Matt Rodda

I appreciate the work that the Minister is doing in this area. She is proving herself to be an excellent Minister who is willing to listen to those of us with concerns about flooding. As part of the review, is it possible to investigate the role of locks and weirs in river catchments and how they are maintained and operated when rivers are at a high level? Concerns have been raised with me by local residents that some weirs or locks—this is an issue within the community, which I have not yet been able to fully check out—may have been opened at times of high flow, when perhaps it might have been better for the water to have been managed in a different way. Is it possible to have further consultation on that? I understand that in some catchments there are different ways of locks and weirs being managed, and it may be that there is no national standard. On the Thames, there are often lock-keepers who are paid employees, but with some tributaries, it is not as organised as that, and it may be individual landowners who are responsible. In our area, the way that the Kennet—it is a large tributary, but still only a tributary—is managed is different from and less professionalised than the Thames, and concerns have been expressed about that.