Janet Finch-Saunders
I thank my colleague Janet Haworth Assembly Member for actually leading this debate today. Certainly, many miles from here, up north, we are still reeling from the effects of the devastating floods that we’ve had over the past few weeks.
Minister, if you recall, I did actually raise concerns with you as to how fast your approach was on Boxing Day at a time when water was gushing in and raw sewage. There was no comment from you, no comment from the First Minister—no leadership. However, when you did emerge, you mentioned that there is funding available for these flood-hit communities and I would just ask you to put on record here, so that there is some clarity to this, how this money is going to be distributed. How it is going to be accessible? Speaking to people in my constituency today, one business alone has got damage to the tune of £100,000.
The financial burden faced by our businesses is incalculable. I have got another business now that needs £10,000 to build their own flood defences, and they make the point that they’d had rain for several days and weeks when you could have actually put defences in to ensure that there wasn’t the damage to the properties that we’ve all seen.
Immediate support is now essential to enable those affected to clear up, repair the damage and get back to their business. The UK Government and the Scottish Government have come forward with significant support packages for affected businesses to help them recover from the impact. Here in Wales, we must award some immediate flood rate relief to those businesses that have been affected by the recent flooding, in particular as regards the business impact and their turnover. From local pubs to shops and hospitality businesses, these all contribute immensely to our communities and local economy, and our businesses make vast contributions each year to the public purse. Last year, our authority in Conwy collected £27.7 million in non-domestic rates. We simply must now repay that and show some faith and confidence within these businesses that are affected. The criteria to apply for hardship relief may exclude many of those seriously affected. However, we believe that there are already administration structures in place for rate relief with local authorities that could be extended to establish a flood rate relief in affected communities. Local authorities already administer the Welsh Government’s retail relief scheme and have received grants from the Welsh Government to cover administration costs. Administration costs for similar flood relief would only apply to those local authorities that have been affected by the recent flooding, and this could develop into a model for provision in the face of any future flooding.
Through helping businesses get back on their feet, employees can return to work and communities can get back to normal. Additionally, it is vital that we take real action to engage with our communities. You need to be engaging with our communities and the landowners to ensure that such floods never happen again through the development of robust flood prevention strategies, establishing local co-ordinators for flood action and ensuring ample supplies of sandbags—a basic requirement.
The Welsh Conservative approach, based on the initiatives of the UK Government, focuses on removing the silo approach to flooding that exists here in this Welsh—[Interruption.] Yes, Minister. You can shake your head, but the facts are facts. The reality is that you have failed miserably where flooding is concerned. The Welsh Government is looking just at flood protection, just at farming or just the environment, whilst the UK Government is moving to an integrated approach based on local community solutions first. We need to reverse the Welsh Government’s current top-down approach to managing farmers and landowners across Wales, and we need to use the rural development plan more to its best. We are calling today for the Welsh Government to decentralise decision making and remove red tape to enable additional freedoms to farmers and landowners to clear ditches, drains and agricultural channels to ensure effective local land draining and to give farmers an increased role in the RDP, utilise their expertise and enable the RDP to develop schemes to address issues at a local level and to work with the WLGA to develop micro-regional land management processes. We’ve seen parts of the A55 impassable for days, roads near Llanrwst blocked and the B5106 near Trefriw now closed for three weeks. We have seen considerable miscommunication between the north Wales trunk road agency and local authorities’ road management and we now call for a serious and urgent review of how the trunk road agency deals in the future.
