Examination of Witnesses (Questions 884
- 899)
MONDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2008
BARONESS YOUNG
OF OLD
SCONE, MR
PHIL ROTHWELL
AND MR
DAVID ROOKE
Q884 Chairman:
This is a bit like sort of completing the sandwich. We started
our inquiry with the Environment Agency, we have had a lot of
meat in between, so I hope, Baroness Young, you do not mind me
describing the Agency once again as the other piece of bread on
our proceedings, but I think it helps to round things off. Can
I welcome you again, with your colleagues, before the Committee
(for the record Baroness Young, the Chief Executive of the Environment
Agency, Mr Phil Rothwell, the Head of Flood Risk Management Policy
and Mr David Rooke, Head of Flood Risk Management). Mr Rooke and
I seem to be bumping into each other all the time in various ways
in this inquiry, so it is a delight to see you again. Can I put
on record, first of all, the appreciation of the Committee for
the arrangements you made last week for our visit to Lincoln.
Not only were the arrangements for the public hearing extremely
good, the arrangements went very well, but the trip that you provided
us with to have a look particularly the Washlands and the Lincoln
flood defences were very helpful in enabling us to understand
in real life what it is that we have been discussing, both in
terms of the written submissions and oral evidence that we have
had, so thank you very much for enabling that to happen. Let us
get on with our first question. The Pitt Review seems to have
followed a number of the views that you put forward in September
2007 with your own "lessons learned" inquiry. Did you
have a lot of discussion with Sir Michael about your own views
ahead of him publishing his interim report?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
had a lot of contact with the Pitt team, because, obviously, they
were interested in getting quite a lot of information and evidence
from us and also they wanted to make sure that what they were
proposing was actually practical and doable, but they were very
much their own people, so we do not entirely agree with everything
that is in the Pitt Report but we are pleased with many of the—
Q885 Chairman:
What do you not agree with?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
think it is fine tuning rather than big recommendations. We want
to take a very careful look at the issue, for example, of surface
water flooding, mapping and warning. We think that we can do something
on a fairly broad scale for key emergency partners, but we are
not sure, in fact we are pretty unsure, that the technology is
either there sufficiently robustly for meteorological predictions
about where the rain is going to fall or, indeed, for having fine-grain
information about what impact that rain will have on surface water
flooding, bearing in mind how complex all these urban settings
are and how even a few hundred yards makes a difference, depending
on where the rain falls, and also some of the issues of the dynamic
nature of urban systems. It just takes somebody to concrete over
their patio or drop the edge of the pavement and water will flood
in very different ways. We want to be moving forward on the surface
water issue as far as we can, but we are perhaps a bit less sanguine
than Sir Michael about what is or is not possible at this current
time.
Q886 Chairman:
Sir Michael has gained a lot of knowledge in a very short space
of time about flooding and he has produced a very long shopping
list of things which effectively constitute his recommendations,
but it is a menu without prices at this stage. Have you done a
back-of-the-envelope costing, by any chance, of any or all of
his recommendations?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: The
only work that we have done so far is some very, very immediate
stuff on the things that we have been asked to do within the next
three to four months basically. We did not see any point in trying
to second-guess the work that he is now undertaking to put prices
against his recommendations for his final report. Phil Rothwell
may want to comment.
Q887 Chairman:
It looks quite pricey though, does it not? There is a long list.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Flood
risk management does not come cheap at all. I think, certainly
for the areas which we are interested in, Pitt does a couple of
things. One is it is about focusing and sharpening the collaboration
and the focus of things that people are doing already: so it is
about spending the existing money more wisely. I think also it
is about how we get a better sense of priorities in all of this
amongst partners, but there is certainly, in terms of particularly
the urban flooding setting and the surface water issue, quite
a range of work that needs to be done. The blessing, if there
is a blessing, is that it is spread amongst quite a wide number
of actors. If you look at some of the surface water issues, they
have got water company actions, there are local authority actions,
there will be some that can be funded through developers or re-developers,
there may well be some that arise from work that the Highways
Authority or, indeed, the Highways Agency need to carry out, and
so to some extend it will be up to a whole range of people to
put their hands in their pockets, so it will be less of a burden
on one particular group of people though, of course, much of this
comes back at the end of the day to either the charge payer or
the tax payer.
Q888 Chairman:
We are going to look in some detail at money in a moment when
Dr Strang takes up that line of questioning, but you said a moment
ago, "Nothing comes cheaply when it comes to flooding."
The Secretary of State today has issued a press release and he
tells us that he is allocating £34.5 million which he says
may be needed to implement Sir Michael Pitt's recommendations.
He is not sure whether he needs all of that money, but £34.5
million does not sound like a great deal of money in the great
order of things in terms of the nation's budget which we are spending
annually on flood prevention. How is Sir Michael so cheap?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
think you have got to look at the timescale of that and also this
business of whether it all needs to come from the public purse
or whether it comes from a variety of stakeholders. What Defra
have allocated is really only for the next three years and, of
course, many of the Pitt—
Q889 Chairman:
So, that is ten million a year to implement Pitt over the next
three years.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No,
I think that is annual. Is that an annual figure, David? It is
a total figure. It is really only going to kick off some of the
big national things that Defra will have to fund. A huge amount
of the Pitt recommendations, of course, will not, in my view,
be for Defra funding to carry out, and, of course, many of the
Pitt recommendations are not going to be solved within a three-year
period of the Spending Review. We have always made the point that
the Spending Review funding that we got from the Prime Minister
in the midst of the floods was the right trajectory but that we
were not yet at the right end-point. Even the Foresight study,
some years ago now, pointed out that there needed to be about
a billion pounds in flood risk management. Of course we are at
the upper end at 800 million at the end of the three years.
Q890 Chairman:
We will come back to that, because I am struggling to understand
how Pitt can be implemented so cheaply over a three-year period
at a time when you also, rightly, pointed out to us that Sir Michael's
next range of tasks was to cost out his proposals. It is almost
as if Defra have jumped the gun and said, "Well, Sir Michael,
you can have £34.5 million. That is all you are getting.
Get on with it."
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No,
I think the reality is, if you look at what Pitt is proposing,
it is only a proportion of that that will come from Defra funding
or, indeed, from the public purse nationally, from taxation funding,
and there are quite a number of Pitt recommendations that will
have to be funded through the normal funding mechanisms.
Q891 Chairman:
Let me ask you about one that is not in his list, but we asked
Sir Michael when he came here whether he relished the idea of
almost being the nations flood Tsar? In other words, he is in
a very privileged position because he has spent his time so far
talking to everybody who has got anything to say about flooding,
he has been out and about, he has seen flooding for himself, he
seems to have very quickly acquired a great deal knowledge about
flooding and one of the thrusts of what you said, what local authorities
have said, just about everybody has said, is there has got to
be some kind of new co-ordinatory mechanism to improve the nation's
response to flooding, so has Defra had any words with you about
modifying the Environment Agency to incorporate Sir Michael in
some new role as the flood supremo?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No,
and I think it would be rather unwise to predicate the co-ordination
for flood risk management all on one person. Sir Michael might
get run down by a bus tomorrow, and that would be unfortunate,
but, nevertheless, it is a rather high-risk strategy to put all
your eggs in one basket. Certainly, if you look at what needs
to be co-ordinated, it will depend on medium to long-term relationships
being developed between a whole variety of organisations that
can neither be simply swept up into one organisation nor could
be co-ordinated, I think, by a single person or a single responsible
secretariat.
Q892 Chairman:
I was thinking it might be when we asked him the question as to
whether there would be a role for somebody like him within your
agency because of the body of knowledge which he has built up.
In other words, he has got an overall picture and he is not already
part of the current superstructure, if you like, so here we have
a new broom sweeping clean in the world of flooding who could
bring things together. I was just interested to know whether Defra
had probed you about having somebody like that. Maybe not him
specifically, but a role created within your organisation to achieve
this bringing together which everybody says is so important.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
would hesitate to propose that role, because though Sir Michael
is a very fine man and has got a lot of experience now, the reality
is that we want mechanisms that will be robust for several years,
many years, and unless he takes a job that is totally about flood
risk management, he is going to get quite rusty quite quickly.
As soon as you are out of the inquiry, as you well know, things
move on and your experience becomes less relevant. But certainly,
if Sir Michael would like to join our Board, I am sure he would
be very welcome, though I think we have to make sure that we are
not setting up some sort of parallel decision-making and strategy
formation mechanism that would cut across the role of the Board
of the Environment Agency and, indeed, the role of other organisations
that have got to play a key part in flood risk management.
Q893 Chairman:
It is not often you get a job offer like that advertised in the
select committee!
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
pay extremely badly.
Q894 Chairman:
Splendid. Can we look critically for a second at Pitt before we
move on. You have been very kind about what he has had to say,
but, seriously, are there any weaknesses in any of the recommendations
that you feel you ought to draw our attention to?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Phil
Rothwell, who has been working very closely with the Pitt team,
will probably want to comment. I think the only concern we have
got really is that we do not become over confident about the ability
to warn people about surface water flooding, both because the
meteorological input is not yet there and may never be either.
These things vary with very small geography, the predictions about
weather vary slightly slower than the weather varies, so if you
have got fast-moving weather fronts dumping large quantities of
water in a rather unpredictable way on systems that are also quite
unpredictable because they are dynamic and you have then got to
translate that into a warning to people who may be miles away
at work and who we know, from experience, as yet do not do enough
when they are warned, you have got to question the cost-effectiveness
of a big amount of investment in that. We are moving ahead on
mapping for the risk and carrying forward the Pitt recommendations,
the urgent ones, but we really need to bottom out what the spend
looks like.
Q895 Chairman:
We will have some more specific questions later both on communication
and on the question of mapping, but Mr Rothwell, do you want to
add to that?
Mr Rothwell: The mapping one is
particularly pertinent.
Chairman: We are going to come to talk
about mapping. If you can stay your hand on that until we get
there, then you can have full rein.
Q896 Paddy Tipping:
Remind us: big new capital schemes are allocated and decided nationally
on the basis of a cost benefit analysis. That is right?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: They
are allocated on the basis of a priority scoring system, one element
of which is a cost benefit analysis. There are two other elements,
one social and one environmental, and then there is a thing we
call a moderation process, which is basically looking at the programme
that that produces and thinking: is this sensible? Are there other
issues that need the application of the human brain and judgment
in order to produce a balanced programme?
Q897 Paddy Tipping:
How do the Regional Flood Defence Committees fit into this?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Of
course, we are in a period of change from the old system which
existed five years ago whereby Regional Flood Defence Committees
were allocated funding and made decisions within that funding
on schemes, so there was a regional programme rather than a national
programme. The changes that were made under the Making Space
for Water strategy were about creating a national approach
to prioritisation and a national role for the Agency in making
sure that we had a consistent way of operating and a consistent
way of deciding on priorities across the whole country, and that
is the transitional point we are in. On a national basis, we very
much work closely with the Regional Flood Defence Committees:
they prepare their medium term plans, we look at what they have
put forward by way of proposals. In the interests of forestalling
questions about some of the allocations this year, inevitably
what they put forward is more than the money that will be available.
We try to restrain over exuberance on that point, because there
is no point working up schemes that simply are not going to be
able to be funded, and then the prioritisation process takes place,
both through the priority score process and through the moderation,
and we end up with a national programme which, hopefully, meets
many of the needs of the medium term programmes that the Regional
Flood Defence Committees have drawn up but will not meet all of
them because the bill is always bigger than we have got, even
with additional funding.
Q898 Paddy Tipping:
The focus of public policy at the moment is around devolving decisions
and devolving resources, and it seems to me that you are running
counter to that, taking decisions nationally. The second point
is you talked about the EA Board. That is appointed by the Secretary
of State but, as I understand it, the regional bodies are composed
more than half by local elected politicians who are in touch with
people who are making a levy locally. There just seems to be some
tension in this arrangement.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
think it is quite a useful split, to be honest. The reason why
the changes were made to go to a national system from a local
system was because, with the size of the programmes we have, and
bearing in mind the size of some of these individual schemes that
we have, it is simply not good value for money; it is not the
most effective way of spending money to do it piecemeal, on a
regional basis, indeed, at a time when we had more flood defence
committees five years ago than we do now and they had budgets
that, quite frankly, they had to save up for years before they
could buy themselves a decent scheme, so it was really not an
effective way of using money. If we went to the point—dream
on—where we had four times as much money—I do not
think we ever will and I am not sure what the number would be
that we would want, and certainly not four times; I regret saying
that—it might well be that you would have a sufficiently
big amount to be able to devolve again but we are far away from
that at the moment. There are some major benefits also in taking
a much wider scale view. We are working on a long-term investment
strategy at the moment and all of the advice that we are getting
externally is that the more we can bring together money into much
bigger programmes, the more we are able to get much better value
for money. I do not think that would be possible with a regional,
fully devolved situation, which is the one we have just come from
a few years ago. In terms of the Secretary of State appointees
and the local authority appointees, I think the system we have
gets the benefit of both. The local authority appointees on the
regional flood defence committees can bring both local authority
and local community input. The national people who are appointed
by the Secretary of State can look at the national priorities,
what both Government and Environment Agency priorities are and
take a view, and also benefit from the national expertise and
experience that we can corral on a national basis. So we get the
benefit of that and, of course, on the local levy, which is a
small-ish but very important part of the budget that is still
raised by the local authorities, the decisions on what is spent
from the local levies lies entirely with the regional flood defence
committees and the local people who raised that money in the first
place.
Q899 Paddy Tipping:
Could you remind us what the total amount of the local levy is,
and what proportion it is of the national pot? If you cannot do
it now, you can drop us a note.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
can do it now but David will probably remember it much better.
Mr Rooke: It is £27 million.
So for the forthcoming financial year our committees have raised
£27 million locally.
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