Extreme Weather Events: Resilience

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Alex Burghart

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart]

We obviously learned a great many lessons from covid. As the hon. Lady will be aware from the documentation that the Government have published over the past couple of years, there has been a great deal of activity to improve our resilience and response to emergencies. My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister gave a statement to that effect in this House in December.

The Cabinet Office assigns ownership of acute national risks to lead Government Departments, across risk identification, risk assessment, prevention, resilience, preparation and emergency response and recovery. The lead Government Departments may change between the phases as the impact changes and different competencies are required. None the less, the UK has adopted a bottom-up approach to managing emergencies, as most emergencies affect local areas. We have local responders such as the police, fire and ambulance services, which manage emergencies without direct involvement from the Government. The response to larger-scale emergencies is then led by lead Government Departments. It is only in the most serious cases that the response is escalated to Cabinet Office briefing rooms—known as Cobra—and senior Ministers from across Government are brought in. As the hon. Lady will have heard me say, this is very much about a partnership between centre and locality, and we are starting to see the benefits of that approach.

[Mrs Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

May I ask my hon. Friend to congratulate the good people of Repton and the other villages that came together to help with all the flooding that has been going on? In particular, they are holding follow-up meetings to get more flood wardens across South Derbyshire. I have never seen anything like the flooding that has taken place in South Derbyshire. We need to get the Environment Agency to move on with plans for installing holding ponds further up the Trent and the Derwent to stop the run-off from the fields that we have had this time round. Anything that my hon. Friend can do to help me to get spades in the ground on those projects would be much appreciated.

[Alex Burghart]

I very much hear what my hon. Friend says. I know that my colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will have heard likewise. She will have heard what I had to say earlier about the Department’s position on flooding. On alerts, for instance, normal flood warnings were operated. We did not use the national alert because the situation did not reach that threshold, and our local partners did not ask us to use it. From what we can see at this stage, that local system worked well and helped to protect people and, where possible, property.