Blake Stephenson

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree that that is something the Government should be looking at. During the recent flooding, I was appalled to learn that drains and sewers in the new town of Wixams were overloaded with surface floodwater. Seventeen years after construction began in Wixams, the drainage infra- structure should be adequate to accommodate many more houses than have so far been built. I urge the Minister to join me in pressing Anglian Water to take urgent action to expand its sewerage and drainage infra- structure. Wixams is merely the most obvious example of a problem that residents are seeing repeatedly with development. House by house, development by development, infrastructure is failing to keep pace. While an individual development might not be enough to overwhelm the system or cause knock-on flooding impacts, the accumulated weight of development is creating huge problems across the country—including in Maulden in my constituency, where development has crept gradually up the slope of the Greensand ridge, resulting in water having fewer places to stop and soak, so that it instead surges down into the village. While the flooding infrastructure for these new developments might in theory be sufficient for planners to justify development, planning is failing to cope with the demands placed on it by multiple and interconnected developments, which is piling pressure on to networks and our natural environment. With the Government set to review the planning system and ask for our towns and villages to take thousands of additional homes, I implore the Minister to work with colleagues to deliver reforms that require flooding authorities to take a wider systems view of the impact of developments. We need to ensure that housing targets do not put the delivery of new homes over the habitability of housing stock, or the safety and sustainability of our communities.