Flood Prevention

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 30 March 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 2:00, 30 March 2022

Well, Sam Rowlands will know about the pressure on resources and that's pressure that has intensified as a result of the spring budget where we are £600 million less well off in this budget round than we were anticipating over the next three years, because of cuts made by the Chancellor. So, we simply do not have the money to do all the things that we would like to do. So, the creation of additional public bodies is not something that we will enter lightly into; we'll want to first look at how we can collaborate with local government. And I know as a former leader of a local authority, he will be a champion, I'm sure, of making sure that we use local government to their maximum when we are committed to a partnership with them on that. And we set out last night, for example, on building safety, that rather than creating additional bodies, as they are in England, we are putting some of those responsibilities on local authorities.

So, the same will be true of how we tackle climate change across the piece. We're going to look, first of all, at the bodies that we have—the Welsh Government, Natural Resources Wales and the local authorities, as well as partnerships with other flood management authorities—to see how we can make the most of those before we start thinking about additional institutions to create and run.