Flooding

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, my noble friend has great experience of the flooding in his constituency and we have all seen the difficulties when many residents and businesses on the River Severn have been so affected. It is important to note that in Cumbria all the flood storage reservoirs were utilised—at Carlisle, Wigton, Longtown, Kendal and Penrith—and, indeed, the flood basins at Garstang and Catterall on the River Wyre were immensely valuable in preventing more properties being flooded. Therefore, how we stall water or how to slow the flow are things that we need to look at more rigorously.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I live only a short distance from Honister, and indeed from Cockermouth, and not far from Keswick, and I was at home during the weekend. The situation is hard to overdramatise. Obviously I could speak at great length about the experience but I will not. Suffice to say that we cannot thank the volunteers and the specialist services enough. They worked tremendously hard; they were very prompt in their arrival; and they worked effectively.

However, we cannot overemphasise the resilience of the people. I do not want the House to be under any illusion. There is a great deal of despondency in the area about how seriously the situation is taken. First, for a long time, ever since the last major incident, there has been scepticism about whether all the money was being spent to good effect and whether what was done was sufficient. Secondly, people had anticipated and discussed—I have heard them over the years—that because it was not enough it would create new problems. Indeed, this has happened. There were predictable knock-on effects from some of the defence work that was done, which aggravated the situation just along the road, or just down the way, or wherever. That has to be considered very seriously. In other areas, the work was just useless because the floods completely overpowered it. There is a lot to be examined about the effectiveness and how far public expenditure was put to good use.

Thirdly, there is the impact on people. There will be trauma for a long time to come with consequences for the health service and others. While the resilience of the people is magnificent, there will be others who are completely broken, which will place a heavy demand on the psychiatric as well as the physical aspects of medicine. I bring these points to the attention of the Minister.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord for raising these points today. Absolutely, volunteers came from all parts of the country to help the people of Cumbria. I know there is a very strong flood warden system in Cumbria and I acknowledge, because of the resilience of those communities, that somehow they will get through it but it is going to be very difficult and very painful. I realise that and we need to take all these matters extremely seriously. As the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister have said, we need to learn further lessons from this. Obviously, there is the whole issue of river systems, and the way in which we deal with these enormous flows of water is absolutely crucial.