Storm Henk

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord raises an important point. I assure him that, through the various fora looking at weather patterns—not least the Environment Agency and Defra working closely together—and through our entire adaptation programme, we are changing our view of the risk, in accordance with the best available science, particularly meteorology. This is a requirement under our adaptation programme, but it is also something we have to do to make sure that our plans and the vast amounts of taxpayers’ money that go into these schemes reflect this.

An important difference that has allowed us to take many more schemes forward has been the partnership funding approach. I do not know the specifics of the noble Lord’s Wyre Forest scheme, but so many did not qualify under the value for money criteria in the past and were not built. Now that we have introduced our partnership funding scheme, with other sources of funding, planning conditions, local levies and a variety of other measures, we have seen hugely increased numbers of schemes and protections put in place. I hope the noble Lord’s scheme will benefit from that and I will raise it personally with the floods Minister to ensure that it is in the programme.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the Minister for the effort he made to visit some of the residents affected and also to the Prime Minister, who went to the East Midlands and Oxfordshire. That does them great credit. I understand from what the Minister said that 2,000 homes have been severely affected and badly damaged and that the vast majority will have full insurance. However, some have not been able to get cover, for a variety of reasons. Can anything be done to help residents facing that plight?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his point about visits. It is hard to get this one right. Ministers should not be on site and getting in the way while an emergency is happening—but they should also not be too late. I think my colleagues hit the sweet spot; they were able to hear from people affected, feed that through to officials and make sure that, where changes needed to take place, they did. Our job is now to make sure that we learn from this, as we do from every incident.

On my noble friend’s second point, insurance available for people at flood risk has changed dramatically since we introduced Flood Re, which has meant that households that could not get insurance can now get it. That scheme must be constantly reviewed in the light of increased risk. Alongside that, £5,000 will be available to the households he mentioned and Flood Re can also fund resilience repairs under our build back better programme, which provides up to £10,000 towards the cost of like-for-like reinstatement after flood damage.