Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

This is becoming increasingly important. In his 2008 review, following the terrible floods of 2007, Sir Michael Pitt set out recommendations to deal with surface water flooding. This flooding is increasing much more than fluvial or coastal flooding, but, as yet, successive Governments have not found a means of dealing with it. It is an ongoing challenge that we face. In the spirit of cross-party co-operation, I submit these two amendments this evening. I beg to move.

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as noted in the register as a non-executive director of NatCap Research. This declaration is particularly appropriate as I stand to support the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, in bringing back this sensible amendment—indeed, I support all the amendments in this group—because this company, along with many others, provides a scientific evidence base for nature and climate-based risks for companies that are concerned about the changing environmental landscape in which they find themselves, not least because of the costs to their businesses, stocks and shares, and the bottom line if they do not bring in mitigation measures.

I am therefore struggling to understand why the Government feel unable to support such a sensible amendment, which would ensure the same sort of mitigation approach for individual homeowners, especially those in the lower socioeconomic bands who may not be able to afford the high costs of flood risk or have any insurance. We must acknowledge that flood risk is real. We hear many examples, and I could give more— I will not, because of time. It is a rapidly increasing risk. It is not something that might happen; it is something that will happen, and we are seeing yearly changes occurring now. What is being suggested here are simple and low-cost measures that can be taken by developers to ensure that the homes they sell in areas of higher flood risk are future-proofed.

In Committee, the Minister responded that:

“Designers of new homes may also choose to follow the Construction Industry Research and Information Association code of practice, which includes installing flood-resilient features”.—[Official Report, 4/9/25; col. 1024.]


What happens when designers decide not to follow this and the burden of repairing homes damaged by flooding falls to the owners and their insurers? Strengthening planning rules to encourage low-cost property resilience measures, such as those proposed in this amendment, means that the risk to individual homeowners can be reduced from the outset, and the costs of flooding—not just financial but to mental well- being—can be avoided.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the two noble Baronesses who have just spoken, demonstrating the breadth of support for this set of amendments around the House. As the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, said, to paraphrase, this is a common-sense set of measures which are not big-P “political” at all—it just something that obviously needs to be done.

I am speaking to Amendments 70 and 81, to which I attached my name, and for my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who tabled Amendments 86, 120, 121A and 121B. Briefly, on the first two, we have to set the context. A week ago, the Committee on Climate Change told the Government that we have to be preparing for 2 degrees of warming by 2050. Even more critically perhaps, in the context of this Bill, the Government and the country have not yet adapted to the levels of warming that we already have.

As in so many other areas—not just flooding but heat and cold—we are building homes that immediately need to be retrofitted, or homes that are setting people up for months, if not years, of misery. If a home was flooded and we had the kind of measures proposed by Amendment 70, it would be possible to clean the home up and, potentially, for people to move back in quite quickly. Without those measures, there are issues around the cost of insurance and months or even years of misery before there is any way that the home is occupiable again. We should not be building homes in that condition, and where homes are being retrofitted it should be to prepare them for that.

Those are my views on Amendments 70 and 81. I spoke extensively in Committee on Amendment 81, so I shall just repeat: the flood plain is not beside the river; the flood plain is part of the river.

My noble friend’s amendments are about the other side of this issue. They do not deal with the flood-water rushing down the river, the surface water that is rushing off the hard surfaces that is so typical of many areas, or the impounded soils that reflect so much of our land management now. This is saying that we should catch that water and use it in the right kind of way. It is talking about having infrastructure systems that have sustainable harvesting—we talked a lot about water butts in Committee—in order to distribute fit-for-purpose water among residents. It makes no sense at all that we still use massive quantities of expensive—in both financial and energy terms—treated drinking water for purposes where we do not need anything like that quality.

These amendments are also about reducing costs. We have a cost of living crisis, so if we can use free water rather than water that we have to pay for, that would be a win-win all round. Similarly, Amendment 120 is about water efficiency and making sure that the design minimises the amount of water use. These are all practical things and it is hard to see any reason why anyone could argue that they should not be in the Bill.