Lord Katz (Lab)

I thank the right reverend Prelate for bringing the actions of Rotherham council to our attention. He is absolutely right that the whole of south Yorkshire has been subject to severe flooding. As he said, sometimes, as in places such as Rotherham, basic and simple solutions are the best. To address his wider point, we are working closely with local government to ensure that lessons from recent flooding and innovations that we are seeing across the country can be adapted at scale. The purpose of the Government’s Floods Resilience Taskforce is to improve co-ordination across the whole system and translate local experience into national practice. Recently, the taskforce met in Manchester to consider how case studies from local partners in areas such as Greater Manchester—and from devolved Governments, such as Northern Ireland, in the case of the meeting the other day—including innovation in forecasting, community resilience and emergency response, can be replicated more widely. Local partners are directly engaged through regional flooding coastal committees through local resilience forums, which ensures that local knowledge, such as in Rotherham, as cited by the right reverend Prelate, on innovations to reduce flood risk through natural flood management and sustainable draining systems, informs national decisions on how best to roll out new technologies and share best practice across regions.