17:09 Emma Hardy (Labour)

Events such as Storm Babet are not unexpected, however. We know that floods happen every winter. The Minister’s statement that assets have not been designed “for such rare, extreme levels of rainfall” shows complacency. We know that climate change is bringing more frequent and more severe rainfall events and, as I know from the terrible floods in 2007, where 16,000 properties were flooded in Hull, flooding has a devastating impact on people’s lives, with their belongings lost and businesses destroyed. The country must be better prepared, and we need to take our climate change goals seriously.

“there is no measurable long term national target to reduce flood risk…and the current target does not factor in risk increasing due to climate change.”

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for those astute observations. He is right about the more frequent incidence. This is linked to climate change—there is no doubt about that. We are focusing exactly on the whole flow of water through our plan for water, working at a catchment basis, which will be so important in future. It is local authorities’ role to keep culverts clean and all of that, so I will volunteer the Minister from DLUHC to meet him to discuss that important issue.

I would like to assure the hon. Gentleman that DEFRA has been working closely with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which has a strategy for exactly this issue, because it is critical that power outages are considered when emergencies such as this take place. Effective action was taken over the Rolls-Royce plants in the Derbyshire area; that was a very effective alignment with the Energy Department. Just as an aside, we work closely with the water industry on preparedness, should there be electricity outages, some of which might be linked to flooding. In fact, there was another incident near Derby and it had a clear management plan.

Given that we are seeing more, and more frequent, extreme weather events, and given that the Minister recognised climate change in her statement, does she not now regret the Prime Minister’s recent statement rolling back many of the measures necessary to tackle climate change quickly?

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