Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)

My Lords, I am delighted to address Amendments 108, 109, 155 and 156 in this group. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Willis of Summertown, for their support for these amendments. I look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, who will outline her amendments, which are very closely aligned to the content of mine; I think we are more or less on the same page. The background and starting point to this group is that houses built since Flood Re came into effect in 2009 will no longer qualify for flood insurance if they are built on a flood plain. Flood Re excluded them for a very simple reason: it did not want developers and local authorities to give planning permission to houses on functional flood plains. That is an obvious starting point. I welcome that the Government have commissioned the flood ready review, currently being undertaken by Peter Bonfield. I hope it will report fairly soon, possibly even while the Bill is still going through the House. I will be interested to see what the future holds following that review. The review will look at property flood resilience measures, which are simple, low-cost, proven interventions installed in a home to resist surface water flooding, significantly reducing the time and cost of recovering from a flood. In my previous life as a shadow Flooding Minister, one of the most poignant and saddest things I had to do was visit homes where there had been major floods, both in my own constituency and elsewhere. I am only too aware that people can be evicted from their homes for three to six months for public health reasons while the house is being put back into shape. The type of property flood resilience measures that I am looking at and that the review will look at are self-closing air-bricks, non-return valves on toilets, sump pumps and such. The Government’s own studies have found that these measures provide significant cost-effective opportunities to improve flood resilience. Property flood resilience significantly reduces the time and cost of recovering from floods, so I hope the Minister will respond positively to the amendments I am about to go into in some detail. Flooding costs the UK economy £2.4 billion a year. The average cost of repairing a home after a flood is £30,000 and the average time spent out of a home is nine months. Currently, 4.1 million homes are at risk of surface water flooding. This is a comparatively recent type of flooding, only identified since 2007. This follows on specifically from the measures outlined in the Sir Michael Pitt review of that year. There are now three times as many properties at high risk of flooding from surface water compared to that from rivers and the sea. Currently, 3.1 million UK homes are exposed to flood depths where property flood resilience measures would be most effective and where they could realistically benefit from such interventions. Some 83% of properties exposed to surface water risks are unprotected—far higher than proportions for river or coastal flooding. The Government will be well aware that, by 2050, 6.1 million homes will be at risk of surface water flooding and the number at high risk is expected to have increased by 66%. So these amendments are very timely and could stem the flow of increased properties at risk. In the 12 local authorities with the highest flood risk, over 7,000 homes have been recently granted planning permission on flood plains. In 2021-22, 7% of new homes were built in flood zone 3. Therefore, identifying those most at risk of flooding is especially appropriate. Recognising that surface water flooding now has a greater effect than either river or coastal flooding and the fact that, in a group much later in the Bill, we look at my own pet subject of sustainable drainage—I look forward to my meeting with the Minister and her colleague from Defra, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, to discuss that—I would argue that introducing flood resilience measures to new properties as well as retrofitting old ones would be an extremely valuable opportunity. I will discuss each of the amendments in turn. I completely omitted to declare my interests, for which I apologise profusely. I am co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Water and vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities. I have co-authored a number of reports with Policy Connect and the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum, which is a local think tank in London. We have co-authored a number of reports on bricks and water—four to date, and we hope to do a fifth. I am drawing heavily on the recommendations in those reports, and I would be delighted to share them with the Minister for some reading, perhaps during Conference Recess when she has a quiet moment. Amendment 108 looks at residential building on flood plains. The idea of this amendment is to ensure that local authorities cannot grant planning permission for residential properties to be built on what I would describe as functional flood plains or on areas at high risk of flooding. As Flood Re established, if they are not going to be covered for insurance, it seems very unfair on a householder who may not in fact need a mortgage to find out that, subsequent to buying that house, they are not eligible because of flooding. The amendment would narrow it down so that flood zones 3a and 3b are excluded. Amendment 109 looks at property flood resilience measures, which I described briefly before, particularly raised electrical sockets, non-return valves on utility pipes, air-brick covers, resilient wall plaster and others such as the Secretary of State herself may wish to identify. These resilience measures are being installed at only a fraction of the pace required to make vulnerable homes insurable once the Flood Re insurance scheme is withdrawn in 2039. That might seem a long time away, but it is only 14 years before the Flood Re scheme expires. Amending building regulations to require the use of basic property flood resilience would offer an affordable way to accelerate uptake and would mean that houses built in higher-risk flood areas are adapted for that purpose. It would constitute a far cheaper option than retrofitting, which, while it brings benefits, is obviously infinitely more expensive for new houses. I turn to Amendment 155, which looks at local plans and planning applications regarding flooding. The sequential exception tests are planning tools that would help to ensure that new development is directed away from areas at the highest risk of flooding, and would make necessary development in areas of flood risk safe throughout their lifetime without increasing flood risk elsewhere, as the displaced water is often simply moved to flood existing or other developments. However, these tests are currently only guidance. I propose in Amendment 155 to put them on a statutory basis, as that could only help to ensure that local planning authorities place due regard on them when preparing local plans and considering individual planning applications. Amendment 156 looks at the strategic flood risk assessment maps and would make sure that these included the most up-to-date flood risk assessment provided by the Environment Agency. In this regard, a statutory duty should be placed on local planning authorities to do so. Strategic flood risk assessments are vital to ensuring that planning decisions take into account risks from all sources of flooding, including an allowance for climate change. They would also help to identify whether any proposed development fell into flood zone 3b, the functional flood plain. Placing a duty on local planning authorities to keep strategic flood risk assessments up to date would ensure that they can reliably inform the development of local plans and incorporate the latest information from the Environment Agency’s new national flood risk assessment. The Minister was temporarily unable to listen because she was being consulted by the party managers, but I am sure that she shares my concern that 7,000 new homes have been built on flood plains in 12 local authorities alone, and that 7% of new homes were built in flood zone 3b in 2021-22 alone. With those remarks, I hope that the Minister will look favourably on these key amendments and put them on a statutory footing. I beg to move.