09:30 Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I look forward to the debate, which is important because flooding remains a highly topical issue for many of our constituents who have suffered the appalling consequences of flooding this winter. I regret to predict that many more may suffer that fate during the years ahead as climate change provides more rainfall events of more persistent duration and at unpredictable times of the year.

However, I am not here to forecast the weather or to dwell on the causes or impacts of climate change. There are plenty of other opportunities to do that, not least through the work of the Environmental Audit Committee —which I have the honour to chair—and our latest, recently launched inquiry on climate and security. The consequences of flooding for national infrastructure are one of the issues being considered.

I will offer a few initial words of context on the flooding challenge we face. The Met Office’s “State of the UK Climate” report in 2022 confirmed how the UK has become wetter over the past few decades, albeit with significant annual variation. The third UK climate change risk assessment in 2021 identified flooding as one of the most important climate change adaptation challenges facing the UK. Six of the 10 wettest years on record in the UK have occurred since 1998, and this past year has seen the most rainfall for any 18-month period in England since Met Office rainfall records started in 1836.

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10:16 Rachael Maskell (Labour)

I have met Yorkshire Water, the Environment Agency and City of York Council to look at what is happening in our city. We have a major choice to make. Do we shut water out and have the continual battle of keeping it away, as the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) suggested, or do we learn to live with water? It is a very difficult choice, given the climate changes we are seeing; Members from across the House have articulated how much more frequent flooding is and the extent to which water levels are rising. I have praised our flood defences, but we know that we do not have long in relative terms until they will be challenged. What do we do at that juncture? We have been looking across the globe, as the hon. Member mentioned, but this is very real for us now. We have to make strategic choices about how we manage water, while remembering that flooding is not our greatest threat—drought is—so we also need to think about what we are doing on storage for the long term. York does not have one river; we have two. Of course, many of our towns and cities were built along rivers, which were traditionally trading routes. We have to deal with that.

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10:48 Robbie Moore (Conservative)

Climate change means that the number of people at risk from flooding is, unfortunately, likely to grow. The storms we experienced over the autumn and winter brought that into sharp focus, as more than 5,000 properties were flooded. More importantly, however, nearly a quarter of a million—241,000—properties were protected as a result of the continued investment in flood defences. The Government are acting to drive down flood risk from every angle. Our long-term policy statement published in 2020 sets out our

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