Examination of Witnesses (Questions 740
- 756)
WEDNESDAY 23 JANUARY 2008
SIR MICHAEL
PITT AND
MR ROGER
HARGREAVES
Q740 Mr Gray:
What about rights of property and rights of the individual to
do what they want to do with their own land? I understand the
benefits from all that but do you not think that having the Government
saying, "You can't actually put concrete down your garden
unless we give you permission", that is the nanny state gone
bonkers, is it not?
Sir Michael Pitt: I think on this
one I am going to have to disagree with you. I think the consequences
of paving over gardens are cumulatively very serious and something
needs to be done to bring that under control.
Q741 Lynne Jones:
Do you envisage it being permissible to use porous materials without
requiring permission?
Sir Michael Pitt: Yes, that would
be automatic.
Q742 Paddy Tipping:
I represent a rural area and there is a strong view around that
the water courses and drains are not being properly maintained.
Given the unprecedented nature of the flooding last summer is
this a real complaint or is it a myth?
Sir Michael Pitt: One has to be
very careful about how you answer this question because many,
many people we spoke to were very angry about what they regarded
as lack of maintenance, that the local council had not cleared
the gullies, the Environment Agency had not dredged a particular
river or stream. You can understand this and I am quite sure that
lack of maintenance can lead to local problems. Individual or
small numbers of properties can be flooded; fields can become
flooded as a direct consequence of poor maintenance. When you
move away from the local position and look at the strategic position
about flooding, sometimes maintenance can make things worse. I
am fascinated by this idea of what we call "slow water";
slow water is a good thing, fast water is potentially difficult
for people further down stream. I am arguing that maintenance,
when it is carried out, has to be carried out with a very detailed
understanding of the implications and in some case maintenance
is absolutely vital to make sure that the system operates effectively;
in other cases it probably will not make much difference or could
even make things worse.
Q743 Paddy Tipping:
Just talking about who is responsible for water courses in rural
areas, the Environment Agency is responsible for water courses
over a certain size that are designated, but it is riparian owners
for the rest. Do you think that riparian owners are, first of
all, aware of their responsibility and, secondly, as I understand
it, local authorities have reserved powers to do work. Is that
a satisfactory situation?
Sir Michael Pitt: I do not think
the position now is entirely satisfactory. One of the reasons
why it is not terribly satisfactory is that nobody is taking this
strong overview of what needs to be done and what perhaps does
not need to be done. That comes back again to this point about
drawing up inventories of drainage and having the local authorities
directly involved in looking at the whole system in their local
area. I come from a farming family; farmers know a great deal
about the drainage in their locality. Most farmers are very thorough
in ensuring that their ditches are cleared and that things are
done properly on their farms, but that is not always the case.
Also you can get urban situations where a lot of landowners have
a little bit to do with a particular part of the drainage system.
This is very complex and it comes back again to this problem about
complexity, accountability, who is responsible and why the public
become so frustrated when there are problems.
Q744 Mr Drew:
I would like to pick up the point about the problem in trying
to take one measure which alleviates an immediate problem, it
has major ramifications. Going back to my earlier question, is
this something that really only the law can sort out or is it,
as we saw in France to some extent it has been overcome because
of the way in which the commune has much greater authority over
land ownership; it will not have any of this nonsense saying that
householder A should not do this because of the impact on householder
B, it will do what is best for that community. How do we resolve
those sorts of issues in this country?
Sir Michael Pitt: During the review
so far we have come across a number of intriguing examples of
how one simple part of the drainage system can involve multiple
interests: the riparian owners, the Environment Agency, water
companies. Water can be travelling on its route through various
owners of that particular bit of infrastructure and I think this
is presenting us all with major problems. I do not have a quick,
slick answer to that problem; I think it is something we need
to spend a bit more time looking into. Individual cases turn out
to be extremely complex. We were hearing about one this morning
where to really understand what was taking place took about 15
or 20 minutes of description and it is trying to find solutions
to those difficulties which I think we have yet to solve.
Mr Hargreaves: It is very easy
to fall into the trap of thinking that the answer to this is simply
to take away the responsibility from all the individuals and organisations
and so forth and put them in the hands of a single agency. Actually,
if you go down that road, that single agency becomes terribly
overburdened and struggles to deliver what people expect and faces
many of the same problems in terms of not being able to meet public
demands for maintenance and so forth. The answer is probably less
about just piling everything into the same organisation and more
about opening up the process of transparency, consistency and
proper oversight.
Q745 David Taylor:
Three members of this Committee—James Gray, David Drew and
myself—went to Gloucestershire to see the events that were
so disastrous in the Gloucester and Tewkesbury areas and we went
round the Severn Trent Mythe Water Treatment Plant which was directly
affected by flooding and that took a third of a million of people
off water for ten to 17 days. Talking to staff it was very, very
close indeed to 600,000 people in the Gloucester area losing their
power and producing a short-term dark ages scenario for people
affected. One of the most effective and well-argued chapters in
your report is the one on critical infrastructure, chapter six.
On page 102 at figure 16 you produce a strategic framework for
protecting critical infrastructure and I wondered if you could
explain a little bit more how what you are suggesting improves
on what we have at the moment. I think it has been mentioned before
that when we went to Lyon we talked to the city authorities there
not about critical infrastructure particularly but some of their
arrangements seemed immensely complicated and dependent on high
levels of co-operation between separate organisations. This to
me has a similar resonance.
Sir Michael Pitt: The emergency
services, Gold Command and others were surprised by the extent
to which these sites of critical infrastructure were at such risk
from flooding. During the emergency they were discovering almost
day by day the implications of these sites. I do not think we
should ever let that happen again. Part of the answer to your
question is ensuring that local responders fully understand which
sites are within their areas, just how vulnerable they are to
flooding, the extent to which either the water or power companies
have alternative arrangements in place if there is an emergency
(sometimes they have alternative circuits for getting electricity
and power or alternative sources of tap water supplies that can
be laid on) and all of that needs to be deeply understood by the
locality. That is the area where I think we need to do much more
work. There has to be much more planning, much more engagement
of what I call the category two organisations under the Civil
Contingencies Act so that they are involved in discussions in
advance of the next flood about what is going to happen "if".
That, if you like, is one of the fundamental aspects of these
proposals which would be different to what happened in Gloucestershire
last summer.
Mr Hargreaves: The big deficiency
at the moment in terms of the institutional arrangements is that
if you look at terrorism there is an organisation called the Centre
for the Protection of National Infrastructure whose job is to
collect from government departments and others a sense of the
vulnerability and criticality of infrastructure sites across the
country and then take that information and overlay onto it their
understanding of the risks that terrorism poses so they can then
get advice to organisations about what they might do. What we
do not have is a similar set up for natural hazards, for non-terrorist
risk and what we are talking about here is something that moves
further down that road. So you have a body which takes the diverse
range of information that is scattered across government, across
the private sector, at local levels as well and brings it together
and starts overlaying onto that criticality and vulnerability
data information about which areas are likely to flood or which
areas are likely to suffer from severe weather.
Q746 David Taylor:
So the existing organisational infrastructure for dealing with
likely events of this kind, you are arguing needs to be broadened
geographically to set it into a number of regional contexts perhaps
as well a national context. Is that what you are saying?
Mr Hargreaves: It is making sure
that this information about which sites are particularly vulnerable
to flooding is held consistently at the centre of government but
then shared more widely so that people at the local level also
understand which sites in their areas are vulnerable, but you
use the same structure up and down the chain so it is not the
case that government is terribly concerned about Mythe because
it knows about Mythe because it has talked to Severn Trent but
the local authority or the local police force simply have no idea
because it is just not on their radar screen.
Q747 David Taylor:
It does require over the years a high degree of co-operation between
very distinct organisations in the private and public sector and
so on. Are you confident that that structure will catalyse such
co-operation.
Mr Hargreaves: Essentially it
works for terrorism and you can use that model. You can say flooding
is a different kind of risk but the institutional framework, the
communication, the dialogue between the private and public sectors
and between the centre and local levels works and so adapting
that model and broadening it is probably the right answer and
certainly what we put in the report.
Q748 Chairman:
I think it was 2004 when the Foresight Report came out and it
alerted everybody to possible extreme weather events. The flooding
in 2007 came along three years later and everyone went, "Oh,
critical infrastructure; we need to protect it". Do you think
that the utility companies were derelict in their duty in not
having carried out an appraisal exercise for risk taking into
account the timely warning of the then chief scientist?
Sir Michael Pitt: What we are
inviting the water companies and the power companies to do—and
what I think they are already doing—is to review their priorities.
They have an issue about their financial regulators; the financial
regulators like Ofwat are there to ensure that the bills to consumers
are payable, that people can afford to pay for their water and
likewise that they can pay for their electricity. The companies
have this balancing act to do between how much can they invest
in protecting their infrastructure and to what extent will they
be permitted to increase their charges to consumers. What we are
looking for here is a change in priorities. We are saying that
flood risk now is a higher priority than we thought it was previously
and that those companies now need to review all of their infrastructure,
look at their investment programmes and decide whether they need
to invest more money in protecting those critical infrastructure
sites. I think almost certainly they do.
Q749 David Taylor:
You make a good number of interim conclusions and a block of four
of them relate to this very area, 55 to 58. You talk about imposing
a duty for infrastructure operators to have business continuity
planning; contributing information on critical sites and share
it with other operators; single points of failure; and participating
fully in Gold and Silver Command structures. Is it the case that
we really do need a whole range of new responsibilities or, as
the Chairman has implied, are the existing obligations that they
have are properly delivered and professionally complied with?
That seems to be the core of what went wrong in Gloucestershire
in July.
Sir Michael Pitt: The obligations
placed on the companies by the Civil Contingencies Act for category
two organisations like the companies are less than the obligations
on category one organisations like local authorities and the Environment
Agency. What we are arguing in this report is that we need to
look again at the framework that category two organisations operate
within. They did comply with their obligations as category two
companies; this is no longer sufficient given the degree of flooding
we had during the summer last year and we need to have now much
closer involvement of those companies in flood risk planning and
involvement when there is an emergency.
Q750 David Taylor:
The Civil Contingencies Act allows the Government presumably to
designate to new areas the category two groups that you have talked
about, so it does not need new legislation, does it?
Sir Michael Pitt: No, but it needs
a revision to the regulation.
Q751 Mr Drew:
Can we talk about another aspect of planning which of course is
planning for development? Some of us are increasingly concerned
that not only do we have infrastructure in the wrong place but
we have houses—if not some communities—in the wrong
place. To what extent do you think the Government needs to be
much more robust in its approach towards planning? Floodplains
have traditionally been good places to develop, much easier than
on hills but more particularly they are easier for transport links,
they are easier for larger factories and so on. Do we really need
to rethink some of this? Is it possible that there are existing
planning permissions that have been given that at the very least
need to be very carefully evaluated before they are allowed to
be continued? Is that something you are looking at?
Sir Michael Pitt: I find it quite
an experience going to relatively new housing which was built
in flood risk areas where the bottoms of the houses have had to
be totally gutted, where the residents there are still out of
their homes as a direct consequence of flooding, and yet these
properties are just a few years old. I think it is quite distressing
when that takes place. I think there should be a strong presumption
against building in any flood risk areas at all. If there has
to be building in areas of flood risk then we want provisions
in PPS25 absolutely applied and those provisions I think are much
stronger and better than they have ever been before. That puts
a real obligation on developers and planners to ensure that development
in the flood plain only takes place as a last resort and if it
does have to take place that there are the proper evaluations
of flood risk, that sustainable drainage systems are introduced
and applied and, in particular, I feel very strongly about the
nature of construction, that it is now easily possible to harden
buildings against flooding, to make them resistant and resilient
to flooding. I feel very strongly about this and I suspect in
volume two we might be even more firm about this particular aspect.
Q752 Mr Drew:
Would your views also hold to the extent that the danger with
planning is that you could give permission in an area that is
not necessarily flood plain but because your issue—which
I totally understand—about what we want is slow water, that
the danger is it is the law of unintended consequences. An area
upstream which apparently has no flooding problems whatsoever
is built on and then all of a sudden two miles down that valley,
places that historically have never flooded, start to flood very
seriously. It is the people downstream who will pay for it because
it has not been thought through. My final point is about the role
of the Environment Agency in this. The Environment Agency at the
moment has only advisory powers when it comes to making recommendations
to local development committees. Do you think that they should
now have greater power to say that this is an inappropriate development,
we will not support it and if it goes ahead because you give planning
permission you, as an authority, could be liable in the future?
Sir Michael Pitt: The first point
first on new developments and developers, there is an obligation
on developers to ensure that if they are proposing housing for
example in an area which might not be at immediate flood risk
but nevertheless could have consequential effects further downstream,
they prepare flood risk management plans. In other words, those
possibilities are fully evaluated long before any planning permission
is given at all. The local planning authority would expect to
see those plans and the Environment Agency would have an opportunity
to review those plans to make sure that technically they are up
to standard. The Environment Agency already has a right to be
consulted on all planning applications and also has a right to
ask for those planning applications to be called in by ministers
for a planning inquiry and then ultimately refusal by ministers
if need be. That is a relatively new power available to the Environment
Agency. I think it is pretty effective; it ought to work. We ought
to test it for a while and if we find that there are significant
planning applications slipping through the system then I would
like those powers to be strengthened even further. I think the
Environment Agency is very well placed to make a judgment about
whether new development is appropriate at all or properly designed
if it does take place.
Mr Hargreaves: PPS25 does make
a significant difference to the way that developers and local
authorities will have to operate and require them to consider
not only the effects at site level but also at a local and regional
level. There are a whole series of other fairly stringent aspects
to PPS25 but it will take time for it to bed in; it has only been
in place for around 14 or 15 months and to judge PPS25 against
last summer's events is not really fair to PPS25 and we need to
give it time because a lot of the things we are talking about
here are actually in PPS25.
Q753 Mr Drew:
Should there ever be a retrospective power, where clearly a mistake
has been made, to try to deal with that mistake at least by preventing
future development because, as you well know, the problem with
planning is that once you have agreed some houses you will almost
certainly get more houses, even though those houses may be flooded.
It is still not impossible in this country to continue to do that
with all the ways in which various developers will give you assurances
that this will be okay in the future. Should there be a retrospective
power, where there is a problem we try to do something about it?
Sir Michael Pitt: There are already
many existing problems with current developments that have taken
place in the past. It becomes increasingly difficult, I think,
to unravel those problems once those awful mistakes have been
made. I think the only way forward here is to take each planning
application on its merits and to then deal with it in the rigorous
way that we have been describing.
Q754 Lynne Jones:
In what way do you think that the modelling and mapping which
clearly needs to be done will inform the planning process? One
system that operates in France is that there are certain areas
which are red zoned, where no planning permission is allowed;
others are blue zoned where each case is looked at on its merits;
and white zones where it is up to the planning authority to decide.
Do we need to move towards that system? Have we got the necessary
information to do that and how long do you think we might take
to move to such a system if it were recommended?
Sir Michael Pitt: I think you
may have sensed from some of my earlier answers that I am a great
believer in the importance of modelling and mapping. We know,
for example, that the Environment Agency is able to identify what
have been called "hotspots", places which, because of
their geography and topography, are very likely to be areas where
flash flooding can take place and those are places which can be
identified on maps and can be taken into account by the local
planning authority. Just standing back from the detail here, what
are we saying? What we are saying is that we want more technical
analysis and intellectual power applied to these issues of flooding,
that we should not be caught out by mistakes, errors of judgment;
organisations need to be much better informed about the implications
of their decisions and in particular the implications of new developments.
Q755 Mr Gray:
Sir Michael, your chair will be occupied in a short time this
afternoon by the Regional Flood Defence Committees who will be
giving evidence to this Committee. Rather curiously they are not
even mentioned in your interim report. None of your recommendations
touched on them. What would you ask them if you were in our position?
Sir Michael Pitt: I am due to
meet them shortly so I will have the opportunity to ask the questions
directly. What I would say to them is what I am saying to a large
number of organisations and individuals and that is here is our
report, these are the conclusions we have reached as of Christmas,
how do you feel about the report? What are the things you would
want to support? Are there areas where you think we have made
a mistake? Do we need to extend our evaluations? I think probably
the question I would like you to ask them—I will have a
chance to do it myself later—is whether they feel that this
report is heading in the right direction, is it good for the country?
That is the main thing. Are there any improvements that they could
recommend to the report?
Q756 Chairman:
Sir Michael, Mr Hargreaves, thank you very much for your contributions.
Obviously we have looked with interest at your interim report.
It is a bit like being at the cinema, we have had the forthcoming
attractions so we are looking later in the year for the main feature
when you come up with your recommendations. I hope by then we
will have reported so that you will be able to take into account
what we have said and blend it in with what you have said. By
that time we will have the ultimate, all singing dancing answer
to every question known to man on flooding and therefore we can
confidently predict, I am sure you will agree, that there will
be no more in the future. Thank you very much indeed for your
contribution; we greatly appreciate it.
Sir Michael Pitt: Thank you all
very much indeed.
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