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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger) on securing this debate, and other hon. Friends who have contributed. I will try to address their points also.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset spoke with passion on behalf of his constituency, but I must consider the wider issues, not just the national budgets that we provide to the Environment Agency and other organisations, but also the Severn estuary. The scheme has many positive points. It is the only viable way that the Government can continue to provide defences and secure access to the village of Steart while meeting our environmental objective for the estuary.
The Severn estuary is one of our most important wildlife areas, as well as a great economic asset. It has more than 200 km of coastal defences, which will provide in excess of £5 billion of benefits over time to more than 100,000 residential and commercial properties. The shoreline management plan highlights the need to maintain and improve most of those defences. However, a consequence is that there will be a substantial loss of internationally designated intertidal habitat. Our investment prioritisation process is focused principally on protecting people and property and that is where the vast majority of our money is spent. However, we must acknowledge that what we do to protect people and property has an impact on the natural environment, and that must be taken into account.
My hon. Friend keeps referring to £28 million, but the figure I have is £20 million. That may have an element of semantics, but it is a considerable sum. I assure him that I do not easily agree to spending £20 million in this or any climate. Every penny should count, and I have looked carefully into the matter. We will continue to invest in defence in the Severn estuary, despite the impact on the natural environment, because of the imperative reasons for doing so. That is permitted under the EC habitats directive as long as appropriate compensatory habitat is secured. Our plans to manage and improve the defences therefore depend on sufficient compensatory habitat being secured before the protected habitat is lost due to the flood defence construction work.
There has already been a loss in the Severn estuary, and without the Steart scheme we would fail to maintain the integrity of that protected Natura 2000 site. My hon. Friend may rail against Europe, but frankly, whether we are in Europe or not, I and the Government value what is set out in the Natura 2000 directive, and my hon. Friend should value it if he minds about the valuable asset that is the natural environment in the Severn estuary.
The EU habitats directive, together with the birds directive, forms the cornerstone of Europe’s nature conservation policy to maintain or restore natural habitats and the population of species of wild fauna and flora at a favourable conservation status, and is a key element in the EU’s commitment to halt the loss of biodiversity within the EU by 2020. That is also a firm priority of the Government. With that in mind, I now turn to the Steart scheme. Steart village and peninsula are currently protected by more than 12 km of flood defences. Beyond the short term it will not be economically viable or sustainable to maintain existing defences. To do so would cost in the region of £1 million per property.
The issue has been considered in the shoreline management plan, which highlighted the peninsula as a place where the managed realignment of the defence provides the best option for continuing to protect the village and its access as well as creating habitat to offset the impact of crucial work elsewhere in the area. Indeed, Steart has been identified as the most cost-effective place in the estuary for habitat creation without geomorphic side effects such as adjacent erosion. The twin objectives of the project are therefore to create the habitat we need and protect the village and its access. It forms a vital part of an integrated and sustainable coastal management solution for the Severn estuary. It will provide the only foreseeable opportunity to improve flood protection to Steart drove, the only access route to Steart village. It will help to maintain the existing standard of protection and the new defences can be expected to last longer than the current defences. If my hon. Friend claims that what is happening is just about the habitats directive and just about providing wetland for birds, that is not correct. It is about providing flood protection for his constituents and access to a community that would otherwise be cut off at high tides, or because of further erosion.
As my hon. Friend said, the Environment Agency has carried out extensive consultations, and I understand that the majority of the local residents strongly support the proposals and recognise the flood risk management benefits that the scheme would bring. I hear what my hon. Friend says about the response to the Environment Agency consultation, and I am always happy to consider how consultations are carried out and why there is such a low response rate. One reason could be that people are quite in favour of the scheme. I received a copy of a letter to my hon. Friend from the parish council, which seems to be very supportive of the scheme. There is an organisation called the Steart residents group, headed by Dr Phillip Edwards, who wrote a letter to the local paper. He said that
“while the SRG may not have always seen eye-to-eye with the Environment Agency over all aspects of the scheme, the EA’s staff have demonstrated throughout the last three years of work and consultations the highest levels of professional integrity and technical proficiency”.
He goes on to talk about the value of the scheme, and the group’s opposition to my hon. Friend’s opposition.
I cannot second-guess the exact level of support or otherwise for the scheme, but I assure my hon. Friend that we do not feel that we are trampling on the views of local people. I understand that a number of people want it.
Mr Liddell-Grainger
I want to suggest that the Minister’s Department should let me have the information about who has replied. Secondly, the gentleman that he mentioned—I was going to mention this myself—spends most of the year with the UN; and he is one person, who has set something up with no one else. I must gently tell the Minister that what he read out is not the case. If he would let me have the relevant information, I am more than happy to discuss it with him, and with the people concerned.
Richard Benyon
One of the two references I made was to the local paper, so presumably the hon. Gentleman can get access to that: I am happy to give him the copy I received. The second reference was to a letter to my hon. Friend from the parish council, which was copied to Otterhampton parish council. I cannot second-guess how many members the Steart residents group has, but the fact is I get a different impression of opinion from the hon. Gentleman’s.
Perhaps I may touch on points made by other hon. Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) is a redoubtable campaigner on behalf of her constituents for flood alleviation in her constituency. I can barely move in this building without having my collar felt by her, in her determination to raise that issue. I can only assure her that we shall make available all the information about what schemes will go ahead in the near future and, under the payment for outcomes scheme, what options are left to her constituents to gear in other funding if theirs is not in the top flight of schemes. That will give clarity to her constituents about what is required for the schemes to go ahead. I cannot give her any information, because I do not have any about that scheme.
I have considerable sympathy with my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie), because I recognise the importance of Bristol docks. I do not dismiss them, as they are an important local employer and a major hub of activity that is vital to us as an importing and exporting country and to the wider benefit of the Bristol area. I recognise that we are dealing with something that relates to the Severn estuary, its entire ecosystem and habitats and, importantly, the people and jobs that come from that part of the country.
In conclusion, the proposed scheme is not only the most cost-effective habitat compensation to enable the Severn estuary flood risk management strategy to move forward; it also offers improved flood protection to the local area. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset for raising the matter. He has made me much better educated about it because I have spent a considerable time preparing for the debate, and I listened with interest to his enjoyable remarks.
I hope that what I have said has helped to highlight to my hon. Friend the need to manage flood risk in ways that protect people and property and deliver good value for money to the taxpayer, but also meet our environmental obligations. If we do not do that, we cannot legally improve flood protection elsewhere in the estuary. If we did it without compensatory works, that would leave the taxpayer liable to fines from Europe. That is not something that I have the power to avoid, and no hon. Member should be happy for it to happen, because we are in strapped financial circumstances. If we did nothing we would also lose valuable habitat and all that that offers to us as a society. Our emphasis is always on working with nature, wherever possible, to reduce the risks to people while also meeting social and environmental objectives.