Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 4 March 2020.
Thank you. On the specific three points you raised, just to add, really, to previous answers around tree planting, I know that NRW's board have approved an umbrella woodland creation programme, and what I've asked them to do is really move ahead with that implementation and look at the areas where that can be expedited.
In relation to staff recruitment, and clearly you're talking about, as you say, boots on the ground, I mean, it's something I'm very happy to raise with NRW. We do talk about staffing, but we tend to talk about—. I mentioned flood engineers and making sure that they have their full quota of that. But that's certainly something I will raise with them.
And in relation to dredging, obviously NRW and local authorities are undertaking watercourse maintenance—clearing those obstructions, managing the vegetation, removing sedimentation, for instance. Large-scale dredging of river channels, I'm informed, is not an effective solution to reduce flooding, and what really concerned me was that it can actually make matters worse. So, I think, in the extreme weather that we've seen, for example, the volume of water far exceeds what the river channel can hold, irrespective of dredging works. But I think it's certainly something that we need to look at very carefully because, clearly, we wouldn't want to make matters worse.