Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee 

Oral evidence: Flooding, HC 546

Tuesday 20 February 2024

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 February 2024.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Sir Robert Goodwill (Chair); Steven Bonnar; Ian Byrne; Rosie Duffield; Barry Gardiner; Mrs Sheryll Murray; Cat Smith; Julian Sturdy.

Questions 1 - 61

Witnesses

I: Julie Foley, Director, Environment Agency; Tracey Garrett, Chief Executive, National Flood Forum; Martin Lines, Chief Executive, Nature Friendly Farming Network; Cllr Emily O’Brien, Deputy Chair, People and Places Board, Local Government Association.

Written evidence from witnesses:

- National Flood Forum

Examination of witnesses

Julie Foley, Tracey Garrett, Martin Lines and Emily O’Brien.

Q1                Chair: Welcome to this one-off session of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee on flooding, which is particularly well timed, given the weather that we have been having. As a farmer, I can attest to the fact that we have had wet weather since the beginning of October. It is due to rain tomorrow in Yorkshire, and it is probably the wettest winter on record. I would not be surprised if it was.

We have seen a number of major storms, including Storm Babet, where 2,146 homes were flooded, and Storm Henk, where 2,200 homes were flooded. I also read that, in the case of Babet, 96,000 homes were protected by flood defence schemes, and 102,000 were protected in the case of Storm Henk, but, as we know, the BBC does not go and film pictures of dry houses that have been protected by flood defence schemes. I am sure that it is always a frustration, not only for politicians but for those engaged in building flood defence schemes, that their successes are rarely lauded in the same way as where problems happen.

We have four excellent witnesses. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves for the record?

Tracey Garrett: My name is Tracey Garrett. I am the CEO of the National Flood Forum, which is an independent charity set up to support communities at flood risk.

Emily O’Brien: I am Councillor Emily O’Brien from Lewes District Council on the south coast. I am here on behalf of the Local Government Association. I am deputy chair of the people and places board there.

Martin Lines: I am Martin Lines. I am a farmer in Cambridgeshire and chief exec of the Nature Friendly Farming Network.

Q2                Chair: Has it been wet there this winter as well?

Martin Lines: Yes.

Julie Foley: I am Julie Foley. I am director of flood risk strategy and national adaptation at the Environment Agency.

Q3                Chair: I will start the questioning with one that probably does not apply to Martin, who will make up for it later, I am sure. Can you describe the role of your organisation in flood prevention and mitigation, and how you work with other responsible parties to achieve those goals?

Julie Foley: The Environment Agency has a very wide-ranging role. Under the Flood and Water Management Act, we have a strategic overview of all sources of flooding—rivers, the sea and coasts—as well as groundwater. We have operational responsibilities for flooding from rivers and the sea. We work really closely with other flood risk management authorities, so lead local flood authorities, internal drainage boards, water companies and others.

One of the ways in which we do that is by setting the national strategy for the nation. We have a flood and coastal erosion risk management strategy, which was laid in Parliament a few years ago. It provides the linchpin for the activities that flood risk management authorities undertake.

We also have other duties. We have responsibilities when it comes to flood warning, where we work very closely with the Met Office. We also deliver the Government’s investment programmes when it comes to flood and coastal erosion risk management in terms of both capital investments and maintenance investments.

Chair: We will go to Tracey next, as we are cascading down from national through to local.

Tracey Garrett: My organisation was set up 20 years ago by flooded people to support those at risk of flooding. In what ways do we do that? We have several services. We offer information services via a helpline that people at risk of flooding can call at any time. We do recovery services immediately after a flood, where we will go in and support different communities, working with the EA and local authorities. We also do our longer-term community work, which is flood action groups, where we advocate for a collaborative approach, working with local authorities, the Environment Agency and water companies to co-create solutions for people who have been flooded.

At the moment, we work on lots of projects. We are also working with the Environment Agency on four of the resilience and innovation projects. We also run the all-party parliamentary group on flood prevention.

Q4                Chair: How are you funded?

Tracey Garrett: We have project funding through those different mechanisms and we fundraise. We do not have any core funding from the Government, for example.

Emily O’Brien: Local authorities play a really key role when there is flooding. We often bring local leadership when there is an emergency flooding situation, but we also play an important role in the prevention agenda. Lead local flood authorities have a responsibility for looking at flooding across their area. We very often also work in partnership settings, because flooding and flood prevention in one place is very different from in another. We play a role through those partnership structures. In some areas, that is internal drainage boards. In my area, we have catchment partnerships playing a role in natural flood management.

Q5                Chair: When I was a Transport Minister, David Cameron appointed me floods envoy for the north-east when we had flooding in Cockermouth and elsewhere in Cumbria. I was pleased to see how everybody was working very much together, as well as the emergency services. Emily, is my experience typical? Are the organisations and various bodies working well together or are there ways in which we could improve that functionality, where you have a number of public and voluntary bodies and local government trying to do the best for their communities, not only in terms of planning for flood investment but also when there is a major incident?

Emily O’Brien: It is a “yes” and a “no” on those, or a “yes” and a “yes, we could do better in some cases”. One thing that works really well is when we take a joined-up approach, whether that is in a strategic sense by aligning our planning timescales and cycles with the Environment Agency and water companies, so that we are all working together, or whether it is going that bit further.

One of the problems that we have at the minute is that quite considerable amounts of funding go into flood prevention through the Environment Agency, but it is sometimes quite difficult for local authorities to access that. Particularly for some of those natural flood management schemes that many of us are very keen to take a lead on, the process can be quite bureaucratic.

We have moved on a little bit from these days, but I remember talking to a councillor in Stroud, after they had had terrible flooding there and done some really interesting catchment-based stuff, who said, “We cannot apply for any money for this because it is not concrete”. It has to be grey defences, as it were, or concrete defences. Fortunately, we have moved along from that, which we really welcome.

We hear from councils that the process of applying for some of the money that is on offer is so expensive and bureaucratic that it can end up costing more than the natural flood management solutions that we want to come up with, or, indeed, some of the hard solutions. It is particularly true of those more innovative methods.

In an ideal world, as the Local Government Association speaking for councils, we would really like to see a single pot that goes to local areas to be managed in a partnership way, so that we have all the key players around the table aligning their plans and strategies, but also able to access that money without having to jump through hoops that act as a deterrent. Inevitably, in our local areas, we know where we are at risk of flooding most of all, and we are also often aware of local solutions. We have a lot of information about our areas.

Q6                Chair: Have you floated that idea with Ministers either at housing and local government level or at Defra?

Emily O’Brien: I can follow up with colleagues from the Local Government Association, who can write afterwards and clarify that.

Q7                Chair: We have the Secretary of State coming quite soon, so we can probably put that on our list of asks to him.

Emily O’Brien: We would be very excited if you did that. Thank you.

Julie Foley: Just to add to Emily’s points, I mentioned that the Environment Agency has a national strategy for flood and coastal erosion risk management, which was agreed by the Government a couple of years ago. A really important shift in that strategy was putting climate resilience and adaptation at the heart of all of our work on flood and coastal risk management. We fully recognise that it is really important to continue to invest in engineered flood and sea defences and to maintain those assets.

Q8                Chair: The balance between capital investment and maintenance is going to come up later.

Julie Foley: I am happy to cover that in a moment. Equally, we recognise that we need to shift towards a broader range of resilience actions. It was a really central component of our strategy. That includes nature-based solutions. It includes property flood resilience. It also includes ensuring that the planning system operates in the best way to avoid inappropriate development in the floodplain. We have been doing a lot of work to mainstream natural flood management measures, notably in the last few years, and I am happy to give you more detail on that if you would like me to elaborate on that a little later on. That is a very central part of our work as well.

Q9                Chair: Tracey, when there is a big flood event, people typically get £500 to help with the costs before the insurance bid. A lot of that goes on things like skips, does it not? There are also £5,000 grants for making homes more resilient. Are you actively involved in engaging with homeowners who have been flooded?

Tracey Garrett: Because we do not have any core funding, we are not able to just go to any area that needs support. We have to be employed by either the Environment Agency or the local authority. When it comes to the £5,000, because there is no set governance around it for the homeowners or the communities, it is often not clear for quite some time whether they will receive that £5,000. Once they receive it, there are concerns at a local authority level about the administration of it. From the community perspective, they need to, from the £5,000, get a survey and buy as much PFR as they can, which also includes a contractor, so that money does not go very far in terms of increasing their resilience.

Q10            Chair: Do they get the money up front and then have to demonstrate how they have spent it?

Tracey Garrett: They get the money afterwards, so they have to pay it up front and then recoup.

Q11            Chair: Martin, landowners and farmers have a big part to play in protecting their own land but also, in some cases, creating floodplains and holding back water through various schemes. How do you feel that landowners are being included in this? Has it worked well or could more be done to ensure that we have this joined-up approach to flood alleviation and defences?

Martin Lines: There is a lot more that can be done. Where it is working, it is doing some really good stuff. People have been putting natural flood defences in place, slowing the flow of water and using the Government-funded schemes in England—SFI and ELMS—to put things in place that can slow the flow and to get rewarded for storing water on what was cropland. You can do arable reversion into species-rich grassland, and those options are becoming available.

It is about recognising the role of the landscape to hold and slow the flow of water, but there are other places where it needs to expand and have that opportunity. The part that is really lacking is clear direction from Government, with advice on the ground and a landscape plan for what needs to happen where. We know that flooding is going to get worse. We know that it is going to impact farmers and the wider community more, but what role can they play in holding and storing water? Where are the priorities for slowing that flow of water down and helping farmers to understand the actions that they can put in place and what that infrastructure may mean?

Farmers are trying to run a business, and the impact of flooding is devastating, as it is for everyone else. There are huge opportunities to get rewards for changing land use slightly in areas to allow flooding or to add more trees to slow the flow of water. You can get paid for the trees, but you also have an area that can get flooded. It is just about having that localised knowledge and support. That needs to work with a whole range of organisations, from Defra down. We need to have a local approach to what the priorities are in a catchment.

Q12            Chair: Is the work of drainage boards valued sufficiently and are they allowed to do what they want to do, without interference from other interests that might not want to clean out the dikes?

Martin Lines: There are many people who have an interest in the landscape, wildlife and other things, and everyone needs to have a common understanding of what the priorities and needs are, what the balance is for biodiversity, nature and habitat, and where there is a need to remove some vegetation from places to allow the water to move at the pace at which it needs to.

We need to understand the difference between an inland drainage board, where it is on a flat landscape, and a river catchment, where we need to have room for it to expand. We know that many areas have had development come in, so that area that has been protected is now having to go somewhere else. That needs to be recognised in terms of the opportunity and the challenges for farmers.

Q13            Chair: I suspect that this question is probably best answered by Julie. How will local area initiatives such as the Somerset Rivers Authority or the Severn Valley Water Management Scheme help? Is that a model for future catchment area schemes or full river schemes?

Julie Foley: Both of those are really good examples of where we work in partnership locally. They are very different in their focus and how they are put together. The Severn Valley work, for example, has been convened with the Environment Agency in partnership with Shropshire Council as part of a wider River Severn Partnership. Needless to say, the River Severn has had enormous amounts of flooding in recent years and has been hugely impacted. The work in the Severn is looking at nature-based solutions, for example, and, exactly as Martin described, upland storage and making space for water. We are doing quite a lot of pioneering pilots around the Severn, given that it is such an enormous catchment.

In Somerset and in other geographies that are very low-lying, such as the Fens, there are similar challenges. There is very important farmland, and we are working really closely with farmers and land managers to look at future solutions. The strategic partnerships that we have vary locally and are very different. As Emily was rightly saying, no parts of the country are the same. The Environment Agency is a national body, but we have local area teams who will consider the best solutions in local areas and work very collaboratively with local partners. We will always be looking at the best type of strategic solution that reflects the realities of the geography.

A different type of partnership that is under way at the moment in London is looking at some of the surface water challenges. Surface water flooding in London is another very big challenge. With the GLA, the Environment Agency is co-chairing the London strategic water partnership. As you can see, with different types of partnerships around the country, we will have a bespoke approach in order to find the best solutions.

Q14            Chair: When we had all that flooding on the Somerset levels, there was a real conflict between farmers who were saying, “Dredge the rivers; dredge the dikes”, and environmentalists who were saying, “No, we have this fantastic habitat”. Do you need the wisdom of Solomon to get the right balance between the two?

Julie Foley: The Environment Agency has a number of duties. When you are talking about our rivers and watercourses, as well as trying to convey water as quickly as possible through those watercourses and do river channel maintenance in the way that we should, we also have environmental duties and responsibilities that we rightly need to consider, such as the ecology of the river environment and the impact on the habitat. When we are asked about dredging or desilting, for example, or whatever it happens to be called in a location, we will always consider that on a case-by-case basis. It will be part of our routine maintenance regime, where that is the best flood risk solution.

I say that carefully, because dredging or desilting will not be the best long-term flood risk solution in all circumstances. Any flood risk solution that we take forward needs to be value for money, because we are spending public money, but it also needs to demonstrate that it is not going to cause undue harm to the environment as well. We factor in all of those points, looking at the best river management solutions for a particular river environment.

Q15            Chair: Would it be fair to say that, maybe a decade ago, we had swung a little too far to the side of environmental habitat creation, and maybe not quite as much in terms of removing water from the land? Have we swung back to a more balanced situation, or is that just a perception that farmers tell me?

Julie Foley: It would depend on different stakeholder views around that, because you would get different stakeholder perspectives. As the Environment Agency, we need to balance all of those interests, because our water and river environments also have important roles in water abstraction and irrigation. At all different points of the year, we need to balance our water systems for too much and too little water.

From the Environment Agency’s point of view, we would take all of those factors very seriously in terms of the flood risk benefits that we need to consider, the wider water ecology benefits, and the rights and interests of different water stakeholders.

Chair: We do not seem to have had many Goldilocks years where it has been just right in the winter and in the summer. It has always been too wet in winter and too dry in summer.

Q16            Rosie Duffield: This is mostly for Julie and Emily. How has our understanding of flood risks changed in recent years? Do decision-makers have enough data to account for future risks? Presumably, the 10 storms that we have had since September have increased that data quite quickly.

Emily O’Brien: One of the impacts that we are seeing is the playing out of climate change. Clearly, there are some risks that we know about and some that we do not, in terms of how things look going forward. One of the things that we are already aware of—I am sure that, as elected representatives, you are experiencing this as well—is a big increase in flash flooding and surface water flooding, which is just so devastating for our communities.

It is important to remember that the impact is not just the huge cost—we talked a bit about the cost of clean-up bills, which are huge—but also the mental health costs on our communities. In Lewes, there is still an element of trauma from the very severe flooding that took place in 2000, which is etched in our community memory. There is also the widespread impact of that surface water and those challenges on water quality. When our surface water drainage systems get overwhelmed, our rivers and seas get polluted, and that has become a really increasing worry that I have seen for councils of all kinds around the country.

I cannot give you a clear answer to your question, but we know that we are already having to respond in ways that we have not had to before.

Chair: We like a bit of honesty when people genuinely do not know what the solution is and tell us so.

Julie Foley: I am happy to build on that. One in six properties across England are at risk of flooding from all sources. That is 5.5 million homes and businesses. Emily is right to flag the challenges of surface water flooding, which is a growing risk. There are 3.4 million properties at risk of surface water flooding, so that is a growing area for attention for us as well.

What we definitely know is that the frequency and severity of the kinds of floods and storm surges that we are seeing are worsening. Just looking back on the floods that we have had this winter season—I should add that we are not yet out of this winter season—with Babet, Ciarán and Henk, we had some of the wettest months on record since 2000 in the lead-up to December. During Storm Henk, some of our major river systems, including the Trent, the Thames, the Severn and the Avon, all had close to record-breaking levels. The Trent had some of the highest levels in nearly 20 years. All of this is telling us that the kinds of flood events that we are experiencing are becoming more and more challenging.

In terms of the statistics that I gave you, one of the key duties and roles of the Environment Agency is to understand both present and future flood risk. We do that through a model called the national assessment of flood risk, or NaFRA, to use the acronym. It provides an assessment of all types of flooding. It is much stronger at the moment for understanding flooding for rivers and the sea, because that has always been a much stronger area for our evidence. It has also been focused on looking at present day flood risk.

We are in the process right now of working very hard to update the national flood risk assessment, so we are building a new flood risk model. We are working side by side with local authorities around the country to build in their local modelling, particularly linked to surface water flooding, which is where local authorities lead, so that we can develop a much better understanding of flood risk.

We are also, importantly, building in climate change modelling, because we know that our present day understanding of flood risk is going to change a lot in decades to come. That will enable us to put some of our investments, as well as the strategic planning that we do for flood and coast, on a much more decadal footing, so that we look out not just for the next spending review period, which is quite short-term when it comes to climate and flood adaptation, but out to 2100 in terms of doing more considered flood and coastal strategic planning. That is going to be a significant advancement in our understanding of flood risk.

Q17            Rosie Duffield: To what extent are investments in flood defences undermined by risks arising elsewhere, for instance as the condition of assets declines, or the impact of climate change, which you have just touched on? I know that local authorities and the Environment Agency are not exactly overwhelmed with funds. Is that impacting data collection and planning?

Emily O’Brien: One of the biggest challenges that local authorities are facing is that the very stretched local picture means that many of us are really struggling to do even the basics that we have to do. It is really not the glamorous stuff. It is clearing the ditches and those very basic things. One of our asks would be about redirecting spend to local levels so that we can do that preventive work, but there is also something about ensuring that the money that comes to local government allows us to just be able to function and do those local basics. We are always grateful for the ears of Ministers on local authority funding.

There are two really big barriers. One is the levels of funding, which are really stretched, and we need to see better local government settlements. There is also capacity. A recent study found that only a third of risk management authorities—those with a flood responsibility—have a full complement of staff to deliver surface water management. Three-quarters of risk management authorities are struggling to recruit new staff, so there are huge resource pressures. We are hoping that the new Flood and Water Management Act will provide some clarity around the role of local authorities going forward.

In particular, we need to know a bit more about the timetable and about the additional burdens funding that we are assuming will come with those extra responsibilities. We do not have enough staff with enough skills, and some of these skills are for things like natural flood management, which are genuinely new. Some of it is about having the capacity to invest in skills and to help ensure that we have the staff who can meet those challenges in the future.

Julie Foley: I might just break down the two points in your question. In terms of understanding risk, we will see wider societal changes in terms of land use, housing development and climate change, as well as the state of our assets and the extent to which they are deteriorating. These are impacting on and providing a counterbalance to the investments that we are making in flood risk management. Whenever we are investing in more flood protection of whatever kind—engineered or nature-based—we are always working against a net change and understanding of risk.

Something that a number of other learned organisations such as the Climate Change Committee, the National Infrastructure Commission and, more recently, the NAO have picked up on is the need to develop a better understanding of net changes in risk. That is something that we agree with. The new national assessment of flood risk that I mentioned will enable us to much better understand and measure changes in risk over time, so that we can understand how the investments that we are making today are making a difference when you bear in mind population growth, housing growth and all the other societal pressures that we have.

Could I just make a point on resources? Emily has made some really important points. We work really closely, not only with the LGA but also with bodies such as ADEPT, to support local authorities with skills and capacity building. As a public body, we have a lot of sympathy for the constraints and challenges on skills. Across the flood sector, there is a real challenge at the moment, no matter what body you are in, around retention and recruitment of skills. We have challenges recruiting flood risk engineers, for example, so it is a challenge across the sector.

We have been looking to help as much as we can. For example, we have worked with the Town and Country Planning Association to deliver training to town and country planners and local planning authorities to support their understanding of flood risk and development and to try to avoid inappropriate development in the floodplain, so that we can make the right no-regrets planning choices.

We have also been working with risk management authorities around the country to deliver training for property flood resilience, which is a new and emerging area. We have been looking to streamline as many of our processes as possible to make it as easy as possible to get funding, particularly for smaller surface water projects, which tend to be under £3 million. We are streamlining our business cases and making it as straightforward as possible for a local authority or any partner to get its projects into construction as soon as possible.

The final thing that I would point to is that we have recently launched a new SharePoint site for all risk management authorities, which local authorities and others can freely access. It provides open information on training, guidance and support on taking forward a flood and coastal project. We are very much here to support and are looking to step into that enabling space, particularly when it comes to supporting our local authority partners on the challenges around surface water flooding.

Q18            Chair: On the point about building on floodplains, which everybody would agree was a bad idea, if you have some houses already on the floodplain and a developer comes in to build some additional ones, but, as part of that new development, puts in flood protection, would that make sense or would it just put more houses at risk?

Julie Foley: You would look at every application on an individual basis, so it is difficult to comment on a generality. Building behind flood defences is not necessarily going to be a desirable option, particularly when you bear in mind that flood and climate challenges will only be increasing.

Q19            Chair: Rather than one every 100 years, they are going to be every decade now, are they not?

Julie Foley: Yes. Any development that goes forward in a high flood risk area is, effectively, creating a legacy of potential regret, because that would mean more public investment in flood defences and in flood incident response and warning. We would always urge avoiding inappropriate development in high flood risk areas as the first resort. I would add that that is also Government policy. As the statutory planning adviser, one of the key roles that we have is to ensure that planning policy is effectively provided through the advice.

Chair: That makes sense. Some of the developers quite fancy getting some cheap land and maybe offsetting that by doing flood defences.

Q20            Mrs Murray: Julie, the Government have invested over £2.6 billion in flood defences since 2015. What kind of infrastructure has this created in both urban and rural areas? What has the impact been on communities? Could you give us an idea of what the defences look like? Have they been primarily grey defences, so conventional ones, or have other methods been tried?

Julie Foley: We are now on our second long-term investment programme. The current one runs from 2021 to 2027. It is £5.2 billion in totality. Over the course of the last investment period and the current one that we are still in, we have had a very good track record of better protecting a lot of properties. Across the country, the total number of properties better protected since 2015 is now 374,000.

It is important to point out that that is not just the Environment Agency’s projects. Half of our investment programme is local authority-led projects, and many local authorities do a really exceptional job in delivering great projects alongside the Environment Agency, working in partnership.

The other really important point to make is that we also have regional flood and coastal committees, which are statutory bodies with independent chairs appointed by Ministers. They are also made up of local elected members who help to steer local choices about the right kinds of investments, so that we achieve the best flood risk benefits. In some cases, that may be hard-engineered flood defences, flood barriers or coastal sea defences. In a lot of cases, it may also be property flood resilience, natural flood management, and a wider range of community resilience projects.

We recently developed with Government a new £25 million natural flood management programme, which I can elaborate on if you would like more detail. We also have a lot of property flood resilience investment on our programme. Something like 90% of all property flood resilience in England, in terms of resistance measures such flood doors, flood gates and those kinds of options, comes from the Environment Agency’s investment programme.

Q21            Mrs Murray: Has investment equitably targeted different types of infrastructure that can benefit a wide variety of communities? If not, what changes could be made to the way that it is allocated? Martin, you are representing a different sector here, so I will come to you first.

Martin Lines: Many farmers and land managers have looked at the investment from Defra and at using stewardship schemes. There have been other opportunities for bringing funding in. As a farmer, that is the key thing that you can get easy access to and put mitigation and delivery opportunities through.

Looking at the wider landscape where harder infrastructure is put in place, which impacts farmers through grazing areas and putting earth bunds in, that is working with the authorities to see how you can make that benefit work, particularly where that is going to need some change in management. Where you have had access to land that is on the other side of a bund, how are you going to manage it? How are you going to remove animals? How is that notification going to go?

It is about working hand-in-hand and about land managers understanding what needs to happen and how they get the rewards and the recognition for helping to protect the wider community. A recognition of the impact that that has on individual farmers for helping society in managing flood water has not been there in the past. They need better recognition and funding to implement a change of business model, because it has big impacts on some farmers in particular. How can we join that up in a progressive, whole landscape or catchment approach, with all the advice and the need? We know that flooding is going to have devastating impacts on many farmers. How do we help them understand and plan a business where we can put the mitigation and investment in the right places?

Emily O’Brien: There is, inevitably, some inequity around how we support people to be resilient. From a local government point of view, we would like to see changes to building regulations, so that we include some mandatory flood protection measures for all new dwellings. Those would require developers to introduce things such as raised electrical sockets, fuse boxes, controls and wiring, sealed floors and raised damp-proof courses.

There is a cost to developers around those measures, but, in terms of ensuring equity going forward, it feels really important. It needs some refinement. It could be that somebody at the top of the hill really does not need those measures in a new development, but, on the other hand, as we have heard earlier, with the increasing risks that we are facing, no one is completely safe from flooding. Those kinds of resilience measures are really important.

Echoing Tracey’s point about the resilience funding that has come through, we have picked up some real inequities about how that has been distributed. There have been 10 named storms in the winter of 2023 to 2024. The Government in England activated the flood recovery framework after Storm Babet and Storm Henk, but no emergency funding was activated through the Bellwin scheme, which is when you get the bigger-scale cleanup money. That did not happen.

In terms of the money that was released, some of our council members have raised concerns about the fact that there were some thresholds around it that played out in an odd way. That would be quite an easy fix. All of these things are difficult, but a quicker win might be around the 50 property threshold. To achieve that threshold, you needed to have 50 homes within a local authority area, which disadvantaged some rural areas where properties are very spread out. It has also disadvantaged areas where 50 properties were affected, but there happened to be a local authority boundary in the middle. If you had 30 in one and 30 in another, you did not reach the 50 property threshold, so that funding was not triggered. Unfortunately, our river catchments and flooding areas do not neatly respect our local authority boundaries, so that is another way in which we would like to see that made more equitable.

Tracey Garrett: From a community perspective, the current approach of mainstreaming PFR as one of the interventions is quite a challenge and very complicated for flooded people. It is very costly for a start. Many people ring our helpline and want to do as much as they can in terms of protecting their properties, but, at roughly £2,500 for a flood door, it is very prohibitive. What we really need is the right solution in the right place.

When we look at property flood resilience, for example, in a row of terraced houses, if every property in that terrace has property flood resilience, there may be increased protection. If one of those properties is not protected in the same way, it can lead to all of the properties in that row flooding.

There are very specific circumstances where it works very well, and we would always say that it is one of the tools in the arsenal, but that lots more communitywide schemes are also needed. It puts a lot of strain on the individual. For example, many people report that they dare not go on holiday. They are constantly watching the weather. If they are away and it floods, they are not there to put their flood protection into place, so it increases their stress levels more and more. A lot of people are not fit enough to put in a great big, heavy barrier. We would like to see a much more holistic approach, which puts the right solution in the right place, even if that solution is slightly more costly.

Q22            Mrs Murray: I am very aware that we could have votes coming, so I will just ask the final part of my question. Do we have a full understanding of the impact that flooding can have on individuals and businesses, so that any return on investment can be properly calculated?

Julie Foley: We know that our flood investment programmes have always been really good value for money, particularly when you compare them with other public investment programmes. Our current investment programme has a five-to-one return. For every pound invested, £5 of economic damages are avoided as a consequence of the investments that we make. That is for the whole portfolio of measures, so not just hard defences but natural flood management and property flood resilience. In answer to your question, it is very good value for money.

I will make a couple of points on property flood resilience, if I may. I mentioned that this is another important strand of the Environment Agency’s work. Around 90% of all property flood resilience measures are funded by the Environment Agency. Resistance measures such as flood doors, floodgates and airbrick valves are installed in people’s homes. They do not need to deploy them in a flood incident. They just operate perfectly normally as part of somebody’s house in terms of trying to keep as much water out as possible.

Where property flood resilience has been installed, it has a very significant impact on repair costs. About 70% of repair costs can be avoided where property flood resilience has been installed. I would just like to make the point that, as Tracey has been saying, it is a very important part of the portfolio of things that we should be considering in a place, particularly to help individual homeowners and business owners try to make their properties more flood resilient.

Mrs Murray: Well done, because you have answered part of the other question that I have.

Q23            Chair: Just following up on that, what proportion of flood defence schemes going forward are going to be conventional concrete schemes, how many will be natural flood management schemes, and to what extent will you be able to encourage people to put in their own flood resilience, as you have just been talking about? Is that changing as we get more experience with natural management schemes?

Julie Foley: It definitely is. Over the next couple of years, we are going to be developing our next long-term investment scenario, or LTIS, which helps to frame the Government’s long-term investment programmes. It has done for this programme. We expect that investment programme to look very different in terms of the next generation of projects. We would expect there to be more maintenance projects, for example, rather than new capital projects. We would expect there to be a lot more natural flood management, because we are seeking to mainstream that. We would expect there to be greater installation of property flood resilience in terms of helping with individual households. We do expect the portfolio of projects that we have to look very different.

In the past—and I would flag that this is definitely in the past—whenever we have thought about flood risk management in a place, it has always been, “Let us look at engineered solutions first and at other things after, if the engineered solution is not the best option”. What we know is that, in a changing climate, we cannot expect to build our way out of climate challenges, so it is really important that we look at every place in a bespoke way and at a portfolio of integrated catchment solutions.

Martin has given a number of really good examples of that, but some of those integrated catchment solutions need to be about not only flood resilience but also drought resilience, particularly when looking at measures in the landscape and wider land use. We would like our future investment programmes to be shaped to be much more around flood resilience and adaptation, which will mean looking at wider resilience actions alongside traditional engineered defences.

Q24            Ian Byrne: Staying with you, Julie, many private sector organisations benefit from flood defences, but the EA has acknowledged that getting private investment has been difficult. The NAO reports that only 9% of secured partnership funding is private, so is the partnership funding model working?

Julie Foley: That, of course, is a question for Government to consider, because the partnership funding mechanism is a policy mechanism. What I would say is that it provides a consistent way in which we allocate our funding around the country. It is primarily based on where there is the greatest flood risk, particularly to people and property, but it does weight other factors such as agricultural land and infrastructure benefits, which are also very important aspects of our work.

In the way the partnership funding model works, where there is not enough Government funding for a project to progress, we and other risk management authorities are required to bring in partnership funding contributions from other sources. The NAO was right to say this. It is information that we provided to the NAO ourselves. A lot of the funding that has come in has come from other public sources, either from local authorities or from local levy that is raised from regional flood and coastal committees.

We have been working very collaboratively with a number of private sector partners, for example water companies and energy companies that are beneficiaries of greater flood risk investment, to encourage them to invest more in our projects.

Q25            Ian Byrne: How is that going?

Julie Foley: It is not something that is mandatory for them to do, so we need to persuade them of the flood risk case, which we have been doing as best as we can.

If I could just give you a few key statistics, over this programme alone, which started in 2021, we and other risk management authorities have already secured close to £600 million of partnership funding contributions. That is in addition to Government funding and is double what we raised on the last programme, just to give you a sense of scale. Within that, we have also brought in £128 million of private sector contributions. That gives you a sense of the proportions and shows that private sector contributions are, indeed, there and have been growing, but are currently not as great as public sector contributions.

Q26            Ian Byrne: Would you accept that private sector organisations benefit from flood defences?

Julie Foley: Yes, they absolutely do.

Emily O’Brien: Private sector funding plays a really important role here. In our experience in local government, private sector contributors and, indeed, companies in the water sector, which are, surprisingly, often sited in flood risk areas, are much more likely to come forward when there is a really secure and fit-for-purpose model for the public funding. We need to get that bit right, which is why we are very focused on a more flexible funding model that is more devolved to local areas and, ideally, brings the capital and revenue funding together in a place-based pot. Having that area-based security would do a lot to encourage more private sector funding to come forward.

Q27            Ian Byrne: Martin, how easy is it for major landowners to invest in flood defences or attract private finance to do so?

Martin Lines: I am not aware of much private finance coming to private landowners. It is usually infrastructure that is imposed on landowners. Landowners can receive funding opportunities to improve soil health, and to hold and store more water and make it flow more slowly and better, such as through water companies, encouraging cover crops, and Government schemes. Many landowners put their own measures in place where they can. They might need to go for planning permission, but people are looking at how they put bunds in and other opportunities to protect their own properties and infrastructure.

Q28            Ian Byrne: Are there any barriers to that that you would want to flag?

Martin Lines: There are sometimes in terms of planning. Particularly if you are moving soil to a different place, you need to get planning permission. As a landowner, do you bother or do you just get on with it? Do you ask for forgiveness or for permission?

Q29            Ian Byrne: Julie, could tax incentives or creating a market for flood defences encourage private investment?

Julie Foley: They could do, and we are open to considering all kinds of innovative solutions.

Just to go back a step, you mentioned the beneficiaries to infrastructure sites. An interesting statistic from our own research is that over two-thirds of properties in England are served by infrastructure sites and networks located in or dependent on areas at risk of flooding, and so, when you asked the question about whether infrastructure providers benefit from investment and flood defences, of course they do.

When you look at images of flooding in real life or on the television, which no doubt we have all seen, you have seen big energy and water company substations underwater. You can see the economic implications for infrastructure resilience, so that is incredibly important. Considering different and innovative financing mechanisms to encourage infrastructure providers to be part of the solution is really important.

That is something that we see as a priority particularly along our coastline. We have shoreline management plans, which are world-leading coastal plans. We recently announced an update to the shoreline management plans with coastal authorities and coastal groups around the country, and they are climate-adaptive plans. Involvement of infrastructure providers such as water companies, telecoms companies and others in those plans tends to be very ad hoc. They are sometimes very involved, but not as much as we would like. We are very keen to see infrastructure providers being much more involved in some of our strategic flood and coastal risk management planning.

Q30            Ian Byrne: That makes total sense. On tax incentives or creating markets for flood defences to encourage private investment, Martin, is there anything that you would like to see?

Martin Lines: I would like to see a change of land use. If you are getting rewarded for flood mitigation, where does that fit into farming and food production, the tax benefits to the farming industry, and balancing that clear definition of change of land use or purpose in flood mitigation on the natural capital side? It is also about the cost of that infrastructure. If we are offering benefits to the wider community, how does that come back and fit on the balance sheet?

Q31            Chair: Julie, when I last came in, we were talking about the balance between natural and, for want of a better word, concrete flood management. What is the relative cost effectiveness of the two? People probably feel more confident sat behind a concrete wall than some reed beds a few miles upstream, but is it cheaper and more cost effective?

Julie Foley: We have done a lot of work in recent years to look at maturing our understanding of natural flood management in terms of both the flood risk benefits and the cost effectiveness of those measures, showing that they are value for money. One of the barriers to the take-up of natural flood management is understanding the flood risk and economic evidence benefits of NFM measures, particularly relative to much better understood sea and flood defences, where we have decades of evidence.

To help us overcome this, we invested in some natural flood management pilots between 2017 and 2021 that were Government-funded. It was £15 million of investment, so relatively small, but they have proved to be really effective in building the evidence base for natural flood management and helped us to build a business case for the new natural flood management programme that we have been developing with Defra, which is now £25 million. I hope that Defra Minister Robbie Moore is going to be saying more about this at the end of this week.

Q32            Chair: You have been briefed already, have you?

Julie Foley: I will not say anything further on that, but I am really pleased to say that we have had a lot of projects come forward for the expression of interest that we put out before Christmas, inviting bids from farmers, land managers, the third sector, rivers trusts and other great environmental bodies to come forward to deliver natural flood management projects.

One of the things that we did to try to help that process was to develop a new national tool for assessing the economic and flood risk benefits of natural flood management much more easily. We have been able to do that from the learning from our pilots as well as from our working with natural processes evidence directory, which the Environment Agency has been building up for a number of years now. We can now use that tool to much more swiftly assess the flood risk benefits of natural flood management measures around the country, and to do so in a much more comparable and consistent way. It is one of the many things that we are doing to help try to mainstream natural flood management, so that it can be a much more mature and established option on our next programme going forward.

Q33            Chair: Martin, you mentioned how some of the ELM schemes can incentivise a farmer to use some of his land—or her land, for that matter—to be engaged in one of these flood alleviation schemes. One of the attractions of stewardship and ELMS is that you can opt in and, maybe when your kids leave college, opt out again. Is there a worry in the farmer community that, if you do put your land forward to be in one of these schemes, it is going to be forever, because you cannot decide, “We are going to put this land back into production and get rid of the reed beds, the trees and whatever else has been planted”?

Martin Lines: It all depends on the level of scheme and ambition that you go into. The SFI is for three years, stewardship for five and landscape recovery for probably 30, with other bits in between. Usually, you have already recognised where the worst bits of your farm are, where the flooding is impacting you the most, where it is less productive or causing an impact on your income, or where your crops are destroyed or have been contaminated.

While that land use change may impact further generations, it is probably done for the right reasons. Given that we are going to see more flooding events, I do not think that many people would be wanting to take those areas back. Particularly if you put trees and other infrastructure in, that is a future cropping yield. We sometimes have a monocrop of arable, so why not have a monocrop of timber? It is just a 30 to 40-year contract rather than an annual contract.

It is just about getting the right scheme, depending on the tenure. It is simple for landowners, but you also have the tenant sector in there, so how do tenants get a benefit or a reward? Where does stewardship fit in with those shorter-term management changes that fit in with a tenancy structure rather than those natural capital investments in hedges, trees and infrastructure?

Q34            Chair: When I was at Defra, I was briefed about a situation in Wales where a farmer had been so successful with his stewardship scheme that Defra was going to designate it as an SSSI, which then meant that he would not necessarily get paid for maintaining it, because it was a protected area. Is there not a worry that, maybe in 20 years’ time, farmers who have gone into these schemes might suddenly find that there is no funding there and end up providing a public good without any rewards?

Martin Lines: There are some great examples in Wales, and in England, of where that improved management has brought in different species. We have been communicating with Defra about how that those SSSIs and other special sites should be the crown jewels in those schemes. There should be an ambition for higher-tier things. Those areas in the landscape should be the proud bits that generate you the most support and income, because they are the bits that the nation really depends on for nature recovery and other bits. They should not be seen as a hurdle.

I have been in stewardship for 22 years now. You could come and say that some of those grass margins that have been in there for such a long period are now permanent grass. They are in there to deliver an environmental outcome. If they found a fancy orchid or some other species in there, they should champion that and help me deliver proper management to protect those species. It should not become a mill around a landowner’s or a tenant’s neck.

Q35            Julian Sturdy: I wanted to move on to protecting property, if we can. As part of the effort to create climate‑resilient places, the EA and Defra have said that they want to see more installations of property flood resilience measures. Do we have a good understanding of what these features are and of the level of take-up?

Tracey Garrett: The industry is still relatively new. There are various bodies in the industry that are trying to improve the quality of knowledge around the products, and the quality of the contractors and the people who sell and work with these products. From a public or community perspective, PFR plays an important role, but, as I said earlier, it has its restrictions, and it is important to recognise those. The focus really needs to be on the right solution in the right place. From a community perspective, it sometimes feels like PFR is a less costly solution than others.

Julie Foley: Just to give you some figures for the contribution it makes to our current investment programme, from 2021 to 2027, we are forecast to have 100 property flood resilience schemes on our programme protecting 2,500 properties around the country. It is about a 50:50 split: 50% of those are delivered by local authorities and around 50% by the local Environment Agency teams. They tackle all sorts of flooding, both river flooding and surface water flooding. Our evidence is that property flood resilience investments are good value for money.

Tracey makes a really important point—we have been working very hard on this with the PFR sector for some years now—about improving the credibility and reputation of property flood resilience measures. When this industry started out, some of the products that were being installed did not have proper certification.

Q36            Julian Sturdy: Could you give us some examples of those products?

Julie Foley: They might be flood doors and airbrick valves. Those are measures that help to keep water out of a home. They can also be recoverability measures, such as having your sockets halfway up the wall.

Julian Sturdy: I have seen those in my own constituency.

Julie Foley: You might have tile flooring, so that, when water does get in, it can be swept out of the home a lot more quickly. Installing those types of measures can make the difference between people being out of their home for a week, which is already bad enough, and for months, because you are not talking about impacts on carpeted floors. In these ways, many homes and businesses can recover a lot more quickly, which is why they are beneficial when looked at alongside other wider measures in a catchment.

Q37            Julian Sturdy: What is the take-up like? Some of those schemes are part-funded, are they not? With some of those, the homeowners are expected to contribute as well. Are we at the right level to deliver take-up?

Julie Foley: For the projects in our investment programme, that is very rare. They are either 100% Government-funded or they benefit from local levy investments that our regional flood and coastal committees make as a local choice. They make a partnership funding contribution to these projects. As a whole, the projects in our programme are largely publicly funded.

Q38            Julian Sturdy: Are they oversubscribed, then?

Julie Foley: I would not say they are oversubscribed. We would like to be able to mainstream more property flood resilience going forward. This comes down to increasing confidence in the sector.

I have mentioned some of the ways in which we are doing that, but I will perhaps elaborate a bit more for you. We have worked with bodies such as CIRIA to develop a code of practice for property flood resilience. We have been working with other professional organisations such as CIWEM, which is for water professionals, to deliver training on property flood resilience.

The Environment Agency itself has just kicked off a new property flood resilience supplier framework. That is a four-year framework. It is valued at over £100 million. No company can be on our framework unless it is properly accredited, following the right codes and kitemarked to the right British Standard. That is how we will ensure credibility and confidence in the market going forward.

Sitting suspended for Divisions in the House.

On resuming—

Emily O’Brien: I wanted to talk really briefly about the property flood resilience grants. That is meant to be a mechanism whereby householders can receive some very welcome funding when there has been a disaster. Tracey touched on this earlier. It has been very difficult to administer that scheme. I wanted to report back that there were a number of challenges from a local government point of view.

I talked a little bit about the threshold of 50 properties being a bit of a challenge. There is also something about the timescales. These grants have to be spent within 15 months. You have a situation where there is a lack of surveyors. There is quite a lot of administration involved as well. Some local authorities are suddenly having to manage hundreds of grants, which they had not factored in. We are quite stretched, as I have said. They are having to deal with that.

When trying to get those measures sourced and installed and to have the supply chains, that 15-month deadline is proving really challenging. The Government cut-off date for some of these grant payments is mid-2025. Some councils are worried about whether they are going to be able to deliver to that timescale.

As local government, we would really like to work with national Government to look at how funding is allocated after there is an emergency in order to make sure all the pathways are as good as they can be, whether that is about activating the Bellwin scheme or property flood resilience grant applications.

Q39            Julian Sturdy: You want more flexibility on the dates. Is that what you are saying?

Emily O’Brien: I am sorry. I am not being very clear, am I? There is a really specific thing about having more leeway on the dates and the boundaries. This 50-household threshold is really tricky. It affects rural areas, but, if there is a boundary across a flooding zone, it can mean you suddenly fall on the wrong side of it. There is a specific thing about that.

There is also the slightly bigger ask about whether it is possible to work with national Government to look at reviewing how that emergency funding is allocated. It is not so much of an emergency anymore, is it? It is becoming really quite common. We have just heard about the flood increases. It might be a good time to have a little look at the system to see how well that is functioning. We would be really happy to help with that.

As the Local Government Association, we play a really important role in sharing good practice. We have a number of amazing schemes, both the rural ones that we have talked about and some urban schemes involving permeable roads and those kinds of things. We are happy to share that good practice as well.

Q40            Julian Sturdy: I also wanted to touch on property land. I will start with domestic land and then I will touch on agricultural land with you, Martin. On domestic land, what incentives can we look to deliver to stop too much paving on driveways and gardens, et cetera, to try to alleviate quick run-off? What work is being done on that?

Emily O’Brien: There is quite a lot that can be done through permeable surfaces. One of the ways that local authorities can deliver that is through the planning system. We have some real concerns about permitted development. We can have quite stringent requirements in local planning policy around permeable surfaces, for instance. Those can become quite undermined when we are in a permitted development situation. Those requirements do not apply to those kinds of conversions and things taking place under those rules.

There is something around local ownership of the planning system, which we would like to see. I will let Tracey come in on the wider stuff.

Tracey Garrett: Can I just go back to the resilience framework money? We would be happy to work with Government on governance around that funding and what activates the scheme. At the moment, it is 50 properties. It makes no difference to the flooded individual whether it is one property or 50 properties. It is still as devastating for them. As it has recently changed from 25 to 50, it would be really interesting and good to understand what difference that has made to the numbers of people who have been able to access that funding. That is just to finish off on that point.

With more SuDS or more support around making permeable surfaces, communities—

Q41            Julian Sturdy: It is about the encouragement as well. What can be done to encourage more of that? I suppose that is the argument.

Tracey Garrett: When we work with flood action groups and in local communities, often in partnership with other RMAs, all options are considered by the communities. We work with the local flood risk management agencies. If SuDS, permeable driveways or any of those things are identified, we work with communities. The important thing is engaging the community to recognise and support the right solution for their area. It is all about giving them a say in what is the right solution.

Julie Foley: I just want to elaborate on a couple of the points that colleagues have referred to. Another area that is very important for property flood resilience is the link with flood insurance, which I know comes up repeatedly. It is always a big issue for local flood groups. We know that as well.

There is also Flood Re, which is the public-private initiative between the Government and the insurance sector to ensure that affordable insurance is still available in high flood risk areas. To link this with property flood resilience, very recently, Flood Re has developed what is called a build back better scheme. All the mainstream insurance providers are now signed up to this. It is a £10,000 top-up payment on top of like-for-like repairs. It is specifically there for property flood resilience following an event, on the basis that, if people just put back in the kitchens that they had before and they live in a frequently flooded area, unfortunately they are probably going to flood again. They will then be faced with the same emotional distress and economic costs. The idea is to use this scheme to build back better.

When you look at all the grants and the other things available, it is quite important to look at the comprehensive range of options that are there. Flood insurance and the mechanisms around insurance providers are important components.

To change topic and flip to sustainable drainage, at the moment there are a few gaps in the statutory consultee process. You asked me previously about our work as a flood risk planning adviser. That is an important component of our work. We are a flood risk adviser for development in areas at high risk from flooding from rivers and the sea.

The lead local flood authorities comment on developments with critical drainage issues, but there is no statutory public consultee—it is neither the Environment Agency nor the local authority—for areas at risk from surface water, even though we have discussed and explained that that is a growing source of risk.

You made a really important point about the need for more permeable paving, particularly given the urban creep challenge in towns and cities. There are lots of things that we can do to encourage better infiltration of water and to reduce surface water run-off. It is a really enormous problem when it comes to surface water flooding. It not only creates surface water flooding, but all of that polluted water ends up in our rivers, creating water quality challenges as well.

There are multiple reasons why sustainable urban drainage is a good idea and something that we should really be integrating into our planning system a lot better.

Q42            Julian Sturdy: What about the take-up? Is there enough take-up and encouragement on existing properties as well?

Julie Foley: Retrofitting is a much harder area. It is more linked to Government policy because it is linked to existing development. That is a fair point, particularly when it comes to people paving over their front gardens, for example. That is a challenge. That urban creep effect is causing real challenges for us when it comes to managing surface water flooding.

The challenge with surface water flooding, which is really different from flooding from rivers and the sea, is that it is incredibly hyper-localised. It happens very quickly. It is very hard to forecast because you do not have water running through a catchment. We are working with the Met Office really collaboratively at the moment to look at how we improve forecasting for surface water flooding because it is so technically difficult.

Having more permeable paving and all these options can make a huge difference to reducing the impact of surface water flooding in a local area because it is so very localised. The so-called small measures may seem small and may not cost a lot of money, but they can make a really important collective and cumulative difference to managing surface water flooding.

Q43            Julian Sturdy: I have one last quick point about agricultural land, Martin. You touched on this in your answer to Robert’s earlier question. What can be done to reduce the risk? I would really like to drill down a little bit on SFI. What do you think about SFI? Is there enough in the SFI to help on that?

Martin Lines: There is a lot that is already known about how farmers can reduce flooding on their land, such as putting in small earth bunds, slowing the flow of water and taking other measures. Unfortunately, many farmers still believe they should clear all the drains out and get the water off the land as quickly as possible. There needs to be a bit of re-education. You can clear some drainage, but it is not the whole length and it is not right off the farm. You have to hold more of it.

Within ELM, SFI and Countryside Stewardship, there really needs to be a focus on some of those elements to deliver flooding resilience and prevention. We get funding for ponds. We could focus on balancing ponds and other measures that you can put in that benefit biodiversity, but we could also provide advice about taking action in your landscape to slow the flow, mitigate flash flooding and hold the soil on your land rather than letting it away. We could have a concentration of elements of the scheme that focus on the measures to be placed in different catchments across the different parts of England.

Q44            Chair: Just following on from that, Emily, people have been cementing their gardens to park on. That increases the risk of flooding. I was listening to a debate last week about banning pavement parking. There are many streets, certainly in my constituency, where, without having a wheel on the pavement on each side of the road, you would have to make the pavements narrower or put yellow lines down one side.

Is there a concern that people will be more likely to park in their gardens and cement over them if they cannot park on the road or, indeed, if they have bought an electric car and want to charge it plugged into their house?

Emily O’Brien: That is a really interesting point. It is a challenge. There are also opportunities. As I mentioned, there are some great schemes around the country looking at sustainable urban drainage. I did visit one in Sheffield, where they have some fantastic rain gardens along the pavements, which were part of a regeneration exercise. They have really beautified the area, but they are also collecting quite profound amounts of water. It is a swings and roundabouts thing.

The point was made earlier that some of this is around education. There is a bit of a gap about whose responsibility it is. I have met residents who have asked, “How do I make my garden into a parking area?” It has not occurred to them in a million years that their garden is playing a function here. At the moment, it does not feel quite like anyone’s responsibility, to be completely honest.

If there was a more flexible funding model with a local pot that held the capital and revenue, that would clarify that there is a role around educating residents. Some of that money could go on informing people. At the moment, I am not completely sure it fits in any of our briefs in a way. We do some of this work as a council, but it is because we choose to. I am not sure it is quite clear whose role it is. If you have a set of local priorities, one of those might be around reducing surface water flooding. Certainly it is a factor in my area. We have seen brilliant examples. I love Hull’s permeable pavements.

A more locally led approach would enable a bit more focus to go on some of that education. Just to reiterate, the LGA is happy to share good practice as well. We perhaps have a role in sharing these stories and helping that education to happen.

Q45            Chair: It is worth noting that, even if you install a permeable driveway, if the car is parked on the driveway, probably 75% of it will be covered by the car. There will be a big dry space, and the water probably will not be able to permeate the remaining area. You can do other things, such as putting a drainage channel with gravel in it between the driveway and the road.

Emily O’Brien: Just to use my own example, we have a local catchment partnership. As the council, along with the Woodland Trust and Sussex Wildlife Trust, we co-fund various schemes. One of those is to put rain gardens into people’s gardens in an area with a high rate of surface water flooding. It is a demonstration project that is about education, but it also slows the flow in a really attractive way. It is really cheap to deliver. It does not need a lot of money.

With those kinds of schemes, it is not just paving. It is also rain gardens and other features in an urban environment. Many of us have rural areas. We have funded leaky dams. Last year, we funded 182 leaky dams, which will collect 182,000 litres of water upstream. That is an important contributor to preventing flooding downstream.

Martin Lines: We have seen lots of surface water entering into sewage systems and other drainage systems that just cannot cope with those high flows. When solid infrastructure such as driveways comes in, it should have to soak away naturally so that that capacity builds up. Putting in more hard surfaces and plugging them into the drainage system that is there, which is not brilliantly maintained and is half clogged up, is adding to the problem. We are having more problems due to surface water and sewage water combining together.

There is planning and infrastructure that we can bring in, allowing soakaways and moving tarmac away from the edges of trees. If you walk through a town or city, the tarmac goes to the edges of the trees. If you let some green space in, there is an opportunity for some of that water to soak away rather than enter a drainage channel.

Chair: On Thursday I was in Whitby, where Yorkshire Water is spending £12 million diverting some surface water into a culvert to go into the sea rather than mixing with sewage. That is a very expensive project. It means digging up the roads and quite a lot of inconvenience.

Q46            Mrs Murray: Can I turn to communicating flooding risk? Tracey, how good is the public’s awareness of flooding risk? What practical steps could be taken to improve it?

Tracey Garrett: If you have flooded or you are very much at risk, you are very aware of your flood risk. Research has shown that a lot of people are not necessarily aware that they are at flood risk. Investment is needed to support people.

We tend to work with people who have flooded. They are acutely aware. With all these things, it is the investment that is key. We need to work in collaboration with communities. Particularly when it comes to communication and engagement, there is often a view that people will hear the message if we just shout loud enough, but we have real evidence that, if you work with communities in partnership and in collaboration, you have much more effective ways of building programmes or working together.

Q47            Mrs Murray: How effective are the warning systems, particularly given the impact of climate change on weather patterns? In Lostwithiel, in my own constituency, they now have a system where flood wardens go around and warn people. Tracey, I will ask you that, and then the others can give any answers they have to both of those questions.

Tracey Garrett: With regard to the EA flood warnings, we always recommend that people sign up to flood warnings. It is a really useful system.

Like any system, it can be improved. We would not want to invalidate the system, but improvements definitely could be made. There are incidents where people get warnings too late. They may get a warning when they are standing in flood water. There are instances where people have to make decisions, for example to evacuate their business. All these things can be a challenge. In the main, having a warning system, which the agency is constantly striving to improve, is better than not having one.

If people do get false warnings or warnings that are not necessarily very accurate, it causes an awful lot of strain and trauma for them. They have to take action, such as putting furniture up or evacuating members of the family or pets. It can be very traumatic. It is absolutely key to be as accurate as possible.

Mrs Murray: Julie, I see you indicating that you have some opinions on this. Would you like to go next?

Julie Foley: I will add a little bit more particularly because our forecasting and warning system has been brought up. Before I do that, you asked a question about flood awareness and whether it is good enough. The very simple answer is no, it is not.

That always sounds astounding to say, given the current events we have had. Whenever we have major flood events, they are almost universally on television. All our behavioural insights research shows that nearly two in three households at risk of flooding do not believe it will happen to them. That is a real concern.

That is the reason why, particularly when in the lead-up to a major flood or storm event, the message you get from the Environment Agency, from me and our colleagues across the country, is to sign up to flood warnings to get information and flood risk advice. Some 1.6 million people have signed up to our flood warning service. That is not enough. We need more people to be signed up to it.

Just to give you a sense of how well used the flood warning service is, over Storm Babet and Storm Ciarán, our flood warning service issued 750 flood warnings. That was over the course of just a few days in the lead-up to the event. There were around five severe flood warnings, which is where there is a risk to life. The communications that we do in the lead-up to an event are really on another level certainly to when I joined the Environment Agency.

A big progression that we have had is the collaboration that we have with the Flood Forecasting Centre. I really want to mention that because it is a world-leading approach to flood forecasting and warning. We are not aware of any other country that has the equivalent of a Flood Forecasting Centre. It brings together the Met Office’s skills with the Environment Agency’s skills. It meshes that together so that we can identify the best triggers for flood warnings.

Every event is different. Tracey’s points are fair, but what I would say is that we learn lessons from every major storm event. From the recent storms that we have had this winter, we will go through what is called a validation process. We will work with emergency responders and look at the timeliness and the accuracy of the flood warnings. Did people actually flood?

The reason why we need to do this is that flooding and flood risk is constantly changing. With Storm Henk, the River Trent had some of its highest levels in 20 years. We have not experienced flooding of that kind in 20 years. Understandably, we need to review our flood triggers. When should the warning go off? Are properties flooding more quickly than they did before? Are they flooding to different levels? We probably have areas that have not flooded in the past that are now going to flood into the future.

It is important to get across that our flood warnings do not stand still in time. We are constantly evolving those triggers so we can learn lessons for flood events that are to come. We will always do those post-incident reviews with our partners.

Martin Lines: There is some really good information out there. It is about how people plug into it or use it. There is some very good mapping and notifications, but the majority of people ignore it. Many of these are on local WhatsApp chats or Facebook groups. Other people are accessing it. There is some really good resource out there, but how can we flag it and point people to it to make them aware? Particularly when you are buying properties or other things, it should be part of the search. What is your percentage of risk? Is it going up as we see more weather events coming? If there is that escalation of risk, we need to start to make people aware of the action they should take.

Emily O’Brien: I would agree with some of the points that have been made. The EA warnings are useful. Although it is interesting to hear there is quite low take-up in terms of the population, you can bet your bottom dollar that a lot of those people who signed up will be local councillors and councils who then amplify those messages.

I have to say that some of the warnings are a little bit scary. For some of the audience, it would be helpful to put these messages out in a slightly more “this is what you can do about it” way.

It is interesting. When you have flooding, councils and councillors play a really important leadership role. Through our local emergency response mechanisms, we all muck in. The minute that we had flooding in an adjacent area, all our officers disappeared because they were all in emergency meetings to help those other areas, as is right in a countywide way. That leadership role played by councils and councillors is not recognised in the legislation at the minute. It would be really helpful if that could be recognised and formalised, in a sense.

I understand that we did a submission as the LGA to the Public Accounts Committee, which set that out in a bit more detail. It is also important to recognise the role of local resilience forums as a mechanism for that.

Q48            Mrs Murray: You have led me on to the final part of my question, which I am going to put to Tracey first. What role do local resilience forums and other community groups play? Are risk management authorities making the best use of them? I cited the flooding that I had in my constituency a number of years ago. The community in Lostwithiel came together. They were not officially a local resilience forum, but they were a voluntary group that made sure that everybody was aware when a flood was going to happen.

Tracey Garrett: From our experience, communities come together when they are flooded. They work with lots of organisations. Whether the LRFs are being used enough is another question, really.

As far as communities go, the communities we work with will bring in all sorts of different partners in their area. The whole aim is to collaborate and work together. They create plans to mitigate their flood risk that set out what actions need to be taken by whom.

The beauty of having all of those organisations in one room working together is that each of those organisations can take responsibility and there is a lot of transparency around who is responsible for what. When communities get the chance to work with the flood risk management agencies and other organisations, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that that works really well in terms of getting the best outcome for the community.

Julie Foley: The local resilience fora are essential for us. The Environment Agency is a category 1 responder, which is the same level as the police and the fire service, when it comes to flood emergency events. In the lead-up to a flood event, when we are issuing flood warnings, we will work with the strategic co-ordinating groups. Those are often chaired by the police. The local authorities are on board as well, particularly from the point of view of recovery. It is really vital that all the emergency responders play a role.

Emily made the point about different types of flood warnings. There are different types of flood warnings. They ramp up in seriousness. You start with an alert; you go to a flood warning, which means that people need to take action; and then a severe flood warning, which is the highest level, is where there is a risk to life. In those situations—we saw this recently in Nottingham, where a major incident was declared with Storm Henk—there can be evacuations. That is where the Environment Agency will be working hand in hand with local authorities because they need to support vulnerable members of the community, provide rest centres and consider other things that need to be done in terms of community support.

That is why those local resilience fora and the groups that we have with other emergency responders are so essential over the course of an event. They are invisible to most people because they do not see it happening. In a way, most people do not need to worry about it. It is public authorities working really well together to support vulnerable communities. When it works really effectively, it is absolutely vital, particularly for those people who are at very severe risk, where there is a risk to life.

Martin Lines: Quite often, farmers and land managers are missed off the list of resources that are available to people. In the past, local councils used to have a list of farmers with snow ploughs when there was a snow event. Many farmers have machinery and infrastructure that could be of benefit. You could do a call-out periodically, every few years, to find out who is willing to help and what is available so that can instantly be connected.

Q49            Mrs Murray: Would farmers be able to distribute sandbags?

Martin Lines: Yes. I have seen it happen. They have forklifts; they have the infrastructure. They can be there. They can provide the tools that can really deliver. It is about having connections from the council to those communities in various ways to ensure that those offers of help are listed somewhere. When that emergency happens, they will know who to contact and how to get the best tools to deliver on the needs.

Q50            Mrs Murray: Finally, Emily, does your council have a list of people who it can call on in the way Martin has just outlined?

Emily O’Brien: We do not have a list of people. We have a list of sandbags. We store sandbags. That is shared quite widely whenever there is an incident. It is a go-help-yourself system. We encourage neighbours to work with neighbours to get them. As Tracey has identified, when there is an emergency, certainly in areas like mine, people really do pull together and help each other.

Thinking about the long-term planning, I welcome what Julie has said about how well the EA works with local areas sometimes, but we do also hear from areas where that could be better. We need a strategic long-term approach to both flood and other risk management, like coastal erosion risk management, property and flood resilience, and those kinds of things. We need very good local partnership working that goes across geographical borders and organisations. There needs to be better engagement and a more collective approach to long-term planning that brings all those agencies together.

Q51            Ian Byrne: Emily, what is being done to ensure that all developments contain green infrastructure, sustainable drainage and flood defences? Are changes needed to the planning system?

Emily O’Brien: We touched a bit on planning earlier, did we not? It is interesting. Just to go back a bit, nobody wants to build on a flood plain. As planning authorities, we take our advice from the EA, and 97% of the time it is followed. In terms of where you build, we certainly follow advice. There are also tensions with the requirements around housebuilding. We cannot go into all the detail of those, but it is important to acknowledge them.

In terms of the planning system, we welcomed the new schedule 3 requirement. I do not want to repeat it because we talked about it earlier. It is really important that there is proper sign-off on sustainable drainage schemes, that those happen and that the planning system acknowledges them.

The other thing that we are concerned about is resourcing in our planning departments. We are really struggling in many cases. It is not just in the planning departments but also in the flood risk departments, which are often county versus district in two-tier authorities. Both of those are really groaning. We talked about skills earlier, but it is also about capacity.

It is really important that the reviews of the planning system look at full funding. There was a really welcome announcement in December around being able to up the fees for planning, but, as a sector, as local government, we do not think that is enough to fully fund the system. We cannot deliver it without the resources and the skills.

Finally, the other concern that we have is around permitted development. For instance, in my area, we have really strong requirements around SuDS and permeable surfaces, but permitted development can bypass those. Again, we would call for community ownership of the planning system.

Q52            Ian Byrne: We touched on sustainable drainage systems before, Emily. Hopefully it will become mandatory by the end of 2024, but it only really scratches the surface of the total building stock. How are we going to prioritise retrofitting sustainable drainage systems?

Emily O’Brien: Yes, it is a good question. I do not have an answer to that. I am sorry to come back to budgets and control, but the money should go into a locally based pot, which could cover some of this education piece.

Particularly around surface water, the National Infrastructure Commission recommended that the funding for surface water flooding should go to local authorities. That is a really important recommendation. It means that is owned in a place and there is a place-based approach. Surface water flooding is very different in different areas.

Q53            Ian Byrne: Julie, does the Environment Agency have any thoughts on retrofitting SuDS?

Julie Foley: That is not an area that we work on. It is more of a policy issue for DLUHC in terms of building policy, for example.

I mentioned planning policy advice just now. Emily mentioned that we are the statutory planning adviser for flood risk on new developments. That is absolutely correct. We look at about 9,000 planning applications every year. We publish all of this. It is all open access data. Where we have objections, that is all published. For 6,000 of those, we provide detailed flood risk advice. On 97% of occasions, local planning authorities thankfully take notice of the advice that we provide, which is great news.

As I mentioned, the gap is that there is not a statutory consultee for development in areas at surface water flood risk. Where we can provide that advice as the Environment Agency we will, but we are not the statutory consultee. When we provide that advice, it does not have the same level of accordance that needs to be given to it.

There is one other important thing that I would flag. We are asked to consider flood risk in terms of present-day flood risk. Increasingly, we want to consider future flood risk. We want the development that is being built to be safe not just in the next few years but over its entire lifetime. That is the spirit of planning policy. Where development goes ahead, it needs to be safe, sustainable and flood resilient over its lifetime. There is more that we can look at—we are very happy to work with Government to do it—to strengthen these areas, particularly around surface water flood management.

Q54            Ian Byrne: Just to build on that, Tracey, how can the Government encourage honest conversations about difficult land use decisions, such as building on flood plains or accepting that the cost of protecting certain communities is too high?

Tracey Garrett: From our perspective, it would be to invest in working with communities. By working in partnership, we can come up with different ways to work together in order to help make those decisions and get local community input. Community input is often not asked for or not acknowledged. By not doing that, we miss out on a great deal of local knowledge that could support the work in the area.

Martin Lines: I would encourage local decision-making. Most people are responsible in their decisions if they have been informed. It has to be bottom up rather than top down. If land managers are dictated to or told that they need to do something, there is resentment. If people are aware of the issue, they take responsibility collectively.

Ian Byrne: That is a good point. Did you want to add anything, Emily?

Emily O’Brien: No, Tracey has covered it. I was applauding her contribution.

Q55            Barry Gardiner: First of all, my apologies for arriving late. I was speaking in the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill Committee.

Councillor O’Brien, I wanted to take up the point you were raising about capacity and staffing. The NAO’s report “Resilience to flooding” suggested that 60% of local authorities felt they did not have adequate staffing resources, and 50% of them felt they did not have enough financial resources. Give us the guts of it. To what extent do the skills and resources to manage your flood responsibilities exist? How would you like to see them improved?

Emily O’Brien: We talked a little bit about this earlier. I absolutely agree. Research from CIWEM completely backs that up. This is a point that we are making.

There are different levels. More generally, as local government, we would like to see multiyear settlements that give us a good funding base. We are unable to resource many of the functions that we really need to do. There is a particular issue in planning to do with the rate at which the fees are set. We welcome the news that we will be able to increase planning fees, but we do not believe it goes far enough.

There is also the issue around skills development. When you are very stretched, you are inevitably less able to put the vision and the resources into training the skills that you need for the future, whether that is in natural flood management or assessing planning applications.

I should say that I am a district councillor. We are a planning authority, but our counterparts in county councils—this is also a national perspective—have exactly the same issue in the teams that assess those flooding applications.

We really need to see some clarification from Government on the timetable for implementing schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act, which will create this new role around sustainable drainage approval bodies. We need to know what the timetable is so we can get ready for that. We also need to know what the resource implications are going to be, so we can get ready for that, and what additional burdens funding will come with it.

Q56            Barry Gardiner: You mentioned—I understand that the Committee has touched on it before—the concern that the Public Accounts Committee expressed about local authorities lacking the capacity to check that flood risk planning conditions were being met.

Local authorities have had recent experience of a major disaster exposing a multitude of other problems. Of course, I am referring to Grenfell. Will we have to wait for something like that before we find out there are lots of estates around the country that have not had the appropriate flood protection measures that you indicated should be put in place but were avoided by developers?

Emily O’Brien: I do not have that answer, but I have colleagues from the Local Government Association here. We could follow that up with a written response. I do not want to answer out of turn.

I am not aware of any issue with day-to-day things such as discharging the conditions that are in place at the moment. I do not think that is a huge problem. It is not that we are just not doing our job and terrible things are going through without the conditions being properly discharged. I believe all those functions are going ahead. We are seeing delays, though. We do not have the legislative framework to allow us to insist on things. We will follow up with more.

Julie Foley: Just to elaborate, in 2021 a report was done by DLUHC, Defra and the Environment Agency. We surveyed local planning authorities on all the issues around flood risk and planning. One of the issues that came up repeatedly was skills and capacity, particularly for local authority planners, as has been outlined.

Another major constraint that was picked up was around the enforcement of planning conditions. That has been repeated in a number of other reports, including more recently by the PAC. That is an area of concern. From the Environment Agency’s point of view, we have a lot of sympathy with our colleagues in local government about that. In many cases, the reason they are saying they do not have the capacity to follow through on planning conditions around flood risk matters is skills, capabilities and resourcing.

That is a gap that needs to be considered carefully. When we say our planning advice is taken up on 97% of occasions, that is the advice we provide on a planning application. How those conditions are followed through and enforced afterwards is down to the local planning authority.

Q57            Barry Gardiner: Of course, that was exactly the situation with building control officers. We subsequently found that so many of the apartment blocks in this country are lacking in other fire safety defects, such as fire stopping or compartmentation defects. One can see the possibility for a parallel here.

Perhaps I can come to you again, Ms Foley, before coming back to Councillor O’Brien. On those skill gaps, there has been a particular focus on developing green infrastructure and sustainable drainage systems, but there have been real problems in filling the skills gap there. How are we going to address that?

Julie Foley: I do not have an easy answer to that because it is a challenge that we have across the whole of the public sector. We and the Environment Agency find it equally difficult to recruit and retain staff to work on different aspects of flood risk management. That includes all aspects of planning, so it includes engineers, planning professionals and ecologists. It affects all aspects of our work.

We are seeing that same challenge across local authorities. In many cases, both the Environment Agency and local authorities are looking to the same suppliers and contractors to support us. They also have limited skills in some cases. It is a challenge for the whole of the flood sector. I would not say it is one that is unique to local government.

Q58            Barry Gardiner: Part of what this Committee is trying to do in its report is to analyse the situation, but the other part is to try to suggest some solutions and recommendations to Government. In terms of how one builds that skill set, is it a matter of paying more? Is it a matter of putting in place more apprenticeship schemes? What recommendations could the Committee make that would begin to address the problem, if the Government were to follow them?

Emily O’Brien: It is interesting. I have been in some parallel conversations on this as part of the Defra ministerial working group looking at the nature skills of the future. One of the challenges is that everything has to change, but how do we get there?

From the local government perspective, it is clear that dealing with those basic capacity issues will help to unlock our ability to plan much better for the future. Knowing that we are going to have secure funding going forward allows us to plan that pipeline. It also allows us to bring in those private sector skills that are out there. We did a fantastic natural flood management scheme locally, where we are. Even though we have a focus on using local contractors, the contractor had to come from Yorkshire because there is just not that much expertise around about how you rewiggle a stream. We would love to grow some of that stuff locally. Giving us security going forwards will allow us to plan that in.

It is not a perfect answer to your question. The other thing that is really needed is clarity—again, this comes from national Government—about the strategic direction that we are moving in, what is going to be required of us going forward and what our role will be in some of this stuff. Once we understand our role, we can absolutely step up and get ready for it.

Q59            Barry Gardiner: Finally, returning to the conversation that you had with the Chair earlier about paving over front gardens, would you as a council consider offering a council tax rebate for those who reinstated a garden from a parking space they had concreted over?

Emily O’Brien: Speaking for my own council, we could not afford to. We are reliant on every penny at the minute. We would certainly be really happy to talk about incentives and how they work.

In a sense, this needs to be a national approach. It does not help if we all reinvent this in our different areas. There is a difference between national schemes, where something like that would work really well to incentivise people, and local good practice. That is where we have a really good role in terms of sharing the innovative that things we have done, whether it is leaky water butts or permeable paving.

Julie Foley: I want to make a quick point about skills. The Environment Agency has an apprenticeship scheme. We work with a lot of universities in terms of training. You would be surprised at how many planning degrees, for example, do not have a flood risk and climate change module on them. That is one of the reasons, as I mentioned earlier, that we have collaborated with bodies such as the TCPA to provide training to planners in local authorities. It is not necessarily something that they have a lot of groundwork training in.

When it comes to flood risk professionals, we need our flood risk engineers—they are very important to the future—but we also need nature-based engineers and others. As risk management authorities, it is also important that we do not just look to ourselves. There is always a habit to say that this is for the Environment Agency, the local authority or an IDB. Some of the most successful natural flood management projects that we have collaborated on have been led by the ENGO sector, so the Wildlife Trusts, the Rivers Trust and others, which are really effective at mobilising local grants and working with landowners and farmers.

When we think about the flood risk sector, we need to be thinking about the diversification of skills and working with a wider range of partners to deliver the more flood-resilient nature-based solutions that we need for the future.

Q60            Barry Gardiner: That is very helpful. Given what you said about university and college degrees in relation to planning, what recommendations could we make in relation to that? Should this Committee be expressing its surprise, shock and horror that there are planning degrees out there that do not incorporate nature-based solutions?

Julie Foley: That is your prerogative. I started my career in the Environment Agency working on flood risk and planning. I was surprised to find that many professional planners, even though they were professional planners when they joined us at the Environment Agency, needed a lot of training on flood risk and, increasingly, on climate adaptation. That is an area that needs some more focus.

Emily O’Brien: On your council tax question, I have just realised that I missed an opportunity to bring in something that we do really want on council tax. Is it okay to bring it up briefly?

There has been quite a bit of noise about internal drainage board levies. Internal drainage boards do not apply them in every area, but some areas have them. We have a cap on the amount that we can charge for council tax. When that levy has had to increase substantially, it is having a really disproportionate effect on us.

A very small change to legislation, which would make a really big difference in those affected areas, would be for the internal drainage board levy not to count towards your council tax. In East Lindsey, for example, the council tax requirement was about £7.5 million, but 65% of that, £4.8 million, is going on the drainage board levy. It is completely disproportionate, because the amount that they can charge for council tax is capped.

I am not speaking for the LGA here; I am speaking personally. You could include some of the other incentives that you are talking about, but this needs to be taken out of the cap on council tax. Otherwise, it becomes too disproportionate as a share of council tax.

Martin Lines: I would emphasise the urgent need for training and good advice on the landscape approach and from the bottom up. There is lots of asks from land managers to do different things. Many are paralysed and not doing anything at the moment because they are worried about doing the wrong stuff. We are going to need a lot more support, training and advice to get people to collaborate, to bring people together and to get the right actions happening.

Q61            Chair: Just before we let you go, Martin, I am trying to fix my mind on something. As a farmer who is doing Countryside Stewardship, ELMS and various other schemes, and plugging into income streams, how in isolation can you come up with a scheme that meets the obligations to improve flood management and deliver that?

On my farm, we have a road that runs down the hill. The water goes down it and then rushes across the field into a beck. We could dig a trench, put a steel grating over it and then dig a big soakaway for it, but that does not come within any of the schemes that are out there.

As a farmer, if I want to do one of these schemes that I think will work, at the moment you just plug into the various funding streams, but you do not have an endorsement from the EA or anyone else. Is there any way that we can help farmers to ensure that what they are doing will make a difference? In some situations, what they are doing could possibly make things worse.

Martin Lines: If we go back to the old Countryside Stewardship, when we did those schemes, advice came on to the farm. That was funded or part funded. That brought in the knowledge and resource. They gave you advice and support in ticking off what you could get done.

Many things do not fit in. We have schemes that are rigid. If you want to do it slightly differently, there is nobody to sign it off. Whether it is the EA, Natural England or somebody else, depending on what you are doing, as long as someone who is trained says that it is the right thing, it should unlock that potential. There is a lot that farmers can do. If I want to block a watercourse up or slow the flow down, I may have to get planning permission. Technically, I am not meant to be doing that. There can be opportunities around doing storage lagoons and run-offs.

We need to have a whole-farm approach, which is really lacking in the Defra scheme. It is about individual actions and SFI parts rather than looking at your landscape and asking, “What are the priorities in your context and in your landscape? What can you do that helps your business, mitigates environmental harm and mitigates flooding?” Then put those actions in place that bring in funding and have a funding approach that targets flood mitigation and environmental harms in delivering solutions.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed to the panel. You have been very helpful. I hope that the Government have been listening to what you have been saying. There have been some very helpful suggestions as to how we could improve the situation and ensure that, as we sadly get more and more of these flooding incidents and wet winters—though I hope not—we can protect people’s homes and protect land and communities. Thank you very much indeed.