to make a judgment on. All I would say is that, whichever
agency takes responsibility for co-ordinating the management of
our waterways, it needs to have the necessary powers to do the
job. I think that is the critical point. My understanding is that
Yorkshire water, for instance, works to a different standard to
the Environment Agency. That is not good enough. Yorkshire Water
is incredibly important to my constituency. You would expect me
to say that, with ten water storage reservoirs. It owns a lot
of the land in the area. It is incredibly important that the utilities
are made to work to the highest possible standards and that the
agency responsible has the power to deal with that. Sustainable
urban drainage systems, I think, have to be a part of the way
forward. The problem in Sheffield was not the state of the gullies
in the end. We thought it might be, I think everybody in all the
areas thought it might be, but actually the drainage system had
been maintained as it should be; it just could not deal with the
amount of water that fell over those two occasions and, in a sense,
whichever drainage system you used, we may well have had a problem
that weekend anyway because the rain was so unprecedented. Nevertheless,
I saw rivers forming outside my house, my home, down the sides
of the valley. It is a very steeply sided city. We have seven
hills, numerous steeply-sided valleys, seven rivers in our city.
Sustainable urban drainage systems have to be part of the answer,
because I do not think traditional drainage and sewerage systems
can deal in the long-term with the new climate that we appear
to be having to live with. Catchment: the catchment for Sheffield,
as I have explained, is the Peak District, and nature's natural
flood defences are the blanket bogs for our area. They are not
working as they should do, and I do believe that Defra is going
to have to commit properly to funding programmes that will help
to restore the blanket bogs to their proper function. It is not
just about reducing flood risk—I accept that the incidence
of flooding may only have been reduced if the blanket bogs had
been working properly—but they also work to help absorb
carbon, so they could play an important part in helping to reduce
carbon emissions in the atmosphere. I have read somewhere that
the blanket bogs of Britain absorb more carbon than all the forests
of France and Germany. That is a pretty incredible statistic.
I really do feel that that the softer end of our flood defence
system needs as much attention as the provision of more hard flood
defence on our river banks and so on. I think it is an equally
important consideration. Finally, economic development. I have
mentioned 1864. I have just found out today that the last recorded
big-scale flood of the River Don was in 1536, when it effectively
arrested the progress of an armed Catholic rebellion against Henry
VIII. You may want to thank him for that or you may want to thank
the River Don for that, or not. On a serious note, what I am trying
to say is that the fact that we have had one major flood this
year, probably for the first time in three or 400 years, is worthy
of attention. Does this mean that we are going to have this flooding
at this level more frequently now, or is it just a one-in-two,
three, four-hundred-year event? It is very difficult to judge,
but I do not think we can afford to take the risk of assuming
that it is a rare one-off event; I think we have to prepare. Most
of Sheffield is developed on the valley floors. It puts before
us some very difficult choices, because if we do not continue
our economic growth in terms of redeveloping brownfield sites
on the valley floor, if we do not take account of our increasing
population by making good use of brownfield sites, then we are
going to have to build up the sides of the valleys and on the
tops of the valleys, and if you do that, we are encroaching on
our open spaces, our green spaces, our green belt. They are very
difficult choices and I do believe we have to make the best use
of developing design solutions. I have read about some of the
design solutions that are being applied to South Yorkshire now,
and I really do think we have to look at these issues properly,
on a case by case basis, taking note of the advice of the Environment
Agency. I do not believe, however (and I will finish here), that
the Environment Agency can be given a veto over planning and economic
development. I do believe that if the Environment Agency are going
to have a major say on planning decisions, it needs to be on the
basis of a very rigorous set of criteria and that they need to
be able to justify any of their objections to planning applications
on the basis of absolutely rigorous evidence that they can justify
in front of a planning board and in an appeal process.
Q531 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. Richard, I know you may have to depart.
Mr Benyon: I naively stuck to
my five minutes. I must learn better that MPs never stick to the
time. Can I leave you with one vignette?
Patrick Hall: Could I ask a question?
Chairman: You can ask him a question,
but he might want to give his vignette as well.
Q532 Patrick Hall:
I was interested in the comment about aquatic vegetation in streams
and rivers, because it reminded me of the practice of maybe 30
years or so ago when river authorities used to regard rivers and
streams as an open drainage channel and they stripped them bare
of vegetation, of shallows, of islands and all sorts of things
that give us biodiversity, et cetera. I was very interested in
the comments that Richard made about residents taking action themselves
to clear aquatic vegetation from a flooding river or stream. That
would be quite telling evidence, because the Environment Agency
today denies that its policy towards biodiversity actually contributes
to an increased flooding risk. I have checked that point, it so
happens. The Environment Agency says that changing the old practice
to what they would say is a better practice does not increase
the risk of flooding. You have got evidence that intervention
by residents has led to an instant reduction in flooding. Could
I ask, though, how on earth did these people do that? How did
they have access to whatever length of river? How did they get
into the water? How did they remove the vegetation? What did they
do with it in order to get this dramatically improved effect?
That is evidence that the Environment Agency must, surely, have.
Mr Benyon: I was disappointed
when we raised this at the meeting with the Secretary of State
in the Moses Room two days after 20 July. The reaction of Barbara
Young when I told her this—a number of MPs talked about
this sort of thing—she put her hands over her ears and said,
"I am not hearing this. This is illegal. I do not want to
hear this." This is people's homes. In Bucklebury 22 out
of 24 homes were flooded. The water was pretty static in the residents'
sitting rooms. They went down and, with a neighbouring farmer
with a JCB, they literally just cleared the weed which had blocked
the river, which was about six foot wide and was running about
two foot because of it. I forget the name, it is not ranuncules,
which is what you want, it was the other thing that fishermen
do not want but conservationists do; there is a bit of a conflict.
Anyway, that disappears in the winter; it is a summer weed. They
cleared that, and it instantly dropped. That is in the Pang Valley.
Another village, Eastbury in Lambourn, had precisely the same
experience. The issue is that the Environment Agency produce work
gangs which come and clear this in accordance with a protocol
which has been agreed. That protocol has slipped and these work
forces are under threat. Some of these villages are putting together
working parties who want to learn from the Environment Agency
what they can and what they cannot do, and that is an on-going
process, but the experience of the people in villages such as
Bucklebury is there to be seen on their website—I will give
you the details. If I could leave you—
Q533 Chairman:
Your vignette.
Mr Benyon: Yes. Mr and Mrs Campbell-Murray,
who live in Craven Road, at the convergence of three drainage
systems, have been flooded three times in as many years. If you
stand and look at the Edwardian street scene, you will see that
interspersed into that street scene are modern, infill developments
and you have an Edwardian drainage system trying to cope with
a 21st century, much more congested street scene. The point is
that Thames Water will look at it, have looked at it and any day
now are going to come back and say whether or not they are going
to do something. It is entirely up to them whether they do something,
and that is my first point. They are a commercial organisation
and can make a decision: "This is too much money. We have
got other priorities." The second point is that Thames Water
(and they would try and make this point to you, I know) are not
statutory consultees, as I am sure Severn Trent and other water
authorities are. When it comes to large housing developments,
I think they should be statutory consultees. Can I leave?
Chairman: Thank you very much for that.
Paddy Tipping has caught my eye.
Q534 Paddy Tipping:
I just wanted to comment about the priority score, the ranking
that occurs. It is the case, is it not, that big urban schemes,
because of the number of properties involved, are always going
to get priority over smaller villagers and hamlets. David, your
solution was to build partnership schemes. The other way of doing
it would be to tackle the criteria, and one way you might do that
is to look at the proportion of houses as part of the settlement
that is liable to flooding. It seems pretty clear to me that a
lot of rural communities who are in danger of flooding under present
schemes are never going to get any work done.
Mr Curry: I agree completely.
The reason why I focused on trying to find a way of accelerating
the flow of cash in the schemes is because I recognise that in
Ripon 40 odd properties flooded on both of the flooding events
compared with Sheffield, Doncaster and South Yorkshire. Nobody
is suggesting that we should be bumped ahead of that. The problem
is that there is sufficient risk both to have a scheme and to
get planning permission, and people cannot understand that, if
the risk is there, and if it mattered enough to put something
place, why does it not matter to it do it? As you say, quite rightly,
there are two ways of doing it. One is to revise the criteria
and, indeed, the Environment Agency is doing that—we are
getting the new schemes—but as far as Ripon is concerned
our best hope, it seemed to me, was to try and assemble a package,
and the Yorkshire Regional Flood Defence Committee at the moment
has got a precepting power and precepts literally a third of a
loaf of bread a year per Band D household. It could even be less
than that, given the price of wheat at the moment. I do not exclude
individual businesses—Wolseley, in my constituency, was
severely affected in the floods of the year 2000—might be
willing to make individual contributions, the local authority
through business improvement district schemes may be in a position
to be able to make a contribution, but none of this will work
unless that money is accepted as a way of improving the priority,
because it releases funds for the Environment Agency and so gives
it a bigger bang for the buck. Knowing that this is a self-contained
scheme in Ripon, and the remedy is agreed by everybody and not
in dispute, it seemed to me the sensible thing was to try and
find a way in which we could make it feasible for the Environment
Agency to get the scheme done by lowering that 11 million cost
before inflation starts sending it upwards again. The capping
criteria is an important element to that.
Q535 Mr Drew:
If we are to make a recommendation to our sister committee or
Department for Communities and Local Government regarding what
areas are inappropriate for development now as a result of the
possibility of more regular flooding, what sort of things should
we be saying to them? We have got Angela's point that there should
not be a complete ban on development, even in flood risk areas.
My Gloucestershire colleagues may have some slightly different
views on that.
Martin Horwood: If you take the
flood risk areas, I have got one in Lakehampton—the site
is actually in Laurence's constituency but it is right on the
edge of mine—where we have an application outstanding for
360 houses on an area that was under water in July. The thought
of those houses' insurance premiums is enough to make you go pale,
I should think, and they may even, in fact, be unsaleable because
the ABI are clearly threatening that, unless enough flood defence
work is done, they may be withdrawing insurance in some respects
from flood defence. They point out that it is a fairly unusual
thing that British insurance covers flood defence. So, clearly,
I think planning has to respond to the floods but, as we all know,
the nature of the regional spatial strategies that are being handed
down from DCLG via the regional authorities to local authorities
in Gloucestershire, are, if anything, putting the numbers up now
after the floods, not putting them down, and that cannot be right.
Somebody must stop and think about this area of research, where
these sites are being looked at and whether it is still appropriate
to have the numbers that are being handed down.
Q536 Chairman:
Am I not right that local authorities in that context have got
to identify the land areas that are suitable for housing as part
of this process?
Martin Horwood: No, the regional
spatial strategies define the areas of search for new housing;
so local authorities can try and challenge, but they do not actually
have the right in the end to turn that round.
Mr Robertson: I think the RSS
is area-specific, not necessarily site-specific. The problem is,
when companies take the issue to appeal, again it becomes out
of local hands. To answer Mr Drew's question directly: "What
would you recommend?", I would recommend that planning should
be a local matter and not a regional matter, and if the local
council build on a flood plain, they are democratically accountable,
at least, whereas the RSS is not democratically accountable. We
have to build policy on philosophy. If the philosophy is to build
in safe areas, it means that when a decision has to be taken sometimes
the answer to the developer has to be, "No."
Q537 Chairman:
David wants to come in on this, and Angela as well. We have got
a little bit more time before the vote, we have got about another
15 minutes, so do not panic. David.
Mr Curry: Can I make a suggestion
for a couple of bits of joined up government. We discussed a planning
bill earlier this week in Parliament. A planning bill provides
for infrastructure levy. There is an opportunity there to say
that no development can take place unless it is associated with
adequate infrastructure measures which protect it from flooding.
The Government has moved away from the planning gain concept—that
is now a roof tax to all intents and purposes—enshrined
in a 106 agreement, so not just a site-specific thing like for
social housing, which would be the characteristic one for a site-specific
scheme, but for the broader infrastructure measures which, it
will insist, will be new infrastructure. So that is one element.
Another bit of joined up government which would help is when Defra
does its environmental schemes for farmers. At the moment if a
farmer's land is flooded, his first cry is, "How quickly
can I get the water off this land?" What we want is for him
to say, "How long can I keep this water on the land to stop
the run off?" So, if some of the environment schemes were
tailored to water retention, that might take some relief, and
that goes back to a point about the bogs, it goes back to the
moor land, which is a great repository of water, and so the more
we can get the land to retain the water, the more control there
ultimately is. It is not entirely outside government control.
Ms Smith: On that point, one of
the stumbling blocks in terms of schemes to put farmers funding
into that kind of work rather than the stray Pillar 1 cap funding
is Ofwat. Ofwat object, or have objected, to schemes in the Peak
District, and their objections have been overcome because the
utility companies are involved in the investment and they do not
see that as good use of water customers' money. I do. It has an
impact on water quality as well, it improves water quality, and
I think Ofwat here have to be brought more clearly on board. I
do not think I said entirely that I think we should just build
in flood risk areas, David, we have to be sensible about this,
but for the record, what I said was that it has to be on a case
by case basis, and that infrastructure and designing to cope with
risk is an important part of it. In fact there was a scheme announced
today in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which is a partnership between
a private enterprise, the Environment Agency, and Yorkshire Borwood
for a 1.5 million office project which involves a big contribution
from the property developer towards dealing with the flood risk.
That is potentially a way forward: the involvement of the private
sector and the public sector and coming up with the design solutions
necessary in order to enable us to get round some of these issues.
Incidentally, in Sheffield we are not experiencing this insistence
that the regional spatial strategy overcomes any local consideration
of where and where we should not build. That is not the case in
Sheffield. The local development framework is being developed
locally in consultation with local people. I have had my say on
that and, if it works properly, it should actually be people at
a very local level who have a major input into what is decided
for a particular area.
Chairman: Right.
Q538 David Taylor:
I think for most of us the most enduring picture that we carry
in our minds of these floods is the one at Tewkesbury with the
abbey?
Mr Robertson: The abbey stood
out strong.
Q539 David Taylor:
Myself, David Drew and James Gray went as a sort of advance guard
of rapporteurs to Gloucester and we went to Tewkesbury and, as
we were leaving Tewkesbury, I vividly recall seeing a sign, something
like, "Come and visit our river view" or "Riverside
development". You talked earlier on about having planning
decisions taken more at a local level. Do you know the development
I am talking about and how many of the newer developments in your
town, your constituency, were built in the teeth of opposition
from the town council, the district council, even the Environment
Agency's advice? Do you recall?
Mr Robertson: Some of them go
back a while. The one that I am referring to, I think, is possibly
the one you mean, at Bredon Road, as far as I know was a council
decision. It is an area which was built on what was previously
allotments. When I say things should be decided at a local level,
I am not for one minute suggesting that every decision taken locally
is the correct one, it may not be, but if it is taken at a local
level, the local people have a chance to influence that decision.
I think, the one you are referring to on the Bredon Road, there
is now an application to build another 100 on that site, which,
yes, overlooks the river. The difficulty now is linking into the
drainage system, the sewage system. I put a question to the Minister
saying, what assumptions are made? Does it have to be a one in-a
100, a one-in-150 year rainfall to prohibit that kind of building?
The Government did not want to know about that. They said Ofwat
have to deal with that. So, again, we go round in a circle to
try and define who is actually responsible.
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