Emma Hardy

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Sarah Hall) on securing this debate on a highly important matter. Flood and coastal erosion risk has increased and is projected to continue to increase as a result of climate change. I hope that that is at the forefront of all the conversations at COP this week. A priority for this Government is to protect communities around the country from flooding and to improve the resilience of the country. I recognise the challenge that all constituents, including my own, face during extreme weather events. I sympathise about the impact on households and businesses and, of course, on people’s mental health. Now more than ever, it is important to act to improve our country’s resilience to flooding, and that is exactly what this Government are doing. Before I respond to Members’ remarks, I wish to raise the issue of Storm Claudia, which brought heavy rain and high winds to the UK over the weekend. The worst impacts were felt in south-east Wales. A major incident was declared in Monmouth because of significant flooding in the town and evacuations; The incident was stood down on Sunday, and I met my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) this morning. My sympathies go out to all those affected by the flooding—I personally know the distress and upset that flooding can cause—and my thanks go to the Environment Agency, emergency services, local authorities, other responders who were volunteers and all the people who have worked together to protect and support communities and who continue to do so. As flooding is a devolved policy issue, I have contacted the First Minister of Wales to offer my support, and the Environment Agency has offered support locally, including any mutual aid that may be requested by Natural Resources Wales. I now turn to the focus of today’s debate. I like the passion that my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South brought to this conversation. It shows clearly how much this issue means to her and what an important issue it is to her constituents. I thank her for her continued engagement on the Sankey brook flood risk management scheme, which aims to reduce the flood risk to homes and businesses from Sankey brook, Dallam brook and Longford brook in Warrington. We aim to announce in March 2026 the further list of schemes that will receive investment during 2026-27, but with further announcements to follow each year subsequently. This announcement will follow the regular statutory yearly process for allocating flood funding, with support from the regional flood and coastal committees across the country. The reason we do it in this way is to give local people some say over the money and the schemes that are happening in their area, so it is really important that the regional flood and coastal committees play their role in looking at how the money is best spent and helping to ensure that it meets local priorities. In 2026-27, we are prioritising projects that are already in construction—we are basically just getting on with building stuff—so the money will be going into projects that are literally being built. I would say, “Build, baby, build,” but I think someone else may have used that in a different debate. We will be delivering flood projects. This will deliver flood risk reductions as soon as possible and will secure the best value for money for taxpayers by avoiding costs that would be incurred if these projects were delayed. We will just get on with doing it and get on with building them. The EA remains committed to the long-term goals of Sankey brook flood risk management scheme and will continue to work closely with Warrington borough council and United Utilities on progressing the scheme. There will continue to be close working on that as it goes on, and I will update my hon. Friend with any information that I have. I was quite excited about one point raised in this debate—I am probably the only Minister to get excited about pre-pipe conversations. We can continue to build defences larger and larger, but as so many hon. Members said during the debate, if we slow the flow, if we deal with what happens to the floodwater elsewhere, we do not need as many concrete defences when we reach the bottom of the hill. What is really interesting about the pre-pipe idea is looking at how we prevent lots of the floodwater from ending up in the combined sewerage system, because when these sewerage systems become overwhelmed, what happens? We have a pollution incident, we have flooding—we have something happening around the country. The pre-pipe idea is so sensible, but the previous flood funding formula rules inhibited natural flood management and inhibited what we wanted, which was to do things in a more innovative way. Our water White Paper takes the issue of flooding and water more holistically to look at the pre-pipe idea. Basically, where is the floodwater going to go? The floodwater is going to go somewhere when we have a downpour, so where do we want it to go and how do we design it to be in the places where we want it, rather than the places where we do not want it? It is a really interesting idea. We have also increased the weighting for natural flood management. Under the old scheme, there was a separate fund for natural flood management, but that was because the actual formula did not result in natural flood management outcomes. The reason was that with natural flood management, it is not an engineered solution. We cannot build natural flood management and say, “I guarantee this changes the flood risk bracket—I guarantee this natural flood management scheme will hold this much water,” because by its nature it is a natural flood management scheme. We have changed the rules and the system around them to enable us to have more natural flood management. The other thing of real interest in how the flood funding formula works is that we have given a deprivation weighting, because we know that areas with higher levels of deprivation are often the last to recover from a flooding incident and find it the most difficult to recover. Adding a weighting for deprivation and an emphasis on natural flood management to the formula that allocates where the money will be spent enables us to have more nature-based solutions and protect those who are most in need and least able to respond to flood events. The EA budget has increased, not decreased. Under this Labour Government, we increased it by £188 million this year, and our flood budget of £10.5 billion is a record investment—the most money that has ever been spent on flooding. As a Labour Government, we can proudly say that we are putting the most money ever into flooding and giving the Environment Agency the most money it has ever had.