Julia Buckley

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) for securing this important debate. As the Member for Shrewsbury, flooding is always a priority for me, as it is for my residents, businesses and local services, because our historic town is encircled by the beautiful yet powerful River Severn. Some of my residents have been flooded over 20 times since 1998, and our active Shrewsbury Business Flood Action Group is providing valuable support for them. They often struggle to find affordable insurance to cope. On funding, I thank the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for investing over £16 million this financial year in projects that protect communities such as mine all along the River Severn catchment. As the newly elected chair of the River Severn Partnership, I am delighted to see a suite of demonstrator projects that will develop nature-based solutions upstream for longer-term resilience. DEFRA is demonstrating its understanding and commitment to the scale of this issue and rising to the challenge. In terms of datasets, which I know the hon. Gentleman is very concerned about, DEFRA already published new online data on the Government website in January that show the updated risk of flood from the combined sources of rivers, seas and surface water. For the first time, surface-water flooding is incorporated into that new national flood risk assessment, and that will help individual residents and businesses to know whether the risk is coming downstream or up through their drain gullies—or sometimes both. In March, DEFRA then incorporated that dataset to update the flood zone planning maps that are often used by local authority planning officers and developers. We now have accurate risk assessments for all development sites, which I know environmental campaigners are really keen to hear. We finally have a Government who understand that we need to stop building on areas at risk of flooding, and we have delivered the data, the mapping and the intelligence to inform those local decisions and uphold that approach. Finally, in terms of local agencies and their responsibilities, I am pleased to inform the hon. Gentleman that I have secured an inquiry through the Environmental Audit Committee to examine flood preparedness and response. It will look particularly at the fragmentation of responsibilities across many agencies, and its impact on budgets and on how we can best co-ordinate. I hope that we can provide some helpful recommendations to the Minister, and perhaps find some efficiencies and ways to work better together towards prevention rather than cure. As with the demonstrator projects along the River Severn, Shrewsbury is once again leading the way.