My Lords, I am delighted to speak to Amendment 291 and others, including Amendment 312K in my name. I declare my
interests as on the register. I am also co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Water, and I have been involved recently in a project yet to be published on bioresources, which was undertaken by CIWEM, Water UK and others. I have co-authored two reports, with a third on bricks and water, together with the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum.
Turning to Amendment 291, I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, not just for co-signing the amendment but for agreeing to step in had I not been able to get back from my physio appointment at the hospital. I thank the NHS for my treatment since I injured my ankle earlier this year. Amendment 291 seeks to add a new clause to the Bill relating to sustainable drainage. It asks that provision be made, under Section 49 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010,
“so as to bring Schedule 3 to that Act (sustainable drainage) into force in relation to England before the end of 31 December 2023 insofar as it is not already in force”.
It is important to note at the outset that the same provision already applies in Wales, so to me it is a fairly simple matter to introduce this. I am asking for a degree of urgency on the part of the Government to do so.
I wrote to my noble friend Lord Benyon on 9 December 2022 and received a reply from my honourable friend the Minister for Environmental Quality and Resilience in the other place, Rebecca Pow, on 20 April, some four months later. That, again, reflects the lack of urgency in this matter. I was delighted that the Government announced, and published on 10 January, results of their review, deciding to make sustainable drainage systems—SUDS, as I will call them—mandatory in all new developments. However, the less than ambitious timeline set out is to deliver this sometime during 2024, but that is by no means certain.
Two things are important about Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. One is to end the automatic right to connect, to stop the possibility that water companies are virtually obliged to connect to major new developments. As we know, these are substantial developments. The Government are committed to building some 300,000 new homes a year, and for the most part these homes are four or five-bedroomed houses. When I am not here, I spend my time mostly in rural North Yorkshire, and we have a particular need there for one or two-bedroomed homes in villages wherever possible. I do not know quite why there is an obsession to build four and five-bedroomed homes other than that is what developers seek to do.
One can imagine that four or five-bedroomed homes produce a lot of wastewater: let us call it sewage, for the avoidance of doubt. We are asking water companies to connect major new developments to antiquated piping: some of it is Edwardian and most of it is Victorian, but it needs to be replaced. It is not going to be replaced any time soon. It is grossly unfair that we are asking—obliging—water companies to fit sewage from five-bedroomed houses to pipes that, in many circumstances, simply cannot take them. I raised this at the time of the passage of the Environment Bill, now the Environment Act, because it is potentially leading to a public health disaster.
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Much of this sewage and wastewater is spilling over on to highways. For some reason, highways authorities are not responsible for flooding and sustainable drainage, so if there is a source of flooding, highways authorities— I accept that, for the most part, they may be local authorities too—do not contribute to the cost of easing the potential risk of flooding. That is the first purpose of this amendment: to end the automatic right to connect. It was first required by Sir Michael Pitt following the floods of 2007. That led to surface water flooding, a relatively recent concept, being recognised for the first time and being added as a new source of flooding to the well-established sources of flooding, such as river flooding—fluvial flooding—pluvial flooding and coastal water flooding.
Ending the automatic right to connect is the first problem; it is part of Schedule 3 but has not yet been implemented. This means that sewage can back up not just on to highways but into existing developments. That forces the residents of such developments to leave their homes for three to six months because, obviously, sewage is a public health hazard and their houses have to be cleaned, redecorated and so on. They have to be rehoused during that time.
The second part of the problem is that these new developments are being built without sustainable drains. Such drains could be ponds or something more significant, but they tend to be—indeed, we encourage them to be—natural ways of retaining water. It could be a little culvert or a little pond but it has to take excess water so that, when flood-water comes, it does not mix with sewage and lead to what I described earlier.
For this very reason, it is important to bring Schedule 3 forward at the earliest possible date to end the automatic right to connect and to make sure that SUDS are planned and implemented on an arbitrary but mandatory basis for all new developments. I urge my noble friend the Minister to use her good offices to bring the government consultation forward to the summer. A consultation normally takes 12 weeks. There is then a response and every opportunity to bring forward what I imagine will be a statutory instrument.
We do not need weeks, months or a year to bring this forward. My modest amendment could form part of this Bill; it is a very good opportunity to raise this issue. Schedule 3 could be implemented by December—that is, the end of this year. I take this opportunity to urge my noble friend the Minister on the urgency of this situation and to ask her to bring forward the consultation and the legislative process. If Wales has been able to do it, I cannot understand why it is beyond the wit of my own Government to bring it forward in England.
This is a modest amendment. It will enable sustainable drains to be built on a mandatory basis as a natural part of all new developments. There are more ambitious schemes, such as those with which I was associated as part of the Slowing the Flow project upstream of Pickering, which has prevented Pickering flooding. I hope that less ambitious schemes than that can be implemented in other areas. We also need to have all partners involved.
I accept the point made by my noble friend Lord Benyon in answering a recent Oral Question—on the last day we debated this Bill, in fact—to the effect that
this is a complicated subject and a decision has to be taken on who maintains SUDS once they have been put in place. The question we have to ask is this: who maintains them and implements the maintenance of them in Wales? Perhaps we can learn from the Welsh experience.
I turn briefly to Amendment 312K in my name. It has been drafted to ensure that houses built before 2009 are covered by the Flood Re insurance scheme, or the Government must mandate local authorities to stop building in inappropriate places. The fact is that, if a person does not require a mortgage and buys a property without one, they may be unaware that that property is not covered by insurance, if it was built after —sorry; is it before or after?