Future Flood Prevention

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute, and I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). I do not want to speak to the whole report or the Government’s response. I shall focus rather on our Select Committee’s recommendation 15 on the statutory duty for the fire and rescue service. This recommendation is consistent with our other recommendations 16 to 21, which all raise concerns about governance, command and control, structures and relationships. The evidence the Committee heard led us to the conclusion we reached. Sadly, however, the Government disagree.

Under recommendation 15:

“We recommend that the Government places a statutory duty on the Fire and Rescue Service in England and Wales to provide an emergency response to flood events and commits the necessary additional funding and staff resources to support delivery of this responsibility”—

a point to which I shall return later. The Government’s response states:

“Fire and Rescue Services in England already have the discretionary powers they need…A Statutory Duty would potentially reduce flexibility with a one size fits all approach, and there are clear advantages to a permissive regime”.

That sounds like civil service and ministerial double-speak or euphemism if I ever heard it.

I am grateful to Pat Strickland in the House of Commons Library for its briefing, “Should Fire and Rescue Services have a Statutory Duty to deal with flooding?” It outlines that the 2008 Pitt review into the 2007 floods said that there should be fully funded national capability for flood rescue

“underpinned as necessary by a statutory duty”.

In a written answer in December 2015, the then Minister with responsibility for policing and fire said that the good response of the fire services to flooding in that year suggested that there was “no need for review”. The Labour Government had arrived at the same conclusion in 2008, but we have seen more and more serious flood events since then, so the situation is changing.

The briefing paper details the law as it stands:

“The Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 does not place a statutory duty…to respond to floods, although there is a power to do so…the Act sets out the statutory ‘core functions’ of FRA…to provide for…fire safety…fire-fighting…rescuing people and protecting people from harm in the event of road traffic accidents”—

or road traffic collisions in 21st-century jargon. The law in Scotland is different. There has been a statutory duty since 2013, and the Pitt review took a similar view to the one that now exists in Scotland:

“The Review believes that clarifying and communicating the role of each of these bodies would improve the response to flooding. However, we are concerned that the systems, structures and protocols developed to support national coordination of multi-agency flood rescue assets remain ad-hoc. We believe that the Fire and Rescue Service should take on a leading role in this area, based on fully funded capability. This will be most effective if supported by a statutory duty.”

That is essentially the core of recommendations 15 to 21 and, as I say, nothing much has changed.

The Library briefing goes on to examine the history of the proposal and the debates in the House. I would like to focus on the history of the fire and rescue service’s statutory duties. Colleagues might expect that the fire service has always had a duty to attend fires, but it was partly the fire that destroyed most of this Palace of Westminster in 1834 that led to the creation of the London Fire Brigade, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Most colleagues would also probably expect that the fire and rescue service has a duty to prevent fires, and I suspect most would consider the role of the fire service in dealing with road traffic collisions to be a statutory duty. That is not the case. On fire, the statutory duty was created only in 1938. On fire safety, it was the Fire Services Act 1947 that created it. As for road accidents and road crashes, it was the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 that created the statutory duty.

When the Government say that the fire and rescue service will deal with floods because it has, it does and it will, that was also the case for fires, fire prevention and road traffic collisions until the prevailing wisdom decided that an expectation was not enough and the Government had to do more than just expect. There not only has to be a legal requirement for a duty; it has to be resourced and paid for, and the Government need to legislate for that outcome.

The Select Committee report makes the case for changes in structures. Part of our recommendations for better preparedness, better governance and stronger resilience is to confer a duty on the fire service to boost all those elements. The Government clearly do not want to proceed in that direction at present.

[Rob Marris]

Does my hon. Friend share my suspicion that the Government’s refusal to create a statutory duty for the fire and rescue service in this regard is driven principally by their desire not to commit resources to this area of endeavour?

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

My hon. Friend perfectly anticipates my next point. I was about to quote a statistic to demonstrate that the Government do not want to proceed in this direction—because staff reductions in fire and rescue services since 2010 have been significant, with nearly 7,000 jobs having been lost. By my estimate, that amounts to 20% of the British fire service disappearing since 2010. Those numbers are very worrying.

Furthermore, the transfer of responsibilities of the fire and rescue service to more and more police and crime commissioners, and budget pressures on both the police and the fire services suggest that there is real fear of further reductions. The fire and rescue service needs to be able to maintain the staff and equipment necessary to continue to play a prominent role in dealing with floods, preparing for them and mitigating them. To achieve that, they need recognition in law. The Select Committee believes that that needs to be done. It is an issue that is not going to go away. I suspect that at some point—perhaps not now—the Government will get the message.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Coffey]

I will not give way because I need to make progress and to discuss other important matters to which other hon. Members referred.

Returning to funding and the estimates, this Government continue to play a key role in improving the protection of those at risk of flood. The historic £2.5 billion over six years to better protect more than 300,000 properties from flooding and coastal erosion is an important increase. A key change is that, instead of the annual budget and the hand-to-mouth existence whereby the Environment Agency was not sure whether a project would be finished, a long-term approach to spending allows the Environment Agency to do the appropriate planning and get on with work instead of guessing how long something will take. We have also increased maintenance spending in real terms over this Parliament to over £1 billion.

The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) referred to partnership funding. I want to point out that it used to be that a scheme would either get all the funding or nothing. There was no way for a wider range of schemes to be covered. I recognise what she said about the extent of other public sector sources of money, but it matters that LEPs can and have made bids in order to increase economic development and are able to partner that funding. I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) said and I will follow up on the issue he raised.

I welcome the support for the use of natural flood risk management and the catchment-based approach that we are developing to prevent floods or to mitigate them where they do occur. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton welcomed the fact that we are introducing a new reporting measure on natural flood management in future spending years from 2018-19. We have allocated a further £15 million specifically for natural flood management schemes. I have not yet seen the candidates for those schemes, but the Environment Agency is working them up and I am aware of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee’s recommendation of one catchment scale to test out the principles. That approach is already being used in some flood prevention schemes, but it is right to have appropriate criteria for measuring.

On planning for future resilience, the hon. Member for Wakefield referred to the Environmental Audit Committee’s report and the House should be aware that we are now better prepared to deal with such issues. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton said that I am unable to change the weather—I am certainly not divine in that regard—but we are working hard to ensure that the lessons of previous floods feed into the national flood resilience review. I have chaired weekly meetings, which have only just finished, to get progress updates on what is happening with the different infrastructure providers. We have also re-established the inter-ministerial group on flooding, which meets quarterly for a broader response to flood prevention.

We have allowed the Environment Agency to invest in mobile flood defences. It now has 25 miles of temporary defences and half a million sandbags located across seven key areas, and it can deploy them flexibly around the country. The Army has also been made available. Troops were deployed in Lincolnshire and Norfolk at the request of the local resilience forums, but Suffolk and Essex decided that they did not need the help of the armed forces in the recent coastal surge. Overall, the country will be better protected and services for our communities will be more resilient to flooding. Over the next year, we intend to focus on surface water, which is a significant source of flooding, particularly in cities and urban areas. Again, that will involve collaboration between the Environment Agency, lead local flood authorities, the water sector, and other stakeholders with an interest in managing the risk.

On working together, we all recognise that flooding affects many aspects of our lives. We carefully considered the report’s recommendations on structures, but we do not agree that there is a need for substantial change—that does not mean to say that there are no ways to make it work even better. The local flood risk management action plan, which the Government published on 24 January, is a good example, and it aims to promote best practice and enable all lead local flood authorities to carry out their responsibilities as effectively and efficiently as possible. Eight councils have not started their plan, and I have written to them indicating that, if some action is not undertaken by the end of March, we will use our powers to get the plans going for them.

We should recognise that the current system means that, since 2005—stretching back into the last Labour Government—more than 500,000 properties are better defended today. I want to get it across that, right now, structural change would get in the way of delivering the flood prevention, resilience and other measures that will be undertaken over the next few years. Again, I am not convinced that just changing the name of who does what will improve the way that different bodies work together.

On the fire services, to which the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) referred, I can reaffirm that the Government have no plans for a statutory duty to deal with flooding. Fire services already respond to flooding as part of their general duties under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and in response to the risks set out in their integrated risk management plans. I pay tribute to those fire authorities that moved around the country following the recent coastal surge. It was well done, and in particular I saw the firefighters from Hampshire who came up to help Suffolk and Norfolk. That shows that the system is working well.

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

I recognise that the Government do not intend to move on this matter this instant, but does the Minister accept the statistic I quoted that the number of firefighters in the UK has reduced by 7,000 in the past seven years alone? There is no statutory duty, so responding to flooding is not a role that the fire service legally has to carry out. Will she keep that under close review and talk to her colleagues in the Home Office about making sure that numbers do not fall any or much further? Otherwise the fire services will not have the wherewithal to do the job that we all expect them to do.

[Dr Coffey]

I am cognisant of the fact that, certainly in my own area, there are fewer firefighters than there were some years ago. I do not have a single full-time firefighter in my constituency of 300 square miles, and this is an opportunity to pay tribute to the retained firefighters who help their communities. I assure the hon. Gentleman that there have been conversations with the DCLG and, now, the Home Office.

I have covered the point that we expect sustainable drainage in new developments. On governance, I flag up the role of the regional flood and coastal board, and a lot of that work is covered by the regional flood and coastal committees, which comprise a number of different stakeholders.

Several hon. Members raised the issue of insurance. The Flood Re scheme has been a good success, but I recognise what Members said about businesses, which is why we have worked hard to get the British Insurance Brokers Association to bring a product to market. I encourage all hon. Members to make businesses aware of that fact. If people feel that, having been offered a quotation for a specialist policy, they are still struggling, I would like to be made aware of it. I want to look at that in detail, but I am not able to promise today that we will have another Flood Re for businesses because the basis of Flood Re is that it is time-limited. It is a principle of general taxation that we share resources across the country and, to some extent, that is what has been extended with the Flood Re scheme, through which every insurance policy carries a premium to help with flooding.

I recently visited Mytholmroyd in the Calder valley, and some businesses there are moving. Admittedly they are moving about 200 yards, but they are moving and appropriate defences are being established.