Steff Aquarone

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. In my experience as a county councillor over the past seven years, I have seen changing attitudes in the farming community, with farmers having moved from wanting to get the water off their land and into the river system as soon as possible, to wanting to build attenuation methods upstream and upland to help prevent flooding further downland, but they face planning barriers and all sorts of other hurdles that make that practically unviable. I want to touch on the issues faced by our farmers in North Norfolk. As well as talking to me yesterday about inheritance tax changes, many farmers raised concerns about how flooding impacts their land. Access to the farming recovery fund seems, to my farmers and me, to be scattergun and confusing; the restrictive criteria mean that some are receiving payouts for land that has hardly been touched by flooding, while not receiving anything for land that has spent months underwater, simply because they are either lucky or unlucky with DEFRA criteria and algorithms. William, a farmer in my constituency, told me yesterday that he had 30 acres of potato crop waterlogged for months on end, and totally unharvestable. He lost £100,000-worth of potatoes, but received no payout because he was told his land was not eligible. We know that our farmers operate on the slimmest profit margins to feed our country, and flooding is yet another challenge hammering them and their businesses. Norfolk’s farmers feel that they are being punished by the quirks of the system, and are in the dark about how to get the help that they need. The Minister has heard me raise a lot of problems so far, but I want to reassure her that the Government can achieve some quick wins. There are some things with simple solutions. First, we need to ensure that the insurance landscape for flooding is viable. I am appreciative of the Flood Re scheme, but we must ensure that it will achieve its mission to create a risk-reflective pricing model by the time it exits the market in 2039, and that it covers all types of flood risk, including coastal erosion, which rapidly eats away at the North Norfolk coast. I also feel that we need to place a greater duty on our insurers to carry out the actions in flood prevention reports after incidents occur. Insurers currently put properties back to the state they were in before the flooding, rather than being required to support residents to ensure that the flooding cannot happen again. For example, why are insurers replacing ankle-height sockets in properties they know could flood again, when logic would dictate that they need to be moved higher up to protect them in the future? My residents have been left in a scenario where they know what needs to happen to prevent future flooding, but the actions are not forthcoming. It is totally unacceptable, and I hope the Minister will indicate that she is open to reviewing this area of law, if that is the reform we need to fix these issues. There is a very real human impact of the failings of this set-up. I have spoken with one of my constituents who has been flooded twice, forced to move out of her home for months, and still struggles to secure the changes she needs to avoid yet more flooding. Anglian Water is responsible for increasing the drainage capacity, the highways department is responsible for trying to redirect the water flow off the road away from her property, and her insurers have to help her piece her life back together again. All those agencies and organisations have been unable to secure funding or have been limited in their powers. She will want to hear from the Minister today an assurance that she will not carry on falling through the cracks and being a repeat victim of predictable problems, and will finally receive the long-lasting solution she needs and deserves. Whenever we discuss damaging floods, which are becoming all the more regular, we must address the elephant in the room that is man-made climate change. It is no coincidence that we see more extreme weather events, storms and flooding when our climate is being so drastically damaged. If we do not deviate from the course of climate crisis, resilience measures will become obsolete as the emergency worsens. The current modelling on what we need to prevent and alleviate flooding looks backwards at data and trends from the past, but climate change is bringing extreme weather and flooding that we have never seen before. If we cannot handle what has gone before, we do not stand a chance of tackling what has yet to come. We have to incorporate the climate emergency into our thinking on this issue far more realistically. Norfolk is proudly at the cutting edge of the green energy transformation that we need to fight climate change. We are proud to be playing our part in saving the planet, but if the homes of those working on these projects, and the businesses and suppliers for them, are flooding, and the infrastructure itself is at risk of flooding, we cannot help. We want to play our part and we need the support to do so. I hope the Government can think holistically when tackling the challenges of flooding. It is not just an environment issue; it impacts our local economy, our emergency services and our health systems. I fear the cost of failure here simply is not understood, but I can assure the Government that they cannot afford it. While we are talking about Norfolk today, improving flood preparedness across the country will positively impact so much more than just the people whose homes and businesses are flooding today. This challenge is immediate. The time for waiting around and delay has long passed and we are staring down the barrel of a tough—and possibly disastrous—winter. This is not about just protecting the highest possible number of chimney pots, but preserving a beautiful, historic natural landscape and a way of life that has served Norfolk for generations. I hope that as the Government listen to the contributions in this debate and consider their future actions as a result, in the forefront of their minds are the affected residents and business owners, villages such as Hickling and Potter Heigham, and the communities begging us not to carry on with the status quo.