17:45 Mr. Drew (Tewkesbury) (Con)

I shall not labour the point, but in recent history we have some good examples of fire and rescue services being employed to their full capacity in Gloucestershire, Sheffield, and more recently Cumbria. It is clear that although that may not be normal—in these days of climate change, we are not quite sure what normality means—it is an important part of the fire and rescue services’ precautionary provision. That is not just local provision. In episodes of flooding such as those in Cumbria and Gloucestershire, fire and rescue services are brought in from many other brigades. Such is the scale of the disaster that that level of response is needed.

We have heard a lot about floods occurring once in 100 or 200 years—or, in respect of the north-west floods of a few months ago, once in 1,000 years. I do not think that we can speak in those terms, as I do not believe that floods have been recorded for 1,000 years, in which case we cannot say how often they have occurred over a 1,000-year period. In view of climate change, which we discuss in one form or another every day, we cannot assume that weather patterns will be the same in the future as they have been in the past.

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20:30 Miss McIntosh (Sir Michael Lord)

New clause 13— Annual report from the Climate Change Adaptation Sub Committee —

‘(1) The Secretary of State may by order require the Climate Change Adaptation Sub Committee to submit an annual report to the Secretary of State.

(2) In particular, the report must include information on the progress towards implementing each recommendation for adapting to climate change.’.

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20:45 Martin Horwood (Makerfield) (Lab)

Let me begin by giving an example of the problem. Mr. and Mrs. Staight from the Park area of my constituency have recently had a pretty bad experience with their insurance company. It is unrelated to flooding, because their property has never flooded. In the floods of 2007, which were likely to take place once in every 100-plus years, they were untouched by flooding. However, as a result of that recent bad experience, they wanted to change their insurance company and discovered that flooding was excluded as a risk simply because of their postcode, despite the fact that their property had never flooded. With a combination of threats, from climate change to the Government’s regional spatial strategy putting more and more new housing in countryside areas around the constituency, as well as the risks of increasing and unpredictable bouts of extreme weather of various kinds, it seems wise to extend cover to families such as the Staights. Yet the approach of the insurance industry appears to be to tolerate there being exclusions the moment someone moves insurance companies. However, that is, of course, outside the remit of the voluntary agreement that the Government have already reached with the industry.

The planning inspector involved commented that the flooding of 2007 was not likely to happen again. That is wildly optimistic, especially given that there were two such flood events in the space of a month in 2007 and another quite serious one subsequently. As I have said, climate change, urbanisation and more extreme weather patterns mean that it is wildly over-optimistic to suggest that these kinds of flood events will not happen again. We need to make it crystal clear that local authorities have the right to refuse planning permission on floodplains or on otherwise defined high flood-risk areas. I could have cited many other examples had I had time to do so, and there are other important issues that we sadly do not have time to discuss, but I wish to give the Minister time to respond on the issue of insurance at least.

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