HC Deb 07 November 2000 vol 356 cc289-96

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Sutcliffe.]

10.39 pm
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South)

May I say how nice it is to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker? I warmly welcome you to your new position.

Before I start this debate—which is essentially about events in central Southsea, on 15 September, when a considerable part of my constituency was flooded—I should like to say a big thank you to the police, the ambulance service, the Coastguard service, inshore rescue, Southern Electric staff and all those who gave such a good service on that day. I particularly thank Hampshire fire service. The help of its 20-odd units saved not only many properties in Portsmouth, but many people from experiencing an even greater tragedy than they experienced.

Many local people, despite being in great difficulties themselves, put themselves out to help others. I mention in particular Greg and Jane, the landlord and landlady of the Florence Arms, and Kieran Quade and Gareth Dupre. Both their properties were severely damaged, yet they spent a great deal of time helping others. Basement flats, low-lying bungalows and houses were all flooded, but the big difference between what happened in Portsmouth on 15 September and what is happening now in many parts of the country is that the present flooding is mainly water. In Portsmouth, it was raw sewage mixed with water. Homes, gardens, garages, shops, pubs, public parks and streets were strewn with raw sewage. Condoms, tampons and human waste were everywhere. I saw many houses which had all three in abundance.

The city council and its emergency planning officer, Alistair Hogg, did what they could, but some people suggest that local authorities just do not have the resources to cope with such emergencies and that it takes far too long for them to swing into action.

The real problem on 15 September involved Southern Water and its parent company, ScottishPower. I could mention many individuals, but I shall not list them as I am sure that the Minister wants to tell us how he proposes to prevent similar disasters from happening in future. There are many questions for Southern Water to answer. What it knew, what it did not do, what it should have done and what it has done since are all important issues.

At 6 am on 13 September, the Meteorological Office issued a special forecast. It said that heavy rain would probably deliver something like 45 mm of water over the Portsmouth area or the central Hampshire area on 15 September. Southern Water claims not to have received that severe weather warning. The warning issued on 13 September was repeated again on 14 September, when we were told that there was a 70 per cent. chance of torrential rain causing major problems in the area. Again, Southern Water denies receiving the information. What went wrong? Southern Water claims that the 30-year-old pumping station was drowned by the volume of water that came up from the sewer pipes below.

The timing raises a lot of questions. I was sitting in my office in Albert road in the heart of Portsmouth. Before 1 pm, water was coming out of the main drains in the street. Albert road was flooded not from the volume of rain from above, but from water that was coming up from below and was already lifting the manhole covers. According to Southern Water, that should not have happened until the pumps stopped, which was well after 1.30 pm, but I and many others know that it started well before Southern Water claims that the pumping station stopped working.

Southern Water claims that the pumps were overcome by water and literally drowned. I visited the pumping station at 8 pm on 15 September and there was still at least 4 ft of water over the main pumps. What has Southern Water done for the people of Portsmouth? It has done very little and said simply that it will try to get the pumps back working. The local newspaper, which has done a valiant job trying to keep people updated on the issue, asked the managing director of Southern Water a number of questions. The headline was: First he blamed an act of God. Now he says of the next Great Flood…We just haven't got a prayer. It carries a picture of him about to pray for help. It was obvious that Southern Water did not expect to be able to save the city if there were another such incident.

What did Southern Water do? It got pumps in and pumped raw sewage and other waste straight into the sea across our beaches and open spaces in three different locations. It had to do that to protect the city, but it was pumping raw sewage into sensitive areas such as Langstone harbour, an area of special scientific interest and the habitat of wildlife, sealife and birds.

What did Southern Water do for the people? It offered £20,000 to the Lord Major of Portsmouth hardship fund. That £20,000 accounts for one hour of Southern Water's yearly profit, and for 35 minutes of ScottishPower's profit. It would pay the directors of those two organisations for two days. And the company thinks that that is enough. It has resisted all claims, saying that it has done everything expected of it. That is cynical, uncaring, unhelpful, hurtful and not good enough for a company that claims to have people's interests at heart.

The company claimed recently that upgrading the station would cost more than £4 million. Yet people's homes have been torn apart by this tragedy. People have lost the whole ground floor of their homes, or have had their floor boards taken up, wooden floors and carpets removed, walls chopped back to the brick work up to a metre above the water line. Some people will be out of their homes well into the middle of next year. Asked whether it should spend £4 million to protect the pumping station, the company could only say that its priority since these events has been to restore it to normal capacity, and that is now being done. Our internal investigations continue with an examination as to whether it is possible or practical to improve the protection against flooding at the pumping station. The company says "possible" or "practical", but action must be taken to give the people of a city the size of Portsmouth the protection that they deserve.

The floods came from neither the sea nor a river. People's homes were flooded from the main sewerage system running through the heart of the city. Public parks were not flooded because the sea flowed down the road or a river burst its banks. They were flooded because manholes in the streets started to seep human waste into a playground and a park.

Let me turn to agencies that are supposed to help. The Association of British Insurers, contacted on behalf of those who thought that they might have sufficient cover, wrote to me to say that that is a matter for individual companies. That is not a great deal of help, and some companies have not been greatly helpful. Many people were under-insured or had no insurance.

What about Ofwat? It offered a booklet on levels of service for the water industry and a handout on its guaranteed standard scheme. For flooding from sewers, that offers a maximum of £1,000 per property for each flooding incident or the equivalent of the property's water charges for the year. That is not good enough. No one in Portsmouth has received either £1,000 or repayment of the water charge. The only offer from Southern Water has been the £20,000 for the Lord Mayor's fund.

The Environment Agency visited the station only once during the first three days, according to what it said at a public meeting held shortly afterwards. Since then, we have waited for its report with bated breath, and I hope that the Minister can update it on that response. I, and others keenly interested in the matter, have taken an independent civil engineer to the site, and his preliminary report is in the hands of the Environment Agency, where it is, we hope, assisting in its deliberations. I have also provided background papers about the site and a detailed report from an engineer who used to work there and who ran the plant.

If all that information is put together, it becomes clear that something happened in the pumping station. The capacity of the sewerage system and the station's pumps should have been enough to deal with what happened that day, but that manifestly was not so. The consequences were as I have spelled them out. I do not have the time to go into individual cases.

The Government can help with the hardship fund, a matter that I have raised with the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister, but as yet to no avail. They are not prepared to help as yet, but I hope that they will consider doing so. The Government could help over insurance. For some people, premiums have already been raised by 30 per cent. My local paper today carries the headline "Sunk by a postcode" over a story that says that people living in Portsmouth or West Sussex will find it extremely difficult to get mortgages or insurance on their properties. Already, the problems have begun for people not yet over the awful experience of 15 September,

Local authorities need greater help. They need ring-fenced funding to be made available, to help with emergency planning. Sadly, too few local authorities have the organisational skills or equipment necessary to deal with such problems. Their actions come far too late.

What can the Environment Agency do? It can do a lot. It can tackle the problem and take on operators such as Southern Water. The people of Portsmouth look to the agency to protect their interests and to ensure that they get justice for what happened to them.

We need to see the report sooner rather than later. The agency needs to be resourced in such a way that it can deal far sooner with such issues and report exactly what it has found back into the public domain. I urge the Minister to speed up the agency's report.

Ofwat powers must be studied. Agreements with companies such as Southern Water need to be reconsidered. As with the railways, when the Conservatives privatised water they allowed operators to get away with murder as regards their responsibilities to their customers. The token gestures mentioned in the guarantee scheme are simply not good enough and should not be allowed to continue. I urge the Government to consider carefully how those can be revised in favour of the customer.

Work needs to be done. I also ask the Government to insist that Southern Water protects a city such as Portsmouth and ensures that its pumping station is not supported with standby pumps that are below sea level to start with and must always be vulnerable. When I visited the station, the operators told me that there had already been near disasters, when the station had been flooded. At least two people who were present on 15 September have told us about incidents in the station. Many people believe that some of the flooding that finally put the station out of action resulted from temporary construction and modernisation work there.

Given that it is difficult for the Environment Agency and others to get convictions or to prosecute, I would like to think that the Government can insist that pumping stations, such as the one at Eastney, are upgraded to cope with the additional flows that arise from the increased development and global warming, and are properly maintained to ensure that maximum pumping capacity is not compromised.

The stations should be thoroughly evaluated—independently, if necessary—to identify the potential risks and consequences of loss of, or a temporary reduction in, pumping capacity, or loss or interruption of electrical or fuel supply. They should be modified to eliminate all foreseeable routes to a catastrophic total loss of operational capacity, which is what occurred on 15 September. They should also be modified to introduce failsafe measures to ensure that flows either in excess of those predictable, or occurring during emergencies, are safely channelled away from sensitive residential areas. In an area such as Portsmouth, which is completely surrounded by the sea, that must be a practical suggestion.

The stations should incorporate storm prediction and remote rainfall sensors to provide advance warning of problems, or potential flows in excess of capacity, to alert emergency services promptly. Slow response diesel pumps should be brought in sufficiently early to attain full capacity when needed, but they should be put where they are out of harm's way—not below ground, inside a pumping station, where the water could flood them.

Prosecuting water companies can be difficult and slow, and is inevitably ineffective in achieving a solution. The current process can tackle problems only retrospectively. Is further regulation of the industry to be considered? I hope that it is and that the Minister will say that the Government are looking into regulation of the water industry to enforce improvements in ageing installations ahead of further disastrous flooding.

All of that and much more needs to be dealt with. Southern Water has a lot of questions to answer and it has failed miserably to deliver. We are grateful for the campaigning actions of the BBC South team, led by Freddy Rostan, and to Meridian Broadcasting, but more importantly for the campaigning skills of the local newspaper, doing what local newspapers do well. The News has pushed, dug and shoved and tried to humiliate Southern Water by putting the moral case on behalf of the people of Portsmouth. So far, we are still not getting the answers, despite the fact that the company has attended public meetings. It is not good enough for the company merely to take the flak for one night when people are so disappointed because their homes, their wedding photographs, their cars and all their property have been ruined.

People expect companies as large as Southern Water and its parent company, ScottishPower, to do more. Furthermore, they expect the Government to insist that such companies do more. Justice must be done. Those events took place on 15 September; it is not good enough that, on 7 November, questions remain unanswered and people continue to live with that tragedy—as they will probably have to do for a further six months or a year.

10.55 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Mr. Chris Mullin)

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the debate initiated by the hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) on the terrible incident that took place in Portsmouth on 15 September. He makes a powerful case. I realise that I may not be able to deal with all the points that he has raised, but I shall study his speech and if there are further matters on which I need to respond, I shall do so. I shall also ensure that his speech is drawn to the attention of those people who need to read it—although I imagine that he may do that himself.

I fully sympathise with those people whose properties were flooded in Portsmouth and, more recently, in other parts of the country. On a previous occasion, I was flooded—although not as seriously as the hon. Gentleman's constituents—and I am aware of how distressing it can be.

Many of the recent flooding incidents were caused by swollen rivers, but as the hon. Gentleman points out, the Portsmouth incident was different; it was due to exceptional rainfall over a low-lying area. The Meterological Office stated that, apparently, the rainfall on that day was a one in a 100 year event. The storm was extreme; it could be a further example of the global warming process to which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions referred in his statement to the House last week.

Sewerage undertakings are under a statutory duty to ensure the effectual drainage of their area under section 94 of the Water Industries Act 1991, but that is not an absolute duty to prevent flooding in any circumstances. Portsmouth, like many urban areas, is served by combined sewers that carry both foul water and rainwater; they can usually cope adequately in normal storm conditions. However, in times of exceptionally heavy rainfall, such sewers will sometimes be unable to cope with the significant extra amount of flood water. That can result in their surcharging to such an extent that diluted sewage made up of storm water and foul water overflows into the street. That would be the case whether the flooding was due to swollen rivers or to exceptional rainfall.

Those people who have experienced flooding elsewhere in the country have encountered problems similar to those suffered by the hon. Gentleman's constituents. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced, we are determined to learn the lessons of that experience. However, it must be realised that flood precautions can only protect so far. In extreme conditions, such as we have seen recently, there will be problems.

In relation to the Portsmouth incident, I am assured that the Eastney sewage pumping station was working at full capacity and managed to cope with the rising levels of surface water until its pumps and the motors driving them were eventually inundated. The rainfall started to peak at 10 am, and the first of Southern Water's large diesel storm pumps was brought into operation at 10.25; the other pumps were used subsequently. All the pumps continued to operate until 13.07—that is the time given by the company, although the hon. Gentleman said it was at 13.30—when the diesel engines powering the pumps were themselves overwhelmed by the rising flood water in the pumping station.

Southern Water was able to restart some of the pumps by 15.30 to enable flood water to be pumped to the long sea outfall. In addition, temporary pumps were used. Since the incident, company staff and contractors have been working to bring all the pumps back on line. The Eastney pumping station houses electric and diesel pumps, and I understand that the diesel pumps suffered severe damage in the flood. Southern Water considered whether to buy new ones, but as delivery could have taken several months and might have prolonged the temporary pumping measures at Eastney until well into next year, the company decided that it would be more effective and efficient to repair the existing pumps than to buy new ones.

I understand that these pumps had never been overwhelmed before. As the hon Gentleman is aware, there have been several more extreme rainfall incidents since 15 September, and I am told that the pumping station has coped with them all. The hon. Gentleman has asked in a recent letter why the pumps were situated below ground level, and he referred to that in his speech. The reason is that the sewerage system is below ground and, to a large extent, it relies on gravitational flow. However, those pumps were protected by concrete walls at least 13 m deep in a dry well shaft which, in normal circumstances, would remain immune to flooding. On 15 September, flooding within the pumping station reached unprecedented levels and penetrated ventilation ducts situated a metre below the top of the concrete walls. Southern Water assures me that it will now be investigating whether further measures can be taken to protect the diesel engines driving the pumps.

Even after the pumps were slowly being brought back on line, Southern Water retained temporary emergency pumping plant at the Eastney pumping station as a precaution in the event of further heavy rainfall. That enabled discharges of waste water to be made into Langstone harbour, as a temporary measure which reduced the risk of more flooding of properties in periods of further heavy rainfall since the incident. The Environment Agency was consulted on those temporary discharges and did not object. It did, however, seek assurances from Southern Water that the repair work to the pumps would proceed with full speed and it continued to monitor the environmental impact of the incident. While I accept that pumping this waste water into Langstone harbour was not ideal, it was a temporary measure. I understand that no discharges have been made into the harbour since 11 October.

On the question of compensation, I hope that those affected are able to recover their losses under their normal household insurance policies, although, as the hon. Gentleman says, some of his constituents are under-insured and some are no doubt not insured. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, the Government will discuss with the Association of British Insurers how the insurance industry might respond quickly and effectively to emergencies such as this and deal with problems of insurability of homes and businesses at risk of flooding.

For those not insured or not fully insured, I understand that limited cash help only for those on income support or jobseeker's allowance may be available from the social fund, which is administered through the Benefits Agency. Help is given in the form of a grant or interest free loan. That is obviously likely to apply to only a small number of people who have particularly low incomes.

Help may also be available, as the hon. Gentleman said, from the fund set up by the Lord Mayor following the incident, to which Southern Water has made a donation. I understand that so far grants of only £6,000 have been made out of the fund. The Lord Mayor has recently relaxed some of the qualifying conditions to enable more of the money to be made available. I am assured that its availability has been well publicised in the area and the hon. Gentleman will no doubt wish to advise his constituents who are suffering hardship to make a claim.

Mr. Hancock

The one condition that has not been relaxed is that if there was an insurable risk, people cannot claim from the hardship fund. However, if someone is not insured, everything that they have is at risk. That is what needs to be changed.

Mr. Mullin

That is a discussion that the hon. Gentleman needs to have with the Lord Mayor, rather than with the Government.

The hon. Gentleman is already aware that the water industry operates a statutory guaranteed standards scheme, which has been further improved by the Government. As the hon. Gentleman said, under the scheme, householders are now entitled to a refund of a year's sewerage charges every time there is sewage flooding of a customer's property from a public sewer, up to a maximum on each occasion of £1,000.

There are however certain circumstances in which a rebate of sewerage charges is not payable. One of these is where the event results from exceptional weather conditions, and I understand that that is why Southern Water did not feel that it was liable to pay any rebate of sewerage charges in respect of this particular incident. In the first instance, that is a matter for its judgment. Where a dispute arises between an undertaker and a customer as to the right of a customer to a payment or credit under the scheme, the matter may be referred to the Director General of Water Services by either party for determination. That is an avenue open to the hon. Gentleman's constituents.

Southern Water has so far received only a handful of claims directly. It believes that the reason for this is that most people affected have been able to claim successfully from their insurance. Although it did not operate the guaranteed standards scheme, it did help with the clean-up operation. I understand that some 260 properties were affected in what is a mainly residential area of Victorian terraced houses. Southern Water's assistance involved pumping water out of properties, disinfecting the affected areas and clearing visible contamination from gardens.

The Government for their part are directing substantial resources to measures aimed at protecting communities in incidents such as these. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced over the weekend, we will be providing £51 million extra for flood defence work over and above that already agreed in the spending review.

We are taking a number of other steps that we believe will help people and local authorities to cope with weather difficulties. They include improvement to the working of the Bellwin system, which exists to help local authorities defray unexpected costs in floods and other emergencies. Assistance from Bellwin will now be automatic for local authorities dealing with the current floods and the rate of Government support will increase from 85 per cent. to 100 per cent. Valid claims will be settled within 15 workings days and claims for advance payment can be made. Research work at the Hadley centre and the United Kingdom climate impacts programme will be enhanced and speeded up to improve our prediction and assessment of the effects of climatic change.

I understand that Portsmouth city council has already notified my Department of the problems that it has experienced during the flooding, but officials have yet to receive a formal application for assistance under the Bellwin scheme. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman urge the council to make such an application as soon as possible.

On the calls for an inquiry, I understand that the Environment Agency is carrying out an independent investigation into the incident to assess whether an offence has been committed by Southern Water under the Water Resources Act 1991. To come to a decision, the agency has asked Southern Water to provide a large amount of information and data. The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that this is not a simple operation. It is not until all the relevant evidence has been accumulated that the agency will be in a position to reach a conclusion with respect to potential legal proceedings. The agency has given assurances that it will provide a full report in due course and that it will be publicly available. I have every confidence that the agency will be very thorough and I look forward to its report.

In the longer term, I understand that Southern Water is now well advanced towards delivery of an improvement scheme for the drainage catchments of both Portsmouth and Havant. The scheme will provide secondary biological treatment before discharge via the long sea outfall. As a direct result of the recent incident, the Environment Agency will also, in conjunction with Southern Water, review the design proposals with particular regard to protection of the pumping station.

Therefore, at the present time, I see no reason for any other form of inquiry. With the best will in the world, there is no way in which every incident of this nature can be provided for in advance. In the end, the only way to mitigate the consequences is for people to be adequately insured. As I have already said, we will discuss with the Association of British Insurers how the insurance industry might better respond to such emergencies.

I hope that I have given some reassurance to the hon. Gentleman. I appreciate that several issues must to be resolved and, if he wishes to pursue any further points, I shall be glad to do reply to him in writing.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at seven minutes past Eleven o'clock.