My Lords, I do not know how to add this new interest into the debate, but at some point, I will have another company set up that will put me back into doing small-scale development
with my son-in-law. The accountants are working on it now, and I am going to put this in the register as soon as it is done, but noble Lords need to know it now, because I am going to speak specifically from a developer’s point of view—even though, technically, I am not yet a developer. I am also going to speak as the leader of South Holland District Council, which covers an area that, if we were not allowed to build on flood plains, would become a ghost town, because we are on a flood plain. We would build nothing anywhere in my patch if we followed the idea that, notionally, the designation of a flood plain by the Environment Agency was true and accurate.
We have not flooded since 1947; adequate flood management schemes can deal with it. Amendment 120 would create companies set up to build one development that would then go bankrupt—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said, on that basis we would have to insure against that, so that would add more expense in some areas disproportionately to others.
If I remember rightly, where we are sitting now is also on a flood plain, so all of the people around this area would also be moved out of town if we applied that. We cannot be frightened by water; we have to manage it properly. We cannot retreat from it. We are people and we can deal with it, and we cannot deal with it just by saying, “You can’t build anything anywhere”, which Amendment 120 would have us do; or create perverse incentives to get people to set up businesses that are going to go out of business every time they earn some money.