In 2009, the Assembly approved my proposal to introduce a backbench Bill, or what was known then as a legislative competence Order, to deal with flooding by curbing the use of hard surfaces around people’s homes. That was one of the main recommendations of the Pitt review, given that almost 80 per cent of flooding was caused by surface water flooding, not by rivers overrunning and not by seas reaching the coastline. At the time, the UK Government was bringing forward its own legislation—the Flood and Water Management Bill—that overlapped with my LCO, so it fell by the wayside, but my interest did not fall by the wayside and neither has the problem.

Just a couple of weeks ago, flash flooding once again disrupted communities across my region. Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service crews were called to 12 incidents in Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion. There were yellow weather warnings for the upper and lower Teifi, as well as the Taff and Cynon. Torrential overnight rain flooded parts of Talsarn, Lampeter, Llandysul and Newquay, and the Teifi’s flood peak travelled downstream between Llanfair and Glan Teifi and the ford near Talgarth school was closed. Fields turned into floodplains affecting ponies and other livestock. There was traffic chaos on the A486, the A487, the A475 in Ceredigion and the B4333 between Aberporth and Newcastle Emlyn, as well as the A485 in Carmarthenshire and all the back roads around Beulah. And, there was flash flooding in north Pembrokeshire from St Dogmaels and Abercych to Llanfyrnach.

I don’t like to be a doomsayer, but it is only September. I was prompted to revisit the idea of the legislative route by a column that I read very recently in ‘The Guardian’ by Michele Hanson, entitled ‘Why it’s time to ban concrete in front gardens’. In it, she observed how a drive from London to Sussex had changed in the past 25 years, and I quote from it. She says that,

‘the lovely green front gardens had nearly all disappeared and been turned into parking bays.’

She said it’s a scene that many of us here will recognise from our own communities, with more and more patios and conservatories paved over for gardens and also for parking. Nearly 5 million front gardens in the UK are now completely paved over and more and more disappear every single year.

Actually, one of the first things that I did when I moved into my house 25 years ago was dig up the driveway and I planted a front garden with shrubs and flowers. Michele Hanson did exactly the same. She says that she

‘used to have a concrete front garden, with no run-off, which flooded in heavy rains’.

So she dug it out and planted magnolia and hollyhocks, and the flooding stopped. So, why not make it mandatory, she says,

‘Better to have a sensible nanny state than a catastrophically flooded one. Do it yourself’, she proposes,

‘or the council nips round with a pneumatic drill and does it for you.’

Now, I’m not actually going quite that far today in what I’m proposing, however, I do think she has a point. The effect of this—[Inaudible.]—is more rainwater ending up in sewers and drains, washing pollutants into our water courses. I spoke last week at the Assembly question time about river pollution from livestock farms going too often unpunished, and flash flooding creates exactly the same problem. But it’s made worse by our changing weather patterns: the sort of very intense heavy downpours that we experience, the wetter winters that we have, and the estimates from climate scientists predicting that there will be only an increase in extreme rainfall over the next few decades.

So, I’d like this opportunity to revisit my original LCO, and to look at what has changed since 2009, and why hasn’t and whether the Assembly should look afresh at the need for tougher laws. And I think the most notable change in the intervening years has been the regulations that apply to building work that can be done without planning permission. In September 2013, new regulations did come into force in Wales restricting the type of material that can be used to cover the land in front of your house if it leads to a highway—and highways include public roads, footpaths, bridleways, and byways—but that basically brought us in line with England, where this had been the rule for a number of years.

So, now, if you do want to lay or replace a hard surface at the front of your house, you have to use permeable or porous materials that allow water to soak away, or direct water from a hard surface like concrete to a permeable or porous area at the front of the house. But you are allowed to replace or repair up to 5 sq m of the existing hard surface without those restrictions, and I would suggest that, for most small, mid-terraced houses, that will result in those concrete and hard surfaces existing forever more. But there are no restrictions on laying patios or concrete paths and other areas of hard-standing at the back of your house—none whatsoever.

I think, if we seriously want to do something about this, we really need to reconsider this oversight, because it is the case that most people have more land to the back of their houses than they do to the front. I think that we could, through regulation or beefing up the SuDS, or sustainable drainage, aspects of the 2015 Water Strategy for Wales, or by offering incentives to owners—carrots, as opposed to sticks. And I think that there would be public support for garden-greening proposals. Look at how, in recent years, people have started to recognise the importance of gardens as habitats for pollinators, for birds, and other wildlife. Across Britain, domestic gardens account for nearly 20 per cent of urban land use. So, there’s a huge potential resource for delivering environmental goods.

On the one hand, if we continue to concrete over more and more of that space, we are doing big environmental damage—. It’s a matter of the future generations. We all have a responsibility to look after our own patch, but there is a role for Government as well. But, this Government, and successive Welsh Labour Governments, have prioritised flood prevention investment, with more than £240 million since 2012, and a further £47 million from European funding. And, thanks to that money, more than 12,000 properties across Wales are more secure, and, thanks to the deal the Welsh Government struck four years ago with the insurance industry, 64,000 properties at risk of flooding are guaranteed cover for 20 years, with a premium cap. That compares very favourably with what has happened in England.

Earlier this year, in May, the Welsh Government published recommended non-statutory standards for sustainable drainage for designers, property developers, local authorities, and other interested parties, and it is considering whether to make those binding, as set out under Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2020. There are some ambitious projects that are already reducing surface water, and you will have heard many times me referring to the RainScape project in Llanelli. That had an investment of £113 million, and it’s an excellent collaboration between Natural Resources Wales and Dŵr Cymru, and there are other projects, like Greener Grangetown. So, I do think that the time has come for us to recognise that the back garden does need to be looked at and that we can create a habitat that will sustain us for the future.