Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak to Amendments 100 and 101. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, for lending her support to Amendment 101. Amendment 100 sets out a very simple request that the sequential and exception tests be recognised as planning tools that help to “ensure new development is directed away from areas at the highest risk of flooding and … make development that is necessary in areas of flood risk safe throughout its lifetime, without increasing flood risk elsewhere”. Currently, however, these tests are only guidance and are not always being carried out. A statutory basis would help to ensure that local planning authorities placed due regard on them when preparing local plans and considering individual planning applications. In Amendment 100, I ask the Government to provide clearer statutory guidance on how and when to undertake the sequential and exception tests so that they can be applied by developers and local planning authorities more robustly. In particular, proposed new subsection (7) says: “To pass the exception test it should be demonstrated that … the development would provide wider sustainability benefits to the community that outweigh the flood risk, and … the development will be safe for its lifetime taking account of the vulnerability of its users, without increasing flood risk elsewhere, and, where possible, will reduce flood risk overall”. The reason for bringing this back on Report is very genially to prod the Minister a little bit further. We produced a number of bricks and mortar reports through the auspices of Westminster Sustainable Business Forum. The evidence we took in our third report was, very specifically, repeated accounts of developers providing unsatisfactory site-specific flood risk assessments, and sometimes not performing the sequential or exception tests at all. Therefore, I urge the Minister to ensure that the sequential and exception tests be placed on a statutory footing to make sure that they are carried out. To give an anecdotal example, a planning application in Yatton, north Somerset, was recently refused by North Somerset Council on the basis that it had failed the sequential test. However, the application was later granted on appeal as the planning inspector concluded that the failure of the test was not a strong enough reason for refusing the application, citing local housing need. I argue to the Minister that there is a very clear and pressing need to place the guidance on a statutory footing. Amendment 101 states specifically that local planning authorities should “ensure that the maps included in their Strategic Flood Risk Assessments are based on the most up-to-date flood risk assessments provided by the Environment Agency”. In 2007, when surface water flooding became an issue for the first time, it was generally considered and concluded by Sir Michael Pitt’s review in 2008 that there was insufficient mapping. There have been developments since then. In particular, I applaud the opening of the joint forecasting centre in Exeter—a joint venture, as I understand it, between the Met Office and the Environment Agency—but much more could be done and drilled down to local street level to assess and give a strategic flood risk as to where the flooding is likely to appear. The Environmental Audit Committee’s report, Flood Resilience in England, of 13 October states in paragraph 14 that the Floods Resilience Taskforce should begin to implement, no later than 2026, a mechanism to provide “strategic oversight across all sources of flood risk, fluvial, surface water, coastal, and groundwater, and set national priorities for risk management authorities”. That is even more important now than before.