6. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Reducing vulnerability to flood risk and the independent review of the 2020-21 flooding

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:30 pm on 17 May 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:30, 17 May 2022

I heard you perfectly well all the way through, certainly through the translation there, Delyth. So, thank you very much for that. Just on that last one first, we have a number of reviews going on into slightly different elements of the flood and coastal management programmes that we have in place. So, without compromising in any way Professor Evans's ability to make any recommendations that she sees fit to do, we've asked her to liaise with the other reviews and to just see where they can assist each other without duplication. But I cannot emphasise enough that that in no way inhibits any of the reviews from making the recommendations they want to make, and if they turn out to be contradictory, well, then we'll have to see what we can do to come across that. But we hope, of course, that they won't and that there'll be a cohesive programme at the end, but I thought it was more important to have the independence guaranteed than to try and make them come to some kind of mashed-together conclusions. I anticipate, though, since they're all very professional reviews, that we will have a coherent set of outcomes from those reviews that we will be able to implement.

The designated Member, Siân Gwenllian, and myself have been very clear that the review will be published. It will be Professor Evans's review, it's up to her what it says, but we will publish it and then we will respond to it. We will provide a Government response to that and a combined response to that and we will publish the response to that and then we will implement the recommendations as a result of that. So, we're very clear about that.

The review also has the opportunity to reach out to elected members in affected areas and specifically ask for comments back from that elected member. Now, I cannot emphasise enough that this is not a public inquiry, so we're not looking for evidence of that sort. But we do feel that elected members will probably be able to reflect the views and trauma experienced by the communities that suffered the floods and that the elected members will be well-placed to provide written evidence to the review of those feelings and the aftermath of that. And I'm sure that recommendations will follow. No Member should feel inhibited from proactively providing that evidence, but Professor Evans, I'm sure, will be reaching out very specifically to Members of this Senedd and of Parliament in areas that were particularly impacted, and we all know where they are; we've discussed them a lot. So, I hope that we'll be able to get some quantification of the kinds of trauma and so on, and what kind of support that the community would like to see as a result of that, Delyth. We have provided some support via the resilience fora and the flood risk management authorities, but one of the points of the review is to get to the bottom of some of those personal issues, if you like, about what happens when you don't feel safe.

In terms of the early warning systems, I don't have any problem with early warning systems. The difficulty we have is that some of the incidents of flooding across Wales—in fact, a large number of the worst ones—were as a result of sudden flash flooding caused by extreme weather events. So, I'm no expert in this, but it seems very difficult to me to understand quite how that would work. But we'll investigate it. You know that we have really good weather predictions, so we were able to get some of the floodgates and sandbagging and all that kind of thing out, but there's no doubt at all that we were taken unawares by the severity of some of the storms in 2020 and 2021, and we saw the result of that, didn't we? And we were very lucky over this last winter—I'll be superstitious a minute and touch the desk of wood, because we're not quite out of the storm season yet—that we didn't have a repeat. But that's one of the issues, isn't it, because these extreme weather events, which used to be very rare, are becoming more and more common, and that's part of the reason we need to review once more whether our resilience approach to this and our planning in advance is fit for purpose. 

And just to say one last thing, we're not waiting on the outcome of the review. The First Minister and I took part in resilience training fora for all of the resilience bodies around Wales and the blue-light responders and first responders, just to make sure, before last winter, that we were in prime position to be able to respond should we need to. So, just to reassure communities across Wales that nobody is waiting for the outcome of the review before putting those things in place.