Welcome to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee and today’s review into flood resilience in England. We are delighted to be joined by the panel in front of us. Welcome to you all. First, I invite you—starting with Celia—to introduce yourselves, the organisation that you work for, and your particular area of interest with regard to flooding and the inquiry that we are doing.

Good afternoon, Chair. My name is Celia Davis, and I am a Senior Projects and Policy Manager at the Town and Country Planning Association. My particular interest is around flood resilience and the planning system.

Good afternoon, Chair. I am Hannah Burgess. I am the President of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, which is a membership organisation of over 11,500 water and environmental professionals. My area of expertise is 20 years working in the flood and coastal field, particularly in strategic planning, development and flood risk, coastal adaptation and stakeholder engagement.

Good afternoon, Chair. My name is Rachel Hallos. I am a farmer, but I am also the Vice President of the National Farmers’ Union. I am here representing over 44,000 farmers and growers across England and Wales. My special interest, my keen interest, is that farmers and growers have been suffering from quite a number of flooding impacts over recent years. This is having an effect on their businesses and food security, and I would just like to be part of this discussion.

Thank you very much. It is great to have you all here. I will start with you, Ms Burgess. From your perspective, do you think current land use across England—such as for housing, infrastructure and farming—is having a positive or a negative impact on England’s flood resilience capabilities?

The simple answer is that the way we currently use our land is overall having a negative impact. The simple reason behind that is that at the moment we do not take a catchment-based approach or a coastline-based approach to land use planning. Therefore, we look at things site by site, in terms of, “If we develop this site, what impact will it have on flooding and what impact will flood risk have on that site?” Effectively, planning policy at the moment means that developers have to make sure they do not make things worse, but they do not have to make things better. That is fundamentally why I say that. In urban areas, increasing urbanisation, increasing hard surfaces and increasing surface water runoff lead to surface water flooding. In agricultural areas, agricultural intensification, soil compaction, removal of hedgerows, trees and so on have happened over time, led by different agricultural policies, but also lead to an increase in rural run-off.

Thank you for that very broad layout of the issues that face us. That is exactly why this Committee is looking at this issue. Ms Davis, how effective do you think current land use planning and management is in supporting flood resilience?

The short answer to that is unfortunately it is not very effective at all. At quite a fundamental level, the planning system is failing in its obligation to account for the climate impacts and the rising risk of flooding to developments. An example of that is a development in Blyth in Northumberland last year. It was a new development, with people moving in in 2020. Last year they experienced two flooding events, six months apart from each other, which destroyed the contents of their homes, their kitchens. Some of those residents had to move into temporary accommodation for six months while the repairs were happening. They moved back in, unable to get insurance because of the flood incident, and they were flooded again. That has devalued their properties quite significantly. The negative impact is really the human cost, but also the economic resilience and the impact that has. Is this a rare case? It might be quite an extreme case. Aviva did some research last year that spoke to people who had moved into new build properties. It found that one in eight people it spoke to in new build properties had experienced flooding, and over half of the people it spoke to were concerned that their property was at risk of flooding. Climate resilience is key to economic security and resilience. While the planning system is allowing these outcomes to occur, we cannot say that it is effective in addressing flood resilience.

On that topic, I know from personal experience that sometimes the impact of new builds is not that they themselves flood but that communities very close by that have never flooded previously start flooding. We have had that in Poolsbrook in my constituency. We welcomed 200 new houses being built, but suddenly the surrounding houses all started flooding, many of them never having done previously. Has there been any assessment of the impact that these new builds have not just on those who live there, but on surrounding communities?

There is lots of anecdotal evidence like you say. It is quite a difficult thing to assess because it is almost contested evidence that needs to be adjudicated upon. One of the problems that seems like a common theme in these instances is drainage capacity. Essentially, when the planning applications are coming in, the risk is being underestimated. The infrastructure capacity that is already there is quite poor, so you raise the properties and then that pushes water to other areas.

The Government are currently going through significant changes to planning. This is something that we are also looking at. Is there anything within those changes as they are laid out that you see will make this in any way better or is being considered, and do you have a sense that, because Government are clearly very committed to getting many more houses built, they have taken due care within that to take on board the concerns that flood-hit communities have?

In summary, I think some of the changes that came through in the national planning policy framework around flood risk policy and climate adaptation are quite marginal. They are there—they are an improvement, but when that is weighed against the balance of the standard methodology and the changes, yes, they are quite marginal in terms of the weight given. The standard methodology applies to a very local level. It is the local planning authority that is given a housing need number, and it needs to accommodate and plan for that level of growth. It is blind to the constraint of flood risk. If you are in a local authority area such as North Somerset or East Lindsey, where you have a large proportion of your land in flood zone 3 and maybe another large proportion in a protected landscape, it is very difficult for those authorities to meet those needs. To my mind, you end up with two outcomes. You either end up with more properties being built in risky areas or not being able to meet the housing needs that are set out. The risk is that the development pressure will push it more towards the latter of those outcomes.

Rachel Hallos, are the Government giving sufficient consideration to land management as a tool to address the challenges of changing climate and increasing flood risk, in your view?

I think there is a lot more that can be done. There is recognition that forms of land management can help, but I am afraid I cannot disagree with a lot of what my colleagues have said about planning. It is about ensuring that planning applications consider where surface water and so on is going to go, and quite often it is on local or neighbouring farmland. There are different elements of work that need to be done there. I think we can do more. I think that the Government can incentivise farmers to do more, but we also need to be very aware of where the water is coming from in the first place.

The farmers have always understood their role in flood alleviation. We will go into the depth of these issues a little bit further on, but in general terms, when you say the Government should be doing more to incentivise, what is farmers’ understanding of their responsibility now and under what circumstances do you think they would be doing more?

There is a growing feeling that perhaps planning applications have not looked at the unintended consequences of what goes on with water when those buildings have been built and about what happens next. There seem to be more flooding issues on farmland, and if farmers are to be expected to store that water or allow that water to flow through or carry out mitigation work for that water to go through, they should be part of a solution and, therefore, be recompensed for doing so in some way or form. There has to be an agreement there.

Cameron, were you wanting to come in on this point?

If you wouldn’t mind, Chair. Celia, you mentioned that in the building of new developments the flood risk was often underestimated. Would you be able to go into a bit more depth as to who is underestimating this and why you think that might be happening?

A key piece of evidence in the planning system is called the strategic flood risk assessment, and local planning authorities are required to produce one. It is not a statutory requirement; it is a policy obligation. Quite often, in practice, these are out of date. The climate change projections that are fed into understanding flood risk and potential flooding events, how serious they would be and how frequently they might occur in future can be based on evidence that is 10 or 15 years old. We would support a recommendation that there should be a statutory obligation to keep those pieces of evidence up to date. They also bring together all sources of flood risk, so they should account for surface water as well as tidal and river flooding and other local sources from local watercourses. However, some that we have come across in our research are quite thin in their understanding of surface water in particular, and that is a weak spot in our understanding of risk and how that plays into the planning system.

Good afternoon to everyone. Apologies if some of this has been touched on already. It is a question to everyone, first of all: do current planning policies and regulations sufficiently address flood risk in land use decisions and, if not, what improvements can be made?

Again, my answer to that is no, they are not sufficiently addressing flood risk in land use decisions. In terms of the national planning policy framework, the policy on flood risk is quite interesting because it is given a lot of attention. Often the question is whether it needs more weight in the planning system, and I do think the content is there and the attention is there. The problem is really that the policy is not very robust. It is quite provisional. It can be down to a case of planning judgment. There are opportunities for developments in unresilient locations to come through the test of that policy. If it was to be given more strength, it would be about the robustness of the application of that policy.

Are you saying that you want more weight given to flood resilience in the national planning policy framework?

Yes. I would support more weight and stronger policy wording, giving local authorities the opportunity to refuse development in risky areas.

Going back to a point that the Chair made, for example, if the development was planned at the top of a hill, should we be considering pretty much all the properties further down the hill because of the increased run-off? Is that something we should be considering—a wider area?

Unfortunately, I have been to people’s properties the day after flooding in Nottinghamshire, in one of my previous employments. The people had bought houses on the side of a hill, and they told me they had bought the house because they knew it would not flood. In that situation, tragically the water was from a smaller watercourse from surface water and from the poor design of the development itself. It basically had walls running almost along the contour, so water was being stopped. There was one scenario that was particularly harrowing, where people had had to open the back door and the front door to let the water through their property. That will always stay with me, and it will certainly stay with the people who were affected. In national planning policy terms, you should take into account all sources of flooding, as Celia has said. Surface water in particular should be considered, and I think that needs to be strengthened in the national planning policy, particularly in the guidance that supports that so that it has equal weight with river and coastal flooding. The latest national assessment of flood risk shows that three-quarters of the properties at risk are at risk of flooding from surface water. Some of those may be at risk of river and coastal flooding as well, but that is a significant risk. In planning policy terms, we also need to look at the cumulative impact of development in catchments on flood risk. At the moment, that is not looked at consistently, for example, in strategic flood risk assessments. That should be strengthened and what is required made clearer so that, for example, where you have a lot of developments going on on the outside of pretty much any town that probably any of us could think about—we can think about development that is extending that town or city—that needs to be looked at cumulatively and in terms of what the opportunity is through those urban extensions to reduce flood risk and ensure, as a minimum, that it does not make it worse. I think it is a missed opportunity if planning policy does not lead to a point where those developments are effectively, in policy terms, told to do something to reduce flood risk to the wider community, including those further down the hill.

To Ms Davis, what role do local flood risk management strategies play in shaping house-building policies?

This question to me really captures the complexity of the many flood risk strategies that there are. A local flood risk management strategy is developed at a local level to provide a plan for addressing local sources of flood risk. Essentially, that should be considered by planning authorities, particularly if that feeds into their strategic flood risk assessment and planning decisions. Overall, there are many layers of different flood risk strategies at a local level that address different sources of flood risk, led by different institutions depending on their roles and responsibilities. It is quite a complex jigsaw puzzle to fit together. It would be helpful to have a document that sets out a more cohesive holistic strategy for dealing with flood risk in a particular geography.

The final question from me is to Ms Davis and Ms Burgess. Assuming that there are some, can you give us examples of other countries that have been more successful in ensuring that planning takes account of flood risk?

Yes, I can talk about that. I can talk about the sponge cities initiative in China, and I can talk about Copenhagen and the Cloudburst programme. In China, it started off as a pilot study with 30 cities. It has recently been extended to cover over 60 cities. That is writing into legislation the need to consider the wider water cycle and how the city environment is retrofitted, as well as legislation regarding what must go in for new developments so that they are water friendly and there are green-blue solutions. By that I mean keeping water on the surface and managing it there rather than big, underground stormwater tanks. That initiative is now spreading to places around the world, including India, Berlin and Copenhagen. Copenhagen Cloudburst followed a major storm event I think in 2011, where they had up to three feet of surface water in parts of the city. I have seen the photos; it is quite eye-opening. Following that, the city worked together. The organisations are structured a bit differently to the UK, but, as I understand it, it was basically the city government, the utility company and private landowners who worked together to come up with a master plan for blue-green infrastructure. It is interesting to look at how that is funded. It is funded through government funding, utilities funding and private landowners. It is a mixture of projects. They have a way of prioritising the projects. There are 300 different projects they want to deliver, I think, over 20 years. They have a way of prioritising those projects from a retrofit perspective, which ones will make the most difference to flood risk, which ones are opportunities that can be undertaken when other works are happening, and which ones should be brought forward through new developments. There is effectively a green-blue master plan that addresses surface water for the city.

As with my predecessor there, if you feel that these have already been answered by all means tell me, but if you want to flesh them out with some other information, please do. First, to Celia and Hannah, to what extent are current building regulations sufficient to ensure flood resilience in new builds and existing properties? How should they evolve?

Building regulations currently set a hierarchy in terms of how they deal with water run-off. That prioritises a soakaway and then sustainable drainage and then public sewer as a last resort. I don’t have the expertise to comment on how successful that is in practice, but the point is that building regulations do not require wider property flood resilience measures as it stands, things like materials that might respond better to flood events or recover more quickly, raised sockets, and so on. There is an interesting intersection between building regulations and planning here. What we have seen in practice is that when a flood risk assessment is undertaken for a planning application, there might be some residual risk, some potential that a property might flood, and the flood risk assessment will suggest, “You could include these property flood resilience measures to improve the resilience of the property”. When that comes to the planning decision, they do not make it on to the conditions, on to the decision notice, because they are couched in “nice to have” terms. They are not set as requirements, so they drop off through the process. That means that the aspiration falls as the planning system goes on. Another point is that there is almost no compliance checking. There is very little enforcement capacity in the planning system at the moment. Even where they are conditioned and asked for as a requirement, there is no way really of knowing whether they have been implemented in the final development. There are some weaknesses there, so there is potential for building regulations to perhaps secure a minimum amount of property flood resilience for all properties, which would be a more secure way of guaranteeing that delivery.

My answer is pretty much the same as Celia’s, to be completely honest. I think it is a “no regrets” approach, particularly for properties in flood-risk areas. It would require an adaptation to part C of the building regulations to ensure that those properties are flood resilient. There are simple things that do not necessarily cost more: dropping the electrics down from the ceiling rather than having them coming up from the floor; as Celia said, having materials that are flood resilient, and flood-resilient finishes, such as solid wooden kitchens rather than chipboard kitchens. Those things could be very easily mandated through building regulations. Unfortunately, they are not. Even where there are flood defences, there is always a risk of a major event that could overwhelm those, so it would seem sensible to have that almost second line. If you have a property that is truly flood resilient, there are stories of people who are back in their properties within 24 to 72 hours. They sweep the water out, they decontaminate it, and they are back in their properties. Whereas for properties that are not flood resilient, as has been mentioned already, people can be out of those properties for months and in some cases years.

Thank you. I think you have probably answered my second question, so I will move on from that. You have talked a little bit about how new builds can implement flood mitigation measures. How about retrofit solutions for those homes that are not built with flood mitigation in mind or perhaps to a lesser degree?

Would you mind rephrasing the question?

You have already mentioned that building regulations and planning could perhaps intersect and that new builds could be built with flood resilience in mind. For those homes that already exist that did not have that in mind or perhaps to a lesser degree, what retrofit solutions might be implemented to bring those properties up to standard?

We can think about it in two ways. We can think about measures that resist water getting into a property. Increasingly now, those are what we in the industry would call passive measures, which means they are not like a floodgate that someone needs to go out and mobilise. They are things like flood doors, automatically closing airbricks and the like. Then we can think about them as flood resilience measures, once the water gets into the property, similar to the things I have mentioned previously. The challenge is that our housing stock has been developed over centuries, decades, and each property needs a detailed survey to look at what would be required. That varies from property to property. Surveys are reasonably expensive because they are professionally done. How do you then fund those measures and whose responsibility is it to fund those measures? I think this is an interesting question for us as a nation. For example—and I know it is not as simple as looking at it from a fire or burglary perspective—we all have a fire alarm, and we lock our doors when we go to bed at night, which is us taking a measure against a risk. There is an interesting balance there as a nation as to how we support properties to become more flood resilient in terms of retrofit solutions. As to how that is funded when it is funded by public funding, that may be a specific scheme that an organisation like the Environment Agency or a local authority takes through the national flood defence grant in aid or regional local levy, which can take some time to come up with a business case and to implement that survey. Or it can be funded following major events when there are flood recovery-specific grants for PFR, although those can be a little bit inconsistent in terms of when those grants are available, how many properties have to flood in a community for it to be eligible, for example, and which flood events those apply to and which they don’t. That is another answer in itself.

I don’t have anything to add to that.

To each of you then, given the risk of climate change increasing both the frequency and the intensity of flooding, to what extent do you believe that development of flood plains should be restricted or perhaps entirely prohibited?

The way that flood plains are understood, flood zone 3 does not account for flood defences, essentially. That means that if there is a blanket ban on building in flood plains or flood zone 3, some quite sustainable parts of city centres in areas such as perhaps Sheffield, the River Don and Hull would fall out of that. There are other sustainability considerations to make about that decision. We would support a very strong presumption against building in flood plains unless there was a very overwhelming sustainability argument to support it.

As Celia was saying, it is not as simple as saying that it is a flood plain and we cannot build there. That is where it quickly becomes very complicated: where does the data come from and what teeth does the national planning policy have in this area? It is very much about not always where you build but how you build it. Planning policy should be directing development to the lowest flood risk areas. That is certainly the first principle, which we might term avoid the risk, which we would do by applying the sequential test, for example, in the national planning policy framework. It is important to consider all risks for the reasons I have already talked about, particularly surface water there. Then, if there were wider planning reasons why this development needs to go ahead, we might look at whether we can look at the vulnerability of that development, so the least vulnerable parts of a development are on the bits of the site that are at higher flood risk. You can look at that on an allocation scale as well. Then we look at mitigation. We do not look at a development and say, “Yes, we need to develop in the flood plain; therefore, we will put in mitigation”. That is not our first go-to. We have tried to avoid, we have tried to substitute, and then we are looking at mitigation. For example, we are sitting in a flood plain now. We are in the tidal floodplain of the River Thames. We need to maintain the City of London and—as my colleague has said—Sheffield and other locations as well. How do we continue to build in those areas but in a flood-resilient way?

There is not a great deal to add, to be quite honest. It is about a sensible approach. If you need to build in a flood plain, you need to ensure where the water is going to go. It is balancing that risk with the pros and cons of it all. I don’t think I have a great deal to add to any of that.

There is an interesting question there as a nation. This is a bit high level, but then I will go into a bit more detail: if we put ourselves in the year 2050, if we put ourselves in the year 2080, what do our coastlines look like with increasingly frequent coastal flooding due to sea level rise? That is recognising that sea level rise affects every tide, not just extreme tides. What does it look like inland? Areas that currently, for example, flood once in 100 years might start to flood more regularly. How sustainable is it to maintain all our communities—and I know this is a real challenge for us as a nation—exactly where they are now? For example, if you look at the recent Scottish flood resilience strategy, that starts to talk about supporting communities even to relocate out of those areas that are at highest risk of flooding. As for how you support communities that are frequently flooded—and that is happening now—we need to make sure that organisations like Lead Local Flood Authorities are properly resourced so they have the people who can go in and have those conversations and support people. I can give an example of a scheme in Staffordshire, a road closure scheme in the village of Marchington near Uttoxeter when I worked for Staffordshire County Council. That was working with the community to enable them to close the road on behalf of the county council. It was frequently flooding, and it was bow waves from vehicles driving through the village that was causing a lot of the issues. We worked with that community closely and successfully implemented that scheme with the full support of the local parish council, which was very supportive and wanted that to happen. That takes time and resource. I would have loved to have been able to do that for every community, but I did not have that resource.

Yes. There are a range of interventions, from large-scale engineered flood defences to water catchment planning, natural flood management and even small-scale things like reducing impermeable surfaces in our streets and cities. The point I would make is that we are past the point where any one intervention is likely to be a solution for any community. We really need to have joined-up strategies that bring all these interventions, at an appropriate geographical scale, so that communities can understand the interventions that will support and improve their resilience.

I want to add one thing on that. We are talking about flooding, and I know this Committee is about flooding, but the reality is that we need water, and we need it in the right place. Often we see the negative of flooding, and it is an absolute negative, but we see vast plains of floodwater in front of us. Then at other times of the year we are desperate for water, or in different parts of the country we are desperate for water. That local respect for water is important as part of this.

This is about the resources that local communities have themselves?

I will answer the one on community resources. Having worked frontline in local government with a number of different communities, you see a number of different approaches, which depend on whether the community is urban or rural and lots of socioeconomic factors that come into that. It is important that the organisations working with the communities are able to flex their approach to work with that community. I have worked with communities that have a key community champion that they want everything to go through, and I have worked with other communities that have their own specific flood action groups and flood forums, where you are working with a wider team of people. There are some good regional resources to help build community capacity on flood resilience. There are some for the North West Regional Flood and Coastal Committee. There is the Northamptonshire flood toolkit, for example, and others that are out there. What is needed is to bring that together into a national toolkit. Again, the Scottish flood resilience strategy is looking at that at the moment—a flood advisory service—which I think would be beneficial here as well. The second part of the question is how developers work with communities. That is an interesting question.

It is.

It is an interesting question and probably not with an easy answer. There is a role particularly through local plan making for communities to feed in their concerns about flood risk issues, and there is a place for that evidence to be taken on board in decision making on not only allocations for development, but flood risk requirements. There is an example in Stafford on the Sandyford Brook where upstream development through the local plan had to implement flood storage to reduce flood risk in the wider catchment, which is now going ahead. For all these, though, how much the community is influencing that decision probably varies a lot from place to place.

In terms of the developers, yes. There is a challenge there because the developers tend to not have a long-term interest in the development site in the same way that communities do. Their interest will be in passing the planning policy requirements in order to make that development sustainable. There may be an opportunity for interventions around the plan-making function of the planning system to identify potential community interventions that might support resilience, and if that is adjacent to a potential development site that might enable that to come forward in some way. I want to comment on the issue you raised about the wider community’s resources. To me, the starting point is about understanding and knowledge. I think there is a real absence of a national conversation about some of the implications of climate change and how that might affect communities in the long term. That needs to be the starting point for communities to engage in how they might influence how their community might change and adapt over the long term.

It goes back to respecting water again and the fact that we are in climate change. Quite often it is local communities that understand the water in their areas best and that catchment-based, solution-based conversation is the best one to have. You have already alluded to the fact that sometimes that does not always work with larger developments.

No, I don’t think it is enough. There has been a lack of maintenance for so long and maintenance is key. We are talking about flooding in towns, coastal flooding, rural flooding. There is a large backlog of maintenance work that needs to be done, as well as the new projects that need to be done. Everybody will have their ideas on what the best new projects are, but we need to seriously consider how we maintain what we have and make what we have work. That is not just planners, it is the Environment Agency, it is land managers, it is all of us. How do we maintain what we have right now and then add to it?

To build on that, for example, in this country we have about 7,000 kilometres of existing raised flood defence, which would stretch from here to Bangladesh. We very much need to maintain what we already have and understand the condition of that and then fund that accordingly. It is a very open-ended question. Is £2.65 billion enough? I suppose it depends on who you ask, because I would always ask for more from the point of view of supporting flood-risk communities. When you look at it in the longer term, I think the capital programme needs more strategic planning to support it that considers all sources of flooding, takes on board what has come out of the new national flood risk assessment, particularly for surface water, looks at it more strategically, and asks what a realistic target is to reduce surface water and how we take a risk-based approach. I also come back to that point: how do we plan backwards? How do we stand or put ourselves virtually in 2050 and 2080 and ask how we adapt to increasingly severe flood events and coastal change? Where as a nation are we willing to realistically invest at all costs? For example, the City of London is clearly going to be one of those places with the Thames Barrier and how that evolves over time, but what about other locations? I think we are only being fair to people at risk of flooding—both now and in the future—if we ask ourselves as a nation that honest question. How can we support communities where realistically in the future there will not necessarily be the funding there to protect them? We have to take account of natural processes as well. How do we support them to adapt, to become more resilient? How do we fund a lot of the things in the current Environment Agency programme, the flood and coastal resilience innovation programme and the coastal transition accelerator element of that? That is looking at things like relocation. How do we start to mainstream that to support communities? How do we fund both flood defence and supporting communities to adapt and become more resilient over time?

I will think about that and come back to you. There is probably somebody somewhere in every organisation that thinks their scheme should have been on the list.

Yes. This might be my ignorance, but on whether funding has been assigned to the right projects, I think there is a lack of transparency from what I have found in terms of what is being allocated full funding. The original spending programme up to 2027 was meant to fund 2,000 schemes. The Public Accounts Committee inquiry last year found that that had been reduced to 1,500. Of those 500 schemes that are not getting funding, I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know which of those 30 schemes that have been given funding announced last week are coming forward. To me, that is a big problem. That is 470 communities that are not getting that funding to support their resilience. There needs to be more transparency around it. There needs to be a clearer understanding of what the long-term view is for those communities and whether that funding might come down the line. What that also indicates is that, no, the £2.65 billion is not enough, because there were 2,000 schemes identified, and that money is not funding them.

We heard in previous evidence that there were 6 million homes at risk of flooding and the recent announcement protects 66,000, so until the River Hipper in Chesterfield gets its scheme there is definitely not enough budget. I am going to bring Julia Buckley in now, I suspect on that very theme.

I would like to follow up with Hannah Burgess. I was interested that you kept referring to surface water as being an additional problem and making sure we are talking about water flooding from all different sources. From our experience in Shrewsbury in my constituency we have loads of long, detailed planning ahead about river flooding, but then the surface water flooding always seems to feel like it is an unexpected, very quick flash flood that nobody could possibly predict. Hearing your messages today, do you feel that that needs to be much more integrated and that we need to be hearing about all those sources of flooding at the same time, rather than it being treated as a separate problem? The long-term effects of one can affect the other, but the planning we are doing in the long run could also protect us from those sudden impacts.

The simple answer is yes.

What do you think we could do? What would help, if you were to make a recommendation around those two different types of flooding?

We need more integrated and strategic planning for all sources of flood risk. There are some good examples of that. There is the Northumbrian Integrated Drainage Partnership, which is a good example that brings together Northumbrian Water, the 11 different councils in the area, and the Environment Agency. There is also an example of what can happen in West Yorkshire that was more recent, when they come together to strategically plan and pull together funding. I have always looked at those and thought they are brilliant examples, but how do you mainstream that? How do you get that to happen everywhere?

All you need to do is write to us with those examples so that we can showcase them as a pilot for the rest of the country. You also touched on the current criteria for funding grants when we were talking about resilience. Currently, it is about the number of properties, so the scale of the flood. You all talked about frequency and intensity. Do you have any views about whether other criteria such as intensity and frequency should also be considered or given equal weighting so that if you have 49 properties that are flooded 10 times a year, that they be considered rather than 50 properties flooded once every 20 years?

Thank you. Barry Gardiner.

Was Julia not going to get an answer to that?

I was hoping for an answer first.

Sorry—my apologies.

It was a great question—I just thought she should get an answer.

The funding formula at the moment for partnership funding in England is very complicated. The amount of funding that you get towards a scheme depends on different outcomes and it depends on moving properties from one risk band to another. Risk is a factor of frequency times consequence, so a community flooding more frequently but with fewer properties flooding is, in theory, at the same flood risk as one that has more properties that flood less frequently. I definitely think that needs to be taken into account. The other thing that needs to be taken into account, particularly in rural areas, is community infrastructure. I have seen first hand the impact when the only shop in a village frequently floods, when the only pub in a village frequently floods, and when people cannot get their kids to school, cannot get out of the village, cannot get into the village. The impact that that has needs to be taken into account more.

The scale of impact. That is helpful. Thank you. Sorry, Barry.

As previously billed, Barry Gardiner.

Can I pick up on what you were saying? What is the percentage of the stock of assets that the Environment Agency has that are below the original specification? Is the £2.65 billion going to bring them back up to the original specification or is it going to bring them up and raise the assets to the specification we are going to need in 2050 or in 2100? It seems to me that if we are spending £2.65 billion, there is no point in getting them back up to their original standard if that original standard has already been overtopped by climate change and increased flood risk.

It is an interesting question. I don’t know off the top of my head what percentage of assets information is available from the Environment Agency. It is not at the required standard. My understanding is, and I would have to delve deeper into it, that part of that £2.65 billion is towards maintenance. Some of that is going to post-flood recovery work to repair assets that were damaged, for example, in some of the recent storms, like Storm Babet. It is a good question as to whether that should get defence back up to standard or whether it should improve the standard. The fundamental problem is that in this country we have a capital scheme and we have a maintenance programme. If we look at it, for example, in the way that water companies make a lot of their investment decisions, they do not look at those two things separately. They look at it as total investment, which I think would help us to get the balance better.

Let’s think of recommendations that this Committee could make here, then. Would it be sensible for this Committee to make a recommendation that, when work is being done on an asset, it should be brought up to the standard, say, expected in 2050 or 2100 or whatever the level is, but not simply that it is being restored to its original spec, if that spec is not going to be any use in 10 or 15 years’ time?

That could be a useful recommendation, but it is probably a little bit more complicated than that in terms of the catchment-based strategic planning and taking that longer-term picture—

The words at the beginning of the session were music to my ears. You said it is all about catchment planning, yes.

Yes. We don’t necessarily exactly want to replace every asset with like for like or to continue to raise defences because the challenge with that—and there are tragic incidents from other parts of the world, for example, the Mississippi in America—is that you continue to raise the flood embankments and you end up with a perched watercourse above the flood plain. Then, when it does breach, it breaches with tragic consequences.

In Mississippi it was the MRGO channel, in fact, wasn’t it? It was desalination in the MRGO channel that caused the loss of the tupelo swamp, which then overtopped the city because of the swell. It was the loss of the tupelo swamp and the trees there that allowed the ingress. Sorry, I am side-tracking, but I love it—it is all good stuff, isn’t it? Ms Hallos, we have 11,000 square kilometres of agricultural land at risk of flooding. That is 13% and it is only going to go up. We think it is going to go up to almost 14% by 2050—and, on top of that, that is just agricultural land: grade 1 agricultural land is even more at risk, 59%. You are a farmer. You farm 2,000 acres, yes?

I do, in the hills.

Absolutely, in the hills. You have diversified, gone from dairy to sheep and beef.

Sheep and beef, flood alleviation as well.

Yes, super. What are the impacts on farmers when those flood events happen? Explain to us, because sometimes we just think, “It doesn’t matter, just turn it into a flood plain”.

They are huge. This is interesting and I have actually had a meeting this morning about this very subject. I will upset some farmers now, sorry. If we look down the east coast of the country, it is unbelievably productive land. As you say, 59% of our food is produced there. What our farmer members and our growers have experienced in recent years is quite often land under water, and not just for a week—you can survive that—we are talking months and months. I was speaking to one of our members only two weeks ago, and he had suffered £70,000-worth of losses that year on top of the previous year.

Are they insurable?

No. You can absorb it for only so long and then you start having different conversations as a business. We are running businesses. Any right-minded business person starts having conversations about their business and how they run their business and what they are doing. Obviously, our concern as an organisation is food security. We represent farmers. We produce food as well as many other things. If the flooding continues at the rate it is doing in those lower-lying areas, food security will become a problem for this country. I cannot quantify the values because that is difficult to do, but we can try to do that for you as a Committee. I think it would be useful for you to know that.

I have some figures.

Yes, you will have some, I have no doubt.

The trouble is that you look at the figures and you are not quite sure what it means. We have figures that the NFU has given us that say that climate change has significantly impacted global food security, reducing major crop yields by 4% to 10% over the past 30 years. Research indicates that since 1961 global agricultural total factor of productivity has declined by 21%. What that does not actually say is that we are producing less food, and I do not think we are. Even though there has been a productivity loss of 21%, the world is actually producing more food than it did. It is very difficult to drill down and find out how much more food insecure we are becoming. I think that is a press button that the NFU often goes to, if I can say it, “It is all about food security”. We could get into a discussion about APR on that, but it is always the press button, isn’t it? Let us drill down to what the financial and operational challenges are in recovering from flooding.

I think you are right. I think you have been very fair there, to be quite honest. We have to remind ourselves that we are farmers. We are running businesses. When you cannot produce what it is that you are supposed to produce on your land, whether it is a crop, milking your cows or lambing your sheep, because it is flooded and so on, you have a loss. You have incurred a loss. There is no doubt about it. Quantifying the monetary value of that is difficult, especially when it is so localised. I can only give you anecdotal information, but we can perhaps try a little bit harder to find you that information. I will take that away with me.

Can I steer you on that? If we are looking at that highly productive land in the east of England, we know that it is all below sea level—that is why it is highly productive land—

That is why it is so good.

It is about how we defend that land, isn’t it? That cannot just be from fluvial and pluvial. It can also be from—what is the other one, coming up from underneath the—

You have your paludiculture where you raise the water table, yes.

That is right. Yes, exactly, the water table. If you could give us the figures for that, that would be very helpful.

We can work on that and take that away for the Committee.

Are you a riparian landowner?

I am not a landowner. I am a tenant of a Yorkshire—

Of course, sorry. Yes, you are. That is right.

I personally am not.

Is there water flowing through your farm?

Absolutely. We are a hill farm. We are doing flood alleviation mitigation in partnership with our landlord. We have the leaky dams and so on and our entire farm runs into two reservoirs, so we are very aware of water on our farm.

What are your responsibilities as the farmer—in place of the landowner, as it were—on that land?

Our responsibility is that we take it very seriously. There was a major flooding incident a number of years ago in a valley below us, a place called Hebden Bridge. Since that flooding happened, over £100 million was spent by the Environment Agency on hard landscaping to control the water in the valley bottoms. There are things that as farmers we can do on our land to mitigate some of the flooding problems that we get, but again these are business decisions, so there has to be—

No, they are not.

Oh, I think they are.

They are statutory obligations, so let’s be absolutely clear.

Okay.

Let’s distinguish, because there are statutory obligations that you have and then there are business decisions that you can take, like moving into flood management.

Yes.

What I am concerned about is: are enough riparian landowners familiar with what their obligations are?

No. I am glad you have raised it because they are not. We had a long conversation about this fact as an organisation with a number of our members and a representative from the Environment Agency. There are some members that do not fully appreciate what they should be doing. There are some members who appreciate it, but are afraid to do it because they fear recriminations as a result of maybe not doing it right. There are others who are trying to do the right thing, but getting the permits in place takes such a long time, so we have a real mixed bag of communication, information and knowledge. We have taken that away as an organisation to try to work with the Environment Agency as to how we can make that better. I think we can do a better job with that, but do not underestimate the fear of getting it wrong on the ground.

That is a very important observation. What recommendations should this Committee make to ensure that riparian landowners are aware of their statutory obligations, but also of the other things that they could be doing that are financially beneficial for them within SFI to run their business more profitably?

It is not just SFI. There are other things that can be done with private investment. When it comes to riparian rights or obligations—whichever way you want to look at it—I think we need better communication at ground level with the regulatory authority. That would be a very positive thing to do, rather than it being a combative relationship, a more open and progressive relationship where people understand their obligations and how to deliver on their obligations without fear of getting it wrong. That would be something that I would certainly support the Committee taking away. When it comes to options that may be nature-based solutions, using SFI, using natural flood management tools, we all need to increase our understanding of how it can work on the ground, how it can work for other people—the wider community—and how it can work as a business. Another recommendation is that we take it very seriously, rather than just push it to one side.

You have helpfully encapsulated all the things that need to be done. I want to encourage you to now tease them out because the question I would ask you to dwell on is this: how many of your members have been issued with a penalty by the Environment Agency for a failure to carry out their statutory obligations as riparian landowners?

I don’t have the exact number to hand, but again I can furnish you with that.

It is probably zero.

You are probably right. I think one or two have definitely been in touch. I am just thinking now. In fact, I do have an email chain on my phone about one individual who certainly has—and unfairly so, looking at it. I think education, sharing knowledge and that relationship—

Ignorance of the law is no justification.

You know, I cannot disagree. I think there is confusion about the law.

And concern about how to implement it.

And concern, yes. I think that is why maybe people pull away from it.

I think you and I are pretty much agreed on this.

I think we are.

We need to ensure that people know what their obligations are. We perhaps need to see the enforcement body enforcing them properly where they are not being done, but we also need to be providing the support to farmers and land managers to make sure that they can fulfil their obligations and go further to run their businesses better.

Exactly. Yes, as a representative of farmers, I cannot disagree with that. If we can get our farmer members in that place, I would be delighted.

I want to develop the conversation about building flood resilience on farms, and I am particularly asking you, Rachel. I represent a very rural constituency, north Herefordshire. I absolutely take your point, because we have farms that have been under water, large chunks of them for months, as you have said. I have had many conversations with farmers who are very seriously concerned about this, and also with farmers and residents concerned about the huge soil loss that we are seeing because of the increased frequency and severity of flooding. I would like to invite you to talk about the role that farmers and farming practices can play in flood mitigation, both insofar as it affects off-farm residents, which we have been talking about here, but also farming itself and the mutual benefits of on-farm flood resilience measures and long-term profitability of farming.

Crikey, where to begin? There is so much to talk about there. I think there are a growing number of farmers who are very aware of what has happened on the farm. Looking at the catchment-based approach, those farmer cluster groups—and especially in your area there are quite a number of farm cluster groups—where people are learning from each other and sharing best practice, understanding how they can do this on their farm, understanding how they can learn from it and accessing funding to help with some of those mitigations. We have been talking this morning about buffer strips—but not as you expect them to be; maybe they are down the middle of a field—and working with partners to understand how they can mitigate flooding on their farms. I think that is a very positive step that we can take as an industry. We are encouraging that more and more. We are encouraging farmers to get involved in those cluster groups and look at those catchment-based solutions. The farmer tends to know where the water goes. You know your own farm, you know where it goes, so it is that communication—it almost goes back to the local planners and the housebuilders talking to a local community. A farmer will know where the water goes. It has its little habit of popping up where you don’t expect it, but the farmer will say, “Yes, we have always had that wet bit”.

Although changing farming practices means water goes in different directions sometimes and in different volumes.

That is the unintended consequences. It is exactly the same as building. It is the unintended consequences sometimes on farms that means it should not be like that. As an industry we are working in the climate every day, we see what is happening and we feel what is happening. I would like to think that there is a more open approach as to how we deal with this. That has to be, in my opinion—and I would like to believe that it is a wider opinion, as our members are facing this—that we have to work in partnership with people. We have to understand and appreciate that what we do on our farm does affect other people and what other people do adjacent to our farm affects us, so you have to look at it in a holistic approach. That could be working with somebody on nature-based solutions, bringing private finance into this to help the farmer get to that stage, using SFI on buffer strips and other things or it could be working with the wider supply chain on why we are doing this. Why are we doing this sort of farming in this area? Why has that happened? Understand it and mitigate it. I probably have not answered your question as directly as you would have liked because it is a big subject. Every farm is different, every field is different—topography, geology—and it is understanding that.

Exactly. I totally take that point, that there is not a blueprint that says, “If you do these things, one, two, three, you will sort it out”. Your point about farmer-to-farmer, peer-based learning is very important. I am tempted to ask you, based on what you have said: do you think the NFU is doing enough to support and lead and facilitate that farmer-led sharing of good practice?

As always, we can all do more. Every single one of us in the room can do more.

That is a great politician’s answer.

I genuinely do believe we can always do more. I think what has happened these last few years with flooding in particular has made people think and has made farmers think. It has hurt. It would be wrong for me not to mention that this week is Mind Your Head week, where the NFU is asking farmers to fill in its health and safety survey on mental health as a result of flooding. It has hurt. It is not going away. It will get worse, and we have to find a solution to it.

Two further questions. On the one hand we have increasing problems of flooding in everybody’s face, so it is increasingly hard to ignore. At the same time, we have extended periods of drought as well at some points, so there is an issue here about balancing managing water over an extended period, over the full year. Can you say anything about that?

I would love to have a conversation about integrated water management, because we cannot talk in silos about this. We have flooding; we have lack of water; we have water quality. If you have flooding, you perpetuate the problem with water quality. If you do not have access to water at certain times of the year—and there will be more requirements for water when you look at different land use changes and things like that—we will need more water, so we need to almost take a step back. You talked about a bigger picture viewpoint on this. It is the bigger picture viewpoint on water. We do not value water. It is an issue, but it is of huge value to this country. We need to use it properly, we need to be able to move it to where it needs to be, we need to store it so it is there when we need it, and we need to make sure it is clean.

You talked about the great stress that farmers are facing, with flooding adding to that. Would you agree with me that there is just so much potential synergy between flood resilience and food production and that it is not an either/or—it is not necessarily at all about setting aside land for one and not for the other, but ultimately a sustainable farming future has to be a flood-resilient one?

I don’t think there should ever be an either/or. I think we can do both, but we need to be clever about it. We need to do some myth-busting about it as well. We need to share that advocacy; we need to share the positives of what can be done. Farmer-to-farmer learning is the best way, and hopefully we can take everybody with us as we learn.

I want to ask about what government support you need, but I think you might be asking that, Chris.

Yes, thank you. On to more questions about farming. Specifically, I would like to begin, Ms Hallos, with how you feel the national flood and coastal erosion risk management plan could better address flood risks for farmers and rural communities, especially in relation to climate risks and resilience.

Crikey, that is a big question. That is a massive question.

Of course, following on from my colleagues, you can always write to us with more detailed thoughts, if you would prefer to.

I would prefer to because I think that is a huge question. As long as that strategy is talking to the people that are managing the land, then it is positive, but if I may, I will take that away and give you a true response on that.

Sure. Specifically, since you mention it, do you feel that currently the right conversations are happening, and that the farming community is being properly involved in that conversation around that management plan?

I think it is beginning, which I think is better than not.

It is beginning—okay. Moving on, in relation to schemes like ELMs and Countryside Stewardship, do you feel that more needs to be done to ensure that fair funding is available to farmers for the public good of, for example, nature-based solutions that reduce flooding impacts? Are these schemes suitably designed to give the long-term certainty of funding that farmers need to deliver flood mitigation projects?

In some instances, a lot of the actual options that are relevant to flooding are not available yet and some farmers cannot access that funding.

What is the reason why they cannot access that?

Some of the options are not available yet. Some people are locked into previous environmental agreements, and they cannot come out of those to enter new ones. That is just the current situation that we are in, with some of the high-level agreements not being available yet, so that transition is quite slow.

Would you be able to either suggest now or write to us with recommendations for how that transition could be improved? Speed?

It is as simple as that. It is speed it up and get those schemes open quicker so farmers can apply to them. Before I move on to nature-based solutions, some of the options that are available under ELMs, when you can get into them, are for a short period of time. This is a long-term problem. This is not going to go away. As a farmer, if I am applying to a scheme, I need to know the longevity of that scheme and what happens next. If we are doing this mitigation project on our farm, that is fine for, say, three years, but then what happens? We need long-term planning. We need a long-term aim for this. I think it deserves it, because you could absolutely say that this is a guaranteed public good that should have longevity that sits behind it. I think long-term options for farmers to involve—

Would you say they are currently lacking?

Yes, I would say they are lacking. It would be fair to say they are lacking. This is not a quick fix. Farming is a long-term project. Sometimes you do not see the response to what you are doing for a number of years, especially if you are looking at changing how you manage your land. Slowly, as you change how you manage your land, then you start reaping the rewards or the benefits of that change. We need longer-term solutions. We need to know what is after that, because I do believe this is a public good. For nature-based solutions, it is the same. It is what happens next, because if you are going to commit parts of your farm to something, you need to know—a little bit like building houses—what happens afterwards. As I say, it is not going away. What is the maintenance element of that? What happens if it goes wrong and what you have done on your farm causes an unintended consequence elsewhere? How does that work? Does that mean that that farm is therefore liable? Are they receiving the correct advice? Where is the knowledge coming from? Where is the justification for what it is that they are doing? Would it stand behind them if it goes wrong? There are lots of things that we can do, but I think it is that confidence in the long-term planning of this on a farm.

From all of the questions you have just raised there, it sounds like you feel that the schemes that currently exist have not answered that yet.

No, they have not. It would be fair to say they have not. I would like to believe that that will be addressed in the long term. As a Committee, I would love it if you could make a recommendation that they are. When it comes to nature-based solutions, there are things that we can absolutely do on-farm, but I don’t think it is the only thing we can do. I think there are other things. They need to be in collaboration with other things.

Sure. We heard about some of the challenges at the opening of the session from a slightly different perspective. Can I ask whether we have the necessary incentives to support moves towards farming practices that themselves reduce flooding risks—for example, maintaining and restoring hedgerows, fields, trees and reducing soil compaction? Within ELMs and Countryside Stewardship, do we have the right offers and support for the farming community to make those changes?

That is very difficult to answer at the moment because there has been a stop put on the activity when it comes to capital works, so there is a lack of confidence in the schemes at the moment. I hope that that changes very quickly, so that confidence can be rebuilt. I think once the schemes are fully opened up and we use the advocacy—that learning and that shared experience—more and more farmers will get involved. I think at the moment there is a bit of a confidence—

Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you are saying a recommendation you would like to see this Committee make would be relating to the speed at which we reopen those capital projects.

Yes, so that farmers can plan. We need to be able to plan. Confidence is at an all-time low and we need to plan. There is lots happening within the industry at the moment, as I am sure you are aware, so confidence is key and access to those funds to be able to deliver on some of what we are talking about today is very important.

To pick up some of the points that Barry was making previously, how can funding mechanisms such as the Farming Recovery Fund be tailored to better support flood-affected farmers? Do we need to be doing more to protect the recovery of our highest-grade agricultural land through those schemes, or is that the wrong way to look at it from a food production perspective?

We are still trying to get to the bottom of the fund. The reason I say that is because we are trying to understand the methodology that was applied behind the fund that triggered the payments. We have some members who were offered money and did not need it, but there were some members adjacent to people who were offered money who were not offered money. We are trying to dig to understand what sits behind that. It is very difficult to answer that question without understanding the methodology that sits behind it. We know it had EA data in it, we know it had Met Office data in it, but we don’t know what that data was that triggered it. If we knew that, I think we could give a true answer to that question.

Okay, but as a recommendation that this Committee might make, it sounds like you are suggesting that clarity on the rationale behind the Farming Recovery Fund would be very helpful.

Clarity behind the methodology that was applied for the delivery of it. There is no denying that the fund was extremely welcome to those people who received that funding. The length of time it took from the fund being released to delivery was a long time—a lot happened in the meantime, I have to say—but we are still trying to understand the methodology behind it. It would be very useful for that to be shared with us so we can understand the picture.

Thank you. A final question from me to anyone on the panel who might like to answer. Are there any steps you would like to recommend should be taken to better support farmers who are hosting floodwater storage services or other flooding assets?

Any further steps, sorry?

Yes. What further steps could be taken to better support farmers who are hosting floodwater storage services or other flooding assets?

I think recognising that that is a public good and that, if this is a recurring theme that those farmers are recompensed for delivering that public good. I know one farmer in particular where it was a once-in-a-lifetime event and now it has been successive years, and he has lost his crop in successive years. The beginning of the conversation was, “There is only so many years you can afford to lose”. He has already done lots of mitigation work on his farm and it is still happening. It is only fair that that is recognised as a public good.

Anyone else?

Maybe to just build on what Rachel was saying about catchment planning, particularly for water resources, flood risk management and water quality, and the importance of integrated water management at a catchment scale, with farmers and landowners being very much at the table when those conversations are had.

Ms Davis, anything to add? No.

I will just wrap up with one last question on your final section there. When you were talking about confidence is key and the schemes and the uncertainty, would you say that going back to having multiannual plans for the ELMs and the SFI might be a useful recommendation?

Budgeting is key, whether it is the schemes that are there or whether it is maintenance work for the EA to do. We need to bring that into the conversation as well.

Quite recently they have been either one year or part-year. My question is whether the multiannual approach could be more helpful.

It is that longevity, and that building of confidence. If we can work on longer terms that would be advantageous to us all.

We will put that to one side. Moving back on to cross-sector collaboration, I know you have touched on this before, so don’t feel the need to repeat yourself, because we are against the clock. If I could start with Celia Davis: you mentioned some things, but how can local authorities, developers and landowners work more effectively together around implementing the flood resilient strategies?

It is just echoing things I previously said about the complexity of the institutional makeup that governs flood risk. Perhaps we need to consider how that institutional framework could be simplified and how there could be a clearer strategy for priority flood resilience measures that would be implemented in a specific geography. There are potentially some opportunities, particularly around devolution and strategic planning, which might bring some of those strategies together under the same body, which I think should be explored. I would hope that flood risk would be a fundamental concern for spatial development strategies, for example. There are also some good examples, things like Coastal Partnership East, which bring together coastal protection authorities and local planning authority under one body. That is an efficient way of using resources. It can help with some of the resource challenges that those authorities are facing.

That is very helpful—so we have that clarity of purpose and single responsibility all in one place and hopefully, as you say, efficiency and devolution could be the example where we can make some savings. Could I ask you to write in with details of that Coastal Partnership East example? It is very helpful for us to see that in practice. Could I ask you, Ms Burgess, if you have any comments?

The only thing I would add is that, if we are thinking about integrated water management, we need to make sure that we do not invest in one area at the cost of another in terms of particularly how the water industry, for example, is regulated. The pressures around storm water overflows are clearly a greater driver to improve water quality, but will that draw funding away from schemes that are there to reduce flood risk, when there is an opportunity in a lot of places for schemes to do both?

Would you say that the requirement to separate out the rainwater from the sewage means that we will end up with two different strategies about how rainwater could be put through meadows and how sewage can be better managed within grey? You can separate your grey and your green as soon as you have met the water company, so by working together, those two things should flow, should they not?

In an ideal world, yes. One of the challenges is how fragmented the different responsibilities are and the different levels of regulation and governance that there are. Water companies are driven by five-year investment cycles. They have targets to meet in terms of storm water overflows and they are quite heavily regulated in that area. There is that need to ensure that we are meeting those targets, but also the resources and the drivers there for local authorities to work with them to reduce surface water flood risk. That funding can be found from there to have multiple benefits at the same time.

Are you saying they should also be measured on their work around surface water?

That is an interesting question.

Now is a good time to give us an answer on that.

Yes. CIWEM represents members that work for local authorities, water companies, consultancies, the Environment Agency and so on. I think that our members would welcome that being more heavily regulated. I am not sure that regulation is the entire answer, though.

I was supposed to ask you about any national examples, but you have both given some very good examples that I know you are going to write in about. If you have any international examples where that integration works very well, if you would not mind just popping that in the post to us as well, it helps us just not to reinvent the wheel on this. Rachel, to what extent do the various agencies and level of governance involved have the right resources, information and data—and you touched on this recently—to ensure we are getting the most positive outcomes? Are there any missing pieces there in the jigsaw?

Data is key. There is not always clear data there to inform. We certainly have a positive relationship with organisations like the Environment Agency, but it is maybe not always that positive an experience on the ground. There is a will to make it work. It does not always work. Data is key to everything that we do. Accessing that data is very important—and believing in that data, if I may say that.

Credibility, accuracy?

Credibility that sits behind the data. Maybe it is unfair to say it like that. It is about understanding where the data has come from, and the methodology that sits behind the data, but one body will not solve this. When we talked about planning, we talked about local catchments, surface water and transport. It all flows into one—literally, catching your note there.

Do you feel there is a need for data-sharing agreements, for example?

I think there is. I understand that data is sometimes quite sensitive, but if there is that trust to know that data, that is very important.

Integrity and hygiene of data within that data-sharing.

Yes, I think so.

Could we ask you that, Celia Davis? You talked about the potential there to bring responsibilities potentially under one agency, which is a huge cost saving to a Government looking to saving some money. Is there something around data-sharing agreements that could help unlock that flow of data?

In terms of the planning system, data is integral. I think there are two things happening. One is the national-scale data is improving. The Environment Agency is about to update its national mapping and that will be a huge aid to planners and the planning system. At a local level, if a planning application site goes to a planning inquiry because there has been an appeal, there is no shortage of data on flood risk information. There are pages and pages of it; it is quite bamboozling. What happens is you have the adversarial nature of planning appeals, so there is one set of data and interpretation playing off against another. This is one of those windows where this kind of underestimation of risk can play in because it becomes an argument. Data that can help give a single version of the truth and a single interpretation of risk would be very helpful.

If you had a single agency, that would be much simpler, wouldn’t it? A final question to you, Ms Burgess: any thoughts about any missing pieces there around resourcing or data that you think are needed to glue together what are currently fragmented responsibilities?

I think the key thing that data needs is co-ordination. If I just illustrate this through a project called the Severn Valley Water Management Scheme—

An excellent example that flows through Shrewsbury, yes.

Yes, it does. This is an initiative that is being led by the Environment Agency, looking into Wales as well with the upper Severn catchment. It has brought together over 230 different datasets on land use, topography and so on—all elements of integrated water management to help inform decision making. It is talking to landowners and various different organisations—water companies, for example—about this data, what data it has and how it can use the data. One of the biggest things here is the power of bringing all of that data together, but the organisational fragmentation means that at the moment there is not necessarily that much in every location. That is a pilot study. How do you co-ordinate that data in every catchment and use that data to make the decisions on a catchment basis so that different organisations implement them, and different organisations can bring in funding?

That is an excellent conclusion: that Shrewsbury should be the best case example in the country. On that, I hand back to the Chair. Thank you—you can come back anytime.

We will not have that as a recommendation. Martin Rhodes.

Thank you, Chair. We have covered a lot of ground in terms of the discussion that we have had this afternoon. If the Committee is going to look to make recommendations about what needs to be done to encourage landowners, farmers and developers to do what is needed in terms of effective flood resilience, what would you say are the key elements from your perspective? Obviously, we have covered a lot of ground, and it is that interaction between the different elements, but if you were to say there were some key elements that you think we should have in our recommendations, what would you say they were? I realise that is a very big question. Who wants to take that one first?

Speaking from my perspective about the prioritisation of climate change in the planning system, we have been promised a review of that. So far we have only seen very incremental change. Climate resilience and flood resilience needs to be absolutely fundamental to the way that we plan at a strategic and local level to inform the planning decisions that we make. What I mean by that is that you would have a more robust flood risk policy for planning as a result of that. We have talked about some of the challenges around institutional complexity, but also emphasising the resources and capacity and knowledge in the public sector around flood risk and climate resilience. That needs to be improved. One thing that I have not touched on so much is about improving our understanding of long-term transformational land use changes that might be needed, whether that is water storage, changes to the coast and how the planning system can better reflect that. For example, at the moment there is a very weak link between shoreline management plans and their 100-year time horizons and local plans and their 15 to 20-year time horizons. We need to start planning now for those long-term transformative changes we know that climate change will bring.

To build on what Celia was saying, I come back to that comment: can we put ourselves in 2050 and 2080 and think about what we need to do to adapt and become more resilient as a nation? There is a need to plan in an integrated way, both for our coastlines and inland in our catchments, and then feed that on a statutory basis into local plan-making. A good example that Celia has mentioned is shoreline management plans. In locations in shoreline management plans where those medium to long-term policy decisions are such that they are not to hold the line, how do you support locations to adapt through coastal change management areas and how do you hardwire those into local plans? That is an example of what I mean by that. Plan strategically for the long term for our coasts and our catchments, plan in an integrated way, considering all land uses and the wider water cycle, and then hardwire that into local plan-making and planning policy.

I am going to be quite selfish and make it all about agriculture.

Absolutely fine.

It is very key that Government recognise the importance of maintenance when it comes to Environment Agency-controlled watercourses and flood defences. Maintenance is key to everything. You cannot just build something and leave it alone. Being able to move from capital to maintenance is very important. We need a standard approach to understanding and accurately describing what flooding means in a rural area. We have talked a lot about towns. We need to understand what happens when it floods in a rural area. Yes, there may be fewer homes there, but there are still people’s homes there. Whether it is economic, environment, social, wellbeing—as well as food—that is understanding the data again. I will steal your words a little bit, Hannah, about the integrated water management. We have talked a lot about this strategy and that strategy and that plan and that plan. Just by talking about it, we can see how many different things there are going on all the time here, there and everywhere. How do we bring all those together? How do we bring those together and have an overarching strategy on water? How do we do that? It is a huge subject, I am fully aware of that, but it is just so important that we talk about it in the round.

The Government have launched a consultation on the development of their land use framework to consider the significant land use change and competing demands on our finite land that we have to meet key Government objectives. Can I ask all of you across the panel what you would hope to see in the land use framework from a flooding perspective and why? Perhaps starting with you, Ms Davis.

Flood risk information and data needs to be fundamental. One of the real opportunities of the land use framework is to bring together all of this data about the competing demands on land and different constraints. I would also like to see it look to the future, not just looking at flood risk now, but also looking at what we know about potential flood risk areas in future. It would be very helpful if it included in its scope opportunities for some of the natural flood management catchment-based approaches, areas where land might need to be safeguarded in future for where flood defences are needed or where water storage is needed. Again, it is about that long-term transformational view that is put into it.

I don’t have a lot to add to what Celia said and what I have previously said, but the key thing is that we need to make space for water.

Ms Hallos, I am particularly interested to know from you whether you also perhaps have any recommendations around approaches that could be possible to encourage multifunctional land use of agricultural land being turned over to flood resilience.

There will have to be. It will have to be like that because everybody wants land, whether for energy, flood prevention, infrastructure or food production, so we will have to find that balance in there somewhere. If I dare to be a little bit positive about this, this has been sitting around for quite a while, and it is now there. It is the start of the conversation now and it is about being involved in that conversation. I do think that farmers can answer a lot of the questions being posed.

As a farmer yourself, do you have any recommendations for approaches that the Government should be considering for multifunctional land use between farming and flooding?

Get the schemes right; get the budgets right. I think there are lots of opportunities. I would refer back to what I have already said, if that is fair.

Of course, absolutely. A final question: Ms Davis, are you confident that considerations of flooding within the land use framework will effectively feed through into local planning policies?

That is the question, isn’t it? At the moment the land use framework is not pitched as a statutory document or a statutory plan, so I do not think it will answer that problem, which is about how we have to take a more strategic national approach to planning for growth and balancing all of these demands on land that we have been talking about. I would say that you have the land use framework, which brings together very helpful information. What is next? What is the next step? To me, that would be a national spatial plan, which would then feed into spatial development strategies at a regional scale so that you would have those tiers of a strategic approach to balancing these needs.

Thank you very much. Thank you to Ms Davis, Ms Burgess and Ms Hallos for your excellent evidence today.