19:28 Dan Jarvis (Labour)

Those flooded houses in Lang Avenue, Bentley, Fishlake and right across Yorkshire are connected to a much wider crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that climate change could increase the annual cost of flooding in the UK almost fifteenfold within 60 years in high-emission scenarios. A portion of the hundreds of millions of pounds we are asking the Government for is part of the cost of our collective inaction on climate change over the past decades. This is a small taste of just how false an economy that inaction was. The idea that it costs too much for us to decarbonise is madness. The only thing worse than not having acted then would be not to act now.

The Government have promised a green recovery from covid. We appreciate that intent, but so far they have not delivered anything resembling the transformational change that we should be aspiring to in this once-in-a-generation moment, a moment when massive public investment is not only possible but essential to save our economy. To take just one example, the £3 billion allocated nationally for building retrofits, one of the most obvious and essential ways to decarbonise, as well as to create skilled jobs, is roughly what we need for retrofitting South Yorkshire alone.

The Committee on Climate Change is unequivocal: we are not making adequate progress. The Government have agreed a 2050 target for net zero, but they are not yet doing what is needed to reach it. The challenge of course is real, but so far their actions do not reflect the catastrophic threat that we face. For my part, we have a plan for South Yorkshire to reach net zero by 2040 at the latest, and immediate proposals to plant millions of trees, transform our public transport and carry out £200 million of green infrastructure investment, but we need Government support if we are to make more than a fraction of those plans a reality.

To conclude, we have the opportunity to act now on flooding in Yorkshire, on natural flood prevention right across the UK and on global climate change. I ask the Government to respond to the threat highlighted so powerfully last November in a way that reflects its scale and its urgency and the fact that it is at once a local, national and global challenge, and at every one of those levels to make the investments now that will ultimately save us from paying a much greater price in the future.

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19:44 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)

Returning to nature-based solutions, this is a really important tool going forward, for a raft of reasons—not just for flood control, but to help with our climate change mitigation and our policies on reaching net zero and carbon capture and storage. It has multiple benefits, and it is one of the tools that we will be using. The Government have committed a component of our capital programme to natural flood management and we have provided specific funding, in addition, for specific schemes. I hope that the hon. Member will welcome that, and that we will see more of these projects coming forward in Yorkshire in general.

I think that we and the hon. Member have much in common: green recovery, climate change, and nature-based solutions. He needs to learn a lot more about what we are doing in DEFRA, because all these ideas are coming through, not least in the Environment Bill and the Government’s commitment to a green recovery. I look forward to the meeting that is coming up on 8 October, and thank him very much, again, for raising this issue tonight.

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