PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Flooding: Bedfordshire - 16 October 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

I rise in Flood Action Week to raise an issue that is front-of-mind for so many of my constituents. The flooding in September devastated homes, farms and businesses right across my constituency and those of hon. Friends across Bedfordshire. Indeed, my home in Shillington was flooded. Two months-worth of rainfall in 24 hours caused considerable damage to property and risks for people, especially the elderly or vulnerable, so I thank all the first responders and council workers who worked tirelessly to support my constituents.

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this Adjournment debate during Flood Action Week. Constituents of mine were also impacted by the flooding across the county. Last week, I met representatives from the Fire Brigades Union, who said that over 400 calls had been taken in seven hours on flood-related issues alone. I pay tribute to them. Does he agree that there should be recognition of firefighters who carry out flooding rescue, which they do alongside all their other duties even though it is not a statutory service?

So many people across so many organisations, including fire and rescue, worked tirelessly to protect our communities. I associate myself with the hon. Lady’s comments about the support provided by our local police and fire and rescue services.

Mid Bedfordshire is not an area at obvious risk of extreme flooding—unlike other parts of the county, we lack major rivers beyond the River Flit—but our soil types range from the thin sandy soils of the Greensand ridge to poorly draining clay soil, each of which presents its own flooding challenges. Our winters are getting wetter, and I know that many families will, like mine, look at the damage done by those floods and worry that such flooding will become the norm.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, which is important for residents of Bedfordshire. He talks about not having rivers in his constituency, but in North Bedfordshire we are blessed with two. Although this flooding was an extreme event, flooding issues have been persistent in places such as Harrold, Clapham and Great Barford, and, most recently and quite devastatingly, in Tempsford and Wyboston in my constituency. Does he welcome the initiative taken up by the Mayor of Bedford, Tom Wootton, to get a comprehensive approach from all the different agencies that can help residents with their flood response, and does he agree that that is a model for assessing flood risk in Bedfordshire?

I absolutely agree. I would love to join any of those meetings with Mayor Tom to support those efforts in my wards of Wixams and Wootton.

I commend the hon. Gentleman, to whom I spoke beforehand, for securing the debate. A conversation that people sometimes have is about the co-ordination between different departments, as the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) alluded to. If the flooding of roads and housing development areas is known about in advance, could better co-ordination improve things for our constituents? For many people, it might simply be about having a sandbag available. People need to know those things; maybe that would help.

Certainly, one of the lessons that I have learned from the flooding in Mid Bedfordshire is that many statutory bodies are involved in flooding response and resilience. We need to work harder to ensure that those organisations work together. It is so important that the Government, local authorities and others learn the right lessons from those floods, and I hope that this debate can play a role in guiding that conversation.

First, let me reflect on the direct impact on constituents in Mid Bedfordshire. Hundreds of residents have taken the time to describe for me the huge losses that they have suffered, and I thank them for taking the time to do so while trying to recover from flood damage. Emma from Marston Moretaine, who filled in my recent flooding survey, told me:

“Our property was completely soaked front and back. We saw water rise, and beside the path at our house there was gushing water! We had to call for help. Water came in through the sides and foundations, and in the end there was nothing we could do.”

Caroline from Flitwick also took the time to share her experience:

“Severe flooding of my property requiring full water removal from my home and severe repairs. I am currently staying with family but having to relocate for a minimum of 6 months whilst repairs are done.”

Rita from Harlington explained that

“We had internal flooding start at 9.30 am with sewerage coming up from a manhole cover inside our garage. We contacted Anglian water by 10 am. We couldn’t shower or flush the toilet as it was gurgling back up! Then the rains came—the front drive was a deluge. We had neighbours helping with buckets and pumps trying to get the water off our property. It was a fighting battle—the water reached the front door and came into the property.”

Being flooded is not just an inconvenience: it is expensive, and it is heartbreaking for families to see their valuables—some of them irreplaceable—washed away. Shortly after the flooding, I took the time to visit dozens of local businesses, including Disco-licious in Gravenhurst, Maulden Garden Centre and The Dog House day care centre, which is also in Maulden. Those businesses, together with many others, have experienced severe financial losses, and in some cases have seen many years of hard work and investment washed away before their eyes.

Our farmers have been some of the worst hit, with severe and significant flooding reported at several local farms, including at Moreteyne’s Retreat, a smallholding that has been impacted hugely by floodwaters flowing from the A421. In the aftermath of that flooding, I have learned that 74% of the UK’s floodplain is agricultural land. Flooding can destroy whole crop yields, wasting months of work and threatening the livelihoods of our farmers, in many cases at the same time as they see their homes devastated by floodwaters.

My hon. Friend has mentioned landowners and farmers. He will be well aware of the internal drainage boards, which do such vital work to protect land and require the resources to do so. The previous Government committed £75 million to drainage boards, but we have yet to see that money delivered by the current Administration. We also need a long-term solution to the funding of IDBs, so that local authorities are not put under undue pressure by having to fund those drainage boards themselves.

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that point. He has stolen my thunder, because I was going to make that exact point later in my speech, so I will skip over it when I get to that section.

Say it again!

Perhaps I will say it again. England has suffered its second worst harvest on record, with persistent wet weather, and waterlogged fields risk putting our farmers out of business over the medium to long term.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Building on that point, many of our farmers—not only across Bedfordshire, but across the whole of the country—are facing their second serious crop losses in a growing period. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is incredibly frustrating that, despite the last Conservative Government having allocated £50 million through the farming recovery fund, many farmers who urgently need that money—money that was guaranteed to get out of the door—are not yet receiving it from the new Administration?

My hon. Friend is exactly right: it is very frustrating. I know that constituents who farm in my constituency are incredibly frustrated that funding will not be made available.

The persistent wet weather is a disaster not only for farmers, but for all of us, because it impacts yield and quality, resulting in higher food prices and threats to national food security. The Government need to take action, recognising that farmers in Bedfordshire are businesspeople, but also that they provide a public benefit by taking flooding that would otherwise flow into our towns and villages. I hope the Minister will work with colleagues to design a scheme to properly recognise the contribution our farmers make by allowing their fields to flood, and to remunerate them for that contribution.

Our local councils—as a councillor myself, I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—have done fantastic work to support residents. They have been forced to pick up the pieces and the bill to manage the response, and now to put things right. They have not got everything right—far from it—but they have stepped up during this emergency and provided significant resources to keep people safe, particularly the most vulnerable. Our households, businesses, farmers and councils now need the Government to step up and do their bit by releasing funds to support our communities to recover and improve resilience. The Minister has discretion in this area, and I was surprised to receive a response to a written question this afternoon suggesting that the flooding was not at a sufficient scale to be considered exceptional enough to release recovery funding—perhaps the Minister will address that point in her closing remarks. I am concerned that the Government fail to appreciate the significant but localised impact of this particular flooding event. My constituents want, and deserve, support.

Perhaps the most high-profile victim of our recent flooding was the A421, which was closed for weeks after more than 60 million litres of water collected in a dip in the road at Marston Moretaine. National Highways has worked hard around the clock to reopen the road, but as we look at lessons learned, significant questions must be asked about how we got here—how a major A-road, connecting Bedford to the M1, built this century, can have been built down into the ground in a historic floodplain, which of course is prone to flooding. It was designed in such a way that it regularly floods a little, but was built with flooding mitigations insufficient to deal with the kind of flooding that could become all too common in the years ahead. As this Government look to build similar infrastructure in the years ahead, we must heed the warnings of the A421 and build in a way that is protected from not the flooding of yesterday, but the flooding of tomorrow.

Roads are not the only area where problems with ineffective infrastructure have exacerbated the impact of flooding on my residents in Mid Bedfordshire. The blocked drains reported right across Mid Beds in places like Lower Shelton, Flitwick, Cranfield, Harlington and Maulden significantly increase the likelihood of surface water flooding. Clearing the drains regularly, if not the sole solution, represents common sense to my constituents and is a quick answer to mitigate at least some of the risk. They want to see the schedule of maintenance improved materially. Leaves fall every autumn and block drains, not every three years, and utility companies dig up roads and fill drains with mud and tarmac, only to leave them to be cleared by the council in its three-yearly cycle. This simply is not good enough, and it is putting property and lives at risk.

I therefore call on the Government to urgently consider introducing a new statutory duty on local authorities to clear drains and culverts regularly, backed by central funding at the Budget to ensure that councils have the resources they need. I also urge the Government—this is the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) raised—to look at the way that internal drainage boards are funded, to ensure that they have the resources they need to manage local flood risks. I ask the Minister to commit to meeting me and interested colleagues to discuss how that might be achieved.

In Leicestershire, we have a lot of landowners who should be doing more to help alleviate flooding. Unfortunately, local authorities have very limited powers to compel them to act. Does my hon. Friend agree that more needs to be done to bolster the power of local flood authorities, which are invariably upper-tier councils?

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree that that is something the Government should be looking at.

During the recent flooding, I was appalled to learn that drains and sewers in the new town of Wixams were overloaded with surface floodwater. Seventeen years after construction began in Wixams, the drainage infra- structure should be adequate to accommodate many more houses than have so far been built. I urge the Minister to join me in pressing Anglian Water to take urgent action to expand its sewerage and drainage infra- structure.

Wixams is merely the most obvious example of a problem that residents are seeing repeatedly with development. House by house, development by development, infrastructure is failing to keep pace. While an individual development might not be enough to overwhelm the system or cause knock-on flooding impacts, the accumulated weight of development is creating huge problems across the country—including in Maulden in my constituency, where development has crept gradually up the slope of the Greensand ridge, resulting in water having fewer places to stop and soak, so that it instead surges down into the village. While the flooding infrastructure for these new developments might in theory be sufficient for planners to justify development, planning is failing to cope with the demands placed on it by multiple and interconnected developments, which is piling pressure on to networks and our natural environment.

With the Government set to review the planning system and ask for our towns and villages to take thousands of additional homes, I implore the Minister to work with colleagues to deliver reforms that require flooding authorities to take a wider systems view of the impact of developments. We need to ensure that housing targets do not put the delivery of new homes over the habitability of housing stock, or the safety and sustainability of our communities.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and for securing such an important debate not only for his constituents, but for all Bedfordshire Members present. The point he is making is really important, and is felt keenly by my residents in Langford, on Southland Rise, where the failure of flood prevention measures put in place as part of a new development meant that several of them have had catastrophic flooding in a very short space of time over the past few weeks. Does he share my view that not only is consideration of flooding risk through local and national planning frameworks clearly in need of review, but we need to ensure that measures are in place for robust enforcement, to ensure that the flooding mitigation measures that are included in new developments actually work as it is claimed they should?

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. That story is felt and heard all across Mid Bedfordshire, and I agree with the points he made.

As a starting point, I would like the Government to consider urgently introducing secondary legislation to bring into effect schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. The Minister smiles, so she perhaps has a point to make on that when she winds up. I understand from a recent answer to my written question that the Minister wants to be mindful of the impact of over-regulation on developers, but building homes in a way that increases the flooding risk in our towns and villages does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis.

We must also consider the benefits of nature and nature-based solutions. Natural upstream solutions would help capture water and absorb some of the worst impacts of flooding. The Bedford and Milton Keynes waterway park is a great local example of a project that has the potential to remove water during flooding—and, indeed, to deliver water when it is most needed during droughts—and we must press ahead and deliver it at pace.

In addition, we need the Government to look again at their plans to designate inferior-quality areas of the countryside for development, and instead commit to a bold strategy of restoring nature, and in so doing, creating natural flood defences for our towns and villages. In our towns and villages themselves, I would like the Government to commit to a natural regeneration programme, using trees and nature to create sponge cities by enhancing drainage to prevent surface water flooding.

I will conclude with a final lesson that I hope the Minister will reflect on. My constituents were disappointed that, while she took the time to visit those in nearby Leighton Buzzard and to observe the impacts of flooding there, our towns and villages in Mid Bedfordshire received no attention from the Government at all. With a major road closed and a substantial number of houses and businesses impacted, had the flooding in Mid Bedfordshire been concentrated in a single major urban area, I have no doubt that we would have attracted some specific focus.

I have raised questions with the Minister and the Department that remain unanswered. I urge the Government to remember that rural areas are impacted by flooding too, and that they should be properly served by this Government, not an afterthought.

I call the Minister.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. I thank the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) for securing the debate on this important matter, and everyone who has contributed to the discussion.

I start by sincerely expressing my sympathy with all the individuals whose homes and businesses have been impacted by flooding. I may have previously shared with the House the impact on me when, in 2007, the city that I represent was flooded. It is a story for another day, but I was teaching at the time, and when the floodwater came in we had to evacuate. Flooding has a devastating impact on people for a long time afterwards, including on their mental health, so I am very sympathetic to the hon. Gentleman as a victim of flooding himself. I realise it is not easy at all.

As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, more than 1,000 properties were flooded following recent heavy rain across central and southern England. The effects were felt particularly in communities in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Buckinghamshire and north-west London, but more than 22,000 properties were protected by existing flood defences. As he said, I visited the Leighton Buzzard area in Bedfordshire on 26 September to meet volunteers and local residents and see at first hand the impact of the flooding there.

I know many people are now facing months of disruption and upset. I was particularly struck by one of the ladies I met, who was in tears when I went into her home. She showed me what had been her beautiful home, in which she had lived for over 20 years and on which she had spent a lot of time, and how it had just been ruined by the floodwater coming in, which she found absolutely devastating. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out how this impacts on vulnerable people. I heard stories of an elderly lady having to be rescued and taken away from her home. I absolutely pay tribute to Humberside fire and rescue service. Sorry, not just Humberside— I am so used to saying that—but all the fire and rescue services for their work in rescuing people.

I also thank the hon. Gentleman for joining the call that we had with the Environment Agency, which is something new that I have tried since becoming a Minister. It would simply be impossible for me to visit everywhere, so I want to find other ways to be as open and accessible as possible, which is why we tried this call. We had about 50 Members of Parliament on the call, and it was a way for hon. Members to get information directly from the Environment Agency, so I am grateful that he joined it.

The Minister and I worked together when she was on this side of the House, so I know she is true to her word. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson)—very nobly, I thought—suggested that we ought to have a meeting about IDBs. This is a critically important issue for many parts of the country, and I am sure that a small delegation of colleagues could, in the spirit that the Minister has just described, have a very productive discussion. Would she agree to that?

The right hon. Gentleman is so difficult to say no to. How infuriating—I have experienced this before. Yes, we will. That will be fine. I will be attending the internal drainage board conference, so after I have met people there, I am happy to meet a delegation to talk about IDBs. I can already hear my private office saying, “You’ve agreed to another meeting, Minister”, and telling me off.

I was part of the call to which the Minister referred on 30 September. I am an MP in Somerset, and we requested a meeting. We have the benefit of the Somerset Rivers Authority, which I believe is unique in the country. We need to wrestle with how we enable the Environment Agency, the internal drainage board, the council, the rivers authority, and every other agency to address the problem of flooding for people in Somerset as well. Will she please ensure that her officials make that meeting happen?

Absolutely. As the hon. Lady will be aware, the flooding happened during recess and we have been back just one week. It is all noted down, and if I make a promise I stick to it, so we will have that.

There was also innovation in the incident response from the Environment Agency—I found this quite interesting, but that is perhaps my inner geek coming out. It launched drone flights over the flooded area to assess and monitor where had been flooded, and looked for where there were blockages and fallen trees in some of the waterways. It was then able to send people out to remove them. I thought that was a clever way of covering as much area as possible, especially in large rural areas, to see where it needed to solve a problem.

I reiterate the Government’s thanks to the Environment Agency local responders and many others who worked tirelessly to help communities across the country deal with the local floods. I also pay tribute to our farmers, as this is the worst two years in a row of harvest that they have faced, and I realise the impact that that has had on the mental health of many of them. I accept the frustration around the farming flood recovery fund, and I am afraid I will have to give an equally frustrating answer, which is that until the Budget is announced, there is not much more I can say on that matter, although I realise that that will not offer people the reassurance they want at the moment.

Where I can offer reassurance is that I know the National Farmers Union was keen to consider how the formula is calculated when it comes to assessing where flood defences are built. At the moment is based on the number of properties protected. I want to look at that formula—I know that has been called for over a long time—to see whether it is still the formula that we need, and I have committed to doing that with the NFU.

I pay tribute to a few of the volunteer groups I met in Bedfordshire, including the Bedfordshire local emergency volunteers executive committee, and particularly a lady called June Tobin, and Graham Mountford, who were fantastic. It was brilliant to see how well the volunteer organisations are embedded in the emergency response by the Bedfordshire local resilience forum. I was also impressed by the work of AMYA and what it is doing to get young people involved in volunteering. Many young people were volunteering at Meadow Way community centre, especially two impressive young teenage girls who told me that they wanted to come and help in the community. They were there making tea and coffee for everybody, and I thought that they deserved a special mention in my speech. I am sure the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire also found many wonderful examples of people helping.

As has been mentioned, it is Flood Action Week—what a week to be talking about flooding. If you will indulge me for a moment, Madam Deputy Speaker, I wish to reiterate a few safety messages around Flood Action Week. We are urging the public to know and understand their flood risk, and to please sign up for flood alerts. If there is one thing each Member of Parliament can do it is encourage our constituents to sign up for flood alerts. If people have the time, that means they can get prepared. We would also like people to look at preparing a flood kit, and have medication and essentials if they are going to be away from home or asked to evacuate at short notice, as well as thinking about what will happen with pets. The Environment Agency has extensive guidance on what we can do to try to improve our flood resilience.

There was an event today, which I hope many Members were able to attend—the Environment Agency and Flood Re’s parliamentary drop-in. If people were unable to attend, I am sure they can email out the information for Members to communicate to constituents.

I reassure the hon. Member that flooding is one of DEFRA’s five key priorities. The honest truth is that we have inherited flood defences at their worst since 2010. The condition rating of key flood defences in England is at 92%. That is the lowest it has been in 14 years, which is clearly concerning as we go into another wet winter, as has been mentioned. Because of that, we have been moved £36 million extra to the urgent repair of some of those flood defences, and we also have mobile assets— have 275 mobile pumps and 25 km of mobile flood defences. By using knowledge around long-term forecasts, we want to get those mobile resources into the areas required, but the situation is definitely far from ideal. The previous Government’s flood investment programme was unfortunately behind schedule and over budget. I am urgently reviewing it to ensure we have a flood programme that is fit for purpose, and as has been mentioned, I have been looking at how the formula works.

The hon. Member mentioned one of my favourite words, which is SUDS, or sustainable urban drainage systems—only people with this level of geekery get excited about that—as well as schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. I am pleased he pointed out that it dates from 2010 has still not been enacted. It is important that we look at sustainable urban drainage. As he mentioned, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is doing a review of how the whole planning system works, and it will come as no surprise to him that I am pushing from the DEFRA end of things on how we can ensure that the homes we build are flood-proof now and in the future and, importantly, do not contribute or add to flood risk within an area. Those are two important issues.

The priority for the hon. Member is his constituency, but we must bear in mind that water is a tricky thing that does not obey constituency or national borders. Therefore, as has been pointed out, if we want to tackle flooding, sometimes the answer is literally further upstream. I enjoyed hearing him mention natural flood management solutions, which are another thing I get excited about. We have a nature crisis, so if we can deliver something that not only delivers protection from flooding but increases nature, is that not a wonderful thing to do? I am a huge fan. I do not think the answer to everything should always be more concrete, although at times of course we need those hard flood defences. It is important to look at a catchment-based approach to how we handle this, where we can look at slowing the flow in some areas or moving water out more quickly in others.

The hon. Member also mentioned the A421. I was stuck on that road as well. After visiting the flooded area in Leighton Buzzard, I realised I could not get a lift back to London, because Euston station was shut. I ended up trying to get a lift from someone up to Peterborough to make my way back up to Hull, and I was stuck on a diversion from the A421. I feel his pain as a fellow victim of that particular closed road.

The Environment Agency estimates that £3.5 million will be invested in Bedfordshire to increase flood resilience. As the hon. Member rightly said, for many areas surface water is the problem, so many of the schemes provided will be small-scale surface water solutions. [Interruption.] Am I getting the nod to hurry up? Okay, I will speed on. We can continue much of this discussion at a later date.

To conclude, I reiterate that this Government will act to ensure that people are better protected from flooding in the first place. We are determined to turbocharge the delivery and repair of flood defences, to improve drainage systems and to develop natural flood management solutions. We are investing more than £1.25 billion this year to scale up national resilience through building new and improving existing flood defences. The Government are reviewing the existing programme to get it back on track, after the pace slowed due to the impacts of inflation and delays in the supply chain.

The flood resilience taskforce, which we set up and which has already met, includes the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Home Office, the Cabinet Office, the Environment Agency, the Met Office, local resilience forums, the mayoral office, emergency responders and the National Farmers Union. It will meet again in January. Emergency services, the EA, local authorities, voluntary organisations and Departments stand ready to support affected communities in any future flooding. Flooding is personal and a priority for me, and I will work tirelessly to make our communities more resilient to flooding.

Question put and agreed to.