Speeches by Gardiner.

“It will probably be useful for somebody else who will ask you a question on that, but not for me. You rightly mentioned the mental health impact being devastating on people. That is why the Wembley Brook project—I am grateful to your officers for coming last month to meet me there and to work with local residents—needs…”

“But those are what we need, aren’t they?”

“That is good enough for me. I feel a Philip Dunne moment coming on, Chair, because the former Chair of this Committee spent so many years focused on SuDS and the final question that I want to turn to is about SuDS. I noticed in the Government’s response to the Public Accounts Committee that it said, “DEFRA has publishe…”

“There must be a reason this has not been implemented for 15 years. Why else does the Government delay something for 15 years that everybody is saying we need to do? You have championed it. The previous Chair of the Committee has championed it. We have all talked about the importance of it. Is this just money? Is this j…”

“Mr Duffy, when will we be getting formal clarification of the funding for the flood alleviation scheme for the Wembley Brook in my constituency?”

“The Public Accounts Committee said in its report that you as an agency were forecasting that you would provide protection for at least 40% fewer properties than planned. The recommendation in the Treasury minute response was that the agency should include a robust forecast of the number of properties that will be bette…”

“The EA does not have the responsibility, does it? It is not responsible overall. The Pitt review called not for an overview but for a unified framework and we are lacking that.”

“Why do we still, 15 years on, not have a unified framework to clarify the responsibilities for managing all sources of flooding, as the Pitt review called for? We still heard from all the witnesses that came before this Committee that it is a fragmented system with no overall responsibility and that is a huge part of t…”

“We have heard that overlapping responsibilities continue to confuse the agencies and the communities and they hinder the effective delivery of flood measures. This needs sorting out. You can say that that is the existing system and that these people have this responsibility and those people have that responsibility, bu…”

“Indeed, where we are building homes on floodplains still.”

“Great. It seems we have been talking about the Pitt review for a long time. How many of the 92 recommendations that the Pitt review made have now been implemented?”

“You say contact 999, but that leads to another problem and that is that the fire service has no statutory responsibility for flooding in England. It does in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but not in England. If you call 999, you get the fire service, which does not have the statutory responsibility. They do an a…”

“The Government always come out with these figures, “Because we are doing this, we will protect this many more properties,” but it is not a net figure. They do not say, “In the UK as a whole, 52,000 more properties will be protected,” because it does not take account of those properties that have now come into flood ris…”

“Is that why the Public Accounts Committee said that you need to talk about the number of people and the number of houses that are actually affected here? Otherwise, you give us a gobbet statistic, “52,000 properties will be better protected as a result of what we are doing,” but 100,000 people might now be in greater d…”

“In response to the Public Accounts Committee’s report at the end of last year, DEFRA said it would “develop a measure which shows the net change in the number of properties at risk from flooding in order to give the true picture of England’s resilience to future flood and coastal erosion risk and set a target for the n…”

“I want to drill down on this because the Public Accounts Committee was driving at this. Information should be clearly available from DEFRA about the number of properties in England as a whole that are at risk from flooding. It does not matter whether it is fluvial, pluvial or coastal, but just that are at risk. Then, a…”

“Would it add grist to your mill if this Committee made a recommendation to that effect?”

“Does that not mean that you should be going for soft green engineering rather than concrete and steel wherever possible?”

“Some repairs have been done at the Wembley Brook and nobody can say who has actually done them. We know it is TfL, but it will not own up to it.”

“Just on that, Mr Duffy, neither you nor local authorities actually have the power to find out who is responsible for those flood defences and who owns them. Would it be helpful to have a recommendation from this Committee that gave you and local authorities the authority, the power, to know who actually has those?”