West Berkshire is allowing homes affected by floods to qualify for Council tax reductions. Those with affected homes should consult the Council to see if they qualify.
Author: johnredwood
The Prime Minister sets out the help available for people and Councils affected by floods
After a week of extreme weather and truly dreadful flooding, I wanted to update you on the help the Government is providing to those who have been affected.
The Government will be announcing further detail on how to apply for the following schemes by the end of next week:
• For those homeowners and businesses which have been affected by flooding, we will provide repair grants of up to £5,000 per house and per business to help people build in better flood protection as they repair their homes and businesses.
• Those businesses which have been affected by the floods will get 100 per cent business rate relief for three months and will get an extra three months to pay the business taxes they owe.
• Farmers who are suffering from water-logged fields will be able to benefit from a £10 million fund which will help to restore farm land as quickly as possible. DEFRA will open applications at the end of February.
• We have also secured a total commitment in excess of £750 million from the major banks to provide financial support to business and individual customers affected by the floods.
I have also made it clear to local councils that they should not charge for sandbags in flood-hit areas – where needed, central government will pick up the cost.
We are continuing to take action across the board to ensure that everything that can be done is being done. This includes delivering extra pumps and sandbags; a commitment to dredging – including in Somerset; deploying the military wherever they are needed, with thousands already working on the ground or on standby; and providing additional support for local emergency services. We have also told energy companies to stand up the people necessary to get those homes which have lost power reconnected as quickly as possible.
And following its first meeting yesterday, the new Cabinet Committee on floods agreed a series of reviews to inform the long-term flood recovery plan so that our country is more resilient for the future:
• A review of the Bellwin scheme which provides emergency financial assistance to local authorities during exceptional circumstances, to consider whether the arrangements for providing funding to compensate local authorities for the costs of emergency measures are fit for purpose;
• A targeted review of the resilience of the transport network to extreme weather events;
• A review of investment decision guidelines on flood defences;
• An annual resilience review to consider the local, regional and national response to extreme weather situations and make recommendations for the Government’s long and short-term resilience strategy.
Amidst all of this, as is so often the case, in the toughest of times we are seeing the best of Britain. Visiting the affected areas this week, I saw the incredible hard work and dedication of our emergency services, the Environment Agency, local authority workers, councils and armed forces. I also saw the most inspiring community spirit amongst the many volunteers who are rolling up their sleeves and helping out those in need.
We want to assure all those who have been affected by this extreme weather that everything that needs to be done will be done and that the money that is needed for this relief effort will be available. We are working to get our country back on its feet and we will build a more resilient country for the future.
Detail of floods announcements
‘Repair and renew’ grant for all affected homeowners and businesses
• The £5,000 grant will provide financial support for households and businesses to pay for repairs which improve a property’s ability to withstand future flooding.
• DCLG will shortly come forward with details of eligibility and how homes and businesses can apply.
Business taxes
• All affected businesses will be able to apply to their local authority to get business rate relief for three months.
• Further detail will be announced by the end of next week on the application process and eligibility.
• HMRC will also set up a new hotline for those who have been affected by flooding and may have difficulties in meeting their tax liabilities.
• In all cases HMRC will look to offer up to 3 months additional time to pay. This will cover all taxes owed to HMRC, including VAT, PAYE and corporation tax.
£10 million fund for farmers suffering water-logged fields
• The Government will make available up to £10 million for a one-off grant scheme designed to support farm businesses to restore flooded agricultural land and bring it back into production as quickly as possible.
• The fund will also help farmers introduce lasting and sustainable flood prevention measures to help secure future production once land is restored.
• Grants will provide up to 80% of the cost of removal of flood debris from agricultural land, improving drainage, restoring access tracks, restoring grassland, longer-term planning and design of prevention measures.
• The fund will be open for applications by the end of February. We will keep the application window open for as long as possible given uncertainty around flood water levels receding.
• The scheme will be open to all farm businesses that require support but will be targeted at those areas most affected by the flood crisis.
• DEFRA will announce further details and a single point of contact (for email, post and telephone) shortly.
A total commitment in excess of £750 million from the major banks to provide financial support to business and individual customers affected by the floods
• The packages include a mixture of repayment holidays, reduced or waived fees, loan extensions, increased flexibility of terms, and additional specialist support teams deployed on the ground.
• This support is being made available to businesses, farmers and individual customers in affected areas.
• RBS have announced a £250 million interest free loan fund for affected businesses, and have extended this with an offer of repayment holidays for mortgage customers. Lloyds and Barclays have announced financial packages of around £250 million each. HSBC, Santander and Nationwide have also announced extensive programmes of support for their affected business and individual customers.
Transport announcements
• Rail resilience projects: The Department for Transport will provide £31 million to fund 10 rail resilience projects in the South West to improve resilience to flooding, including works at Cowley Bridge in Exeter. Network Rail will undertake work at the following locations: Cowley Bridge Junction; Chipping Sodbury; Hinksey; Whiteball Tunnel South; Athley – Cogload; Hele Bradninch; Flax Bourton; Patchway up Tunnel; Earthworks strengthening at Honioton and Crewkerne. Network Rail will also install rainfall, river flow and groundwater monitoring around Cowley Bridge Junction and Chipping Sodbury.
• Funding for local authorities: The Department for Transport will provide £30 million of additional funding for local authorities in England affected by the severe weather for road maintenance, including pothole repairs. This is in addition to the £3.5 million transport element of the £7 million flood recovery package announced on 17 January.
• Industry resilience meetings: The Prime Minister has tasked the Transport Secretary to work with bus and coach industry and other public transport operators to ensure that all necessary extra services are in place for the areas currently affected, and to plan for any further capacity required should the severe weather continue and affect other parts of the country.
Cabinet Committee
• The Prime Minister chaired the first meeting on Thursday. The Committee’s Terms of Reference are ‘To provide strategic ministerial oversight of policy on flood recovery and long-term resilience’.
Who speaks for England?
I asked the government this question earlier in this Parliament. There was no clear answer. It is becoming a more important question, as the Scottish government challenges the Union from within, and the European Union challenges it from without. It is especially important given the wish of the EU and its supporters to deny the very existence of England, as they seek to balkanise into regions with no resonance.
The Cabinet contains the nucleus of an English government. The Secretaries of State for Education, Health, the Environment, Communities and local government, and Transport are English Ministers, not Ministers of the Union. Their functions outside England are the responsibility of devolved governments. Parts of Culture Media and Sport are also devolved. It would be helpful if the word English was more commonly used to describe their remits and duties.
The UK Parliament contains a majority of English MPs. Many of us would like to see the proposal enforced that only English MPs should in future vote on English matters. Some nationalist MPs agree and usually absent themselves from votes on English education or health, seeing that they have no interest or constituency knowledge in these matters.
I see the Westminster Parliament as both the Parliament of the Union and the Parliament of England. I do not wish to see another expensive group of politicians elected to some new expensive building for a different English Parliament. I do want our Cabinet Ministers to be explicitly English in their words and work, and do want English MPs to stand up for England , with us debating and voting on these matters within the Westminster building.
The costs of flooding
The Prime Minister rightly reassured people experiencing floods that the costs of helping them during the crisis will not be subject to some arbitrary cash limit.The government does not wish to ration sandbags or fail to help rescue people stranded and in distress.
Much of the cost of responding to the floods is already catered for in current budgets. It is a case of switching Environment Agency staff, police, fire and military personnel from other duties to flood work. They will be paid the salaries that have been in budgets for sometime. Of course the government will need to raid the contingency fund or the underspends against the 2013-14 budget to pay for some additional costs. These include the extra sandbags, the purchase or hiring of extra pumps and barriers, the private sector contractors who may be used to assist the emergency services, any extra pay for overtime for public sector employees and the additional expenses some staff will incur as they try to work in difficult conditions away from their normal base.
The question of who pays for the repairs once the waters have subsided is a different one. Most of the damage will be to homes. These are mainly insured by their owners. The government has offered to work alongside the insurance companies to help ensure fair and speedy settlement of claims to get the work done and people back to normal as soon as it is possible to do so. Business premises too will usually be insured.
Businesses and farms will also have suffered loss of income which may well not be an insured risk. The government has made some more money available for farmers immediately, and will doubtless look at what help could be offered to other businesses brought low by the inability to trade for a period. It has asked the banks to be helpful to businesses, and has announced favourable tax payment terms for affected businesses.
The bigger financial question will be which schemes should be brought forward or developed for the future to give more parts of the country more protection against future floods. A fundamental rethink of the Environment Agency’s large £1200 million budget would be a good place to start. There may need to be some additional financial provision from government capital budgets in future years, which can be achieved by altering current priorities. This should be allied to new thinking on either preventing more new building on floodplain or requiring works to handle the additional water that leave the position better, not worse, than before the development.Some of the recent anti flood investments have paid off and have protected homes. We need to find more schemes which can protect those places which have suffered badly this time.
Why the rest of the UK will have to negotiate strongly if Scotland does leave
I fully support Mr Osborne’s stance that a single currency between the rest of the UK and an “independent” Scotland would not work. It is bizarre that Mr Salmond calls this “bullying”. Mr Salmond has to accept that if he succeeds in winning a vote to leave, it is then a matter for the rest of the UK and not for him how we negotiate the final settlement from our side.
Indeed, warning Scotland not to opt to be part of the pound is right for Scotland as well as for the rest of the UK. What part of the sorry experiences of Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy has Mr Salmond not understood? We have before our eyes the results of currency union without fiscal union, without discipline over borrowings, and without proper levels of transfers from rich to poor in the Euro area. Why would anyone want to recommend to the Scots being in a currency union where they had no influence over the monetary policy and where there was no common fiscal policy?
Mr Salmond now retaliates by the most unpleasant threat that Scotland would walk away from the Union without taking its share of the debt. British fair play and commonsense argues that of course Scotland has to take its share of the debt, as it enjoyed helping us spend the money. Scotland should remember that if they try that tactic, there are plenty of ways the rest of the UK can also negotiate forcefully.
How much of the oil belongs to the rest of the UK rather than Scotland? How do you draw the border out from the coast into the North Sea? Why shouldn’t Scotland assume full responsibility for the debts of RBS? What charges would the rest of the UK levy for Scots using rest of the Uk facilities?
The more Mr Salmond hits out, the more he needs to understand that the rest of the UK will harden its attitude to the negotiation. Many people in the rest of the UK are with the Prime Minister in wanting the Scots to remain, keeping our country united. If the Scots vote for Out, the mood will change. Then the rest of the UK, rejected by the Scots, will want their politicians to do a great deal for those of us who remain in the union.
Most people in the rest of the UK do not see the union as a simple commercial transaction. We are not constantly adding up how much we pay in tax and comparing it with what we get back. There are other parts of the UK who get a worse financial deal than Scotland, who accept that is part of belonging to union with others.
Ministers and quangos
If quangos are not really independent and do have in the end to accept some accountability to people and Parliament, how should the relationship between Ministers and quangos be conducted?
When I was a Minister with quangos reporting to me I defined my roles as:
1. Establishing aims and requirements for the Agency in accordance with their Statute
2. Settling budgets with the Agency
3. Reviewing and influencing their policies to achieve their aims
4. Monitoring and reviewing their performance
5. Acting as the customer and taxpayer voice as they were usually monopolies
To do this I established a pattern of review meetings with Chairmen and Chief Executives. The minimum annual requirement was a budget meeting to discuss the following year’s total spending and sources of income, and a Corporate Plan Review meeting to discuss aims, achievements and performance.
I would conduct my own review of their requests of increases in fees and charges, as often a quango that thought the grant settlement was too mean would simply carry on spending and aim to send the bill to the captive customers. I was there to represent them to the Treasury if there was a good case for them to receive more grant in aid. I usually found that they had generous budgets and what was needed was better financial management to achieve higher value for money.
I found that where I had some professional expertise based on past employment and training I was more likely to be more involved in the detail of the quango in our private exchanges. I was responsible for a period for the financial regulators of all the non banks, where it was possible as Minister to have productive discussions about what we were trying to do and how you could best achieve it. Where a quango dealt with something like food science where I have no qualifications I had to take the professional judgements on trust, though could and did still ask questions to expose any inconsisencies, poor performance or areas where professional judgements were divided.
The truth is quangos spend a lot of public money. They have a surrogate tax power in the case of the monopoly regulators. Their independence is subject to Parliament and Ministers telling them their aims and deciding how much they can spend. Ministers therefore need to review them closely, demand improvements, and change managements if they start to fail.
Mr Redwood’s intervention during the Statement on Flooding, 10 February
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): As the two main A roads from my constituency into Reading have been closed by floods, and as many homes, businesses and gardens have been inundated, sometimes with foul as well as surface water, will my right hon. Friend assure me that, in future, the £1,200 million budget and the near £100 million cash that the Environment Agency started the year with will be available for schemes that I and others recommend which could stop that water in future? Is it not about time that we had the promise of some action from the Environment Agency?
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles): We need to deal with the short-term effects of the floods given what is likely to happen over the next few weeks, but my right hon. Friend makes a reasonable point—it is not just the size of the Environment Agency budget, but what it does with it and what priorities it has. I am sure that, as the water recedes, there will be a lot of discussion between the Government and the Environment Agency.
Wokingham Times, 6 February
Last week the government put through its Immigration Bill. This piece of legislation will help control the numbers of people coming to settle in the UK, as most agree we need to continue to reduce the number of newcomers. Councils and the NHS are finding it difficult keep up with all the extra demand for homes, healthcare and education. The new law will reduce the number of appeals an individual can undertake against a Borders decision. It will also ask visitors to contribute to the NHS whilst they are here.
Backbench Conservative MPs welcomed and supported this legislation. Three also raised other issues which they wanted the Bill to consider. My neighbour, Philip Lee of Bracknell wanted health screening for new arrivals. Dominic Raab wanted to reduce the use of the right to a family life by people convicted of serious offences who want to stay in the UK afterwards though they are not UK citizens born here. Nigel Mills wanted to re-open the question of the ending of restrictions on new arrivals from Bulgaria and Romania.
None of these backbench proposals found favour with Liberal Democrat members of the government. They used their veto to prevent the government supporting any of them. The amendments by Dr Lee and Mr Mills were not reached during the relatively short period allowed by the government for further debate of the Bill, so we will never know how many Conservatives might have rebelled. These amendments would anyway have been lost, with Labour and the Liberal Democrats against.
Dominic Raab’s amendment was debated and voted on. I supported him, as I agreed with him that the UK authorities and courts should have more power to remove serious foreign criminals from the UK where necessary, without the European Convention on Human Rights being stretched to give them the right to remain here. Conservative backbench MPs were given a free vote on this topic. So we were not as is commonly reported rebelling. Conservative Ministers were whipped to abstain, with the Prime Minister expressing sympathy with the intention behind Mr Raab’s amendment.
Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs combined to vote down Mr Raab’s amendment. As a result useful improvements will survive in the Immigration Bill, but violent foreign criminals who have been found guilty of serious crime in the UK will still b e able to claim a right to family life in the UK .
Wokingham Times, 23 January
95 MPs sent the Prime Minister a letter about the EU. We did so, not as rebels, but as Conservatives keen to build on the PM’s policy of renegotiating our relationship with the EU and then offering all of us a vote on the results. The British people will decide whether to stay in or leave.
The immediate reason for the letter was the publication of a very important European Affairs Select Committee report . This unanimous piece of work, agreed by members of all the parties on the Committee, proposed that in future the UK should reserve the right to decline to implement a European measure, or to repeal an existing one, where it is not in the UK’s national interest.
This would strengthen our bargaining hand when it comes to renegotiation that we have taken this power. It would mimic the German position. Germany reserves the right not to implement European matters where they are at variance with her constitution. Disputes are settled by the German constitutional court. The UK equivalent is the supremacy of Parliament, and the decision of Parliament in a few crucial cases to assert our rights.
Some say you could not have a working EU if countries take this line. We know that is untrue, because Germany already practises this. We used to belong to the EEC and then the EU whilst preserving a European version of the veto called the Luxembourg Compromise. This was first deployed by France, and was a useful way of protecting the national interest if all else had failed in the discussion with other member states.
We 95 have merely urged the government to respond positively to the Committee Report. If they do so they will have a stronger negotiating hand. They will also please the majority of the UK people, who clearly want Brussels to govern us less and Parliament more. We need to sort out dear energy, borders and criminal justice matters with more input at home.
Wokingham Times, 9 January
The government is keen to help people own their own home. They are improving the discounts available for those who want to buy their Council house. They have launched a scheme to provide a guarantee for extra mortgage borrowing for people who do not have a large deposit to put down. This means that you can buy a home with a cash deposit of 5% of the total value, rather than having to save up 25% of the cost of the house.
As always such schemes bring their critics. We hear the old argument that if someone buys a Council house there is one less house available. That is nonsense, as the same family stays living in the same house. The difference is that family will not have to pay rent in their old age, when the mortgage is paid off. Meanwhile the Council has a sum of money from the sale to help it provide more housing.
We hear the new argument that helping people with the deposit is irresponsible, as it will boost house prices and put them into too much debt. This is a misunderstanding of the scheme. The bank or Building Society offering the mortgage still has to make the appropriate checks on income and capacity to pay the interest. Of course people taking out mortgages should think about what happens if interest rates go up in due course. We are going to need more houses in our country, and that means we need people able to afford to buy the new homes currently being built so builders will think it worthwhile building some more. House prices are still below the peak levels they reached in boom of 2007, when the banks were allowed to lend too much and fuel too big a house price explosion.
There are many people living in rented accommodation who would like to own their own home. Doing so gives you much more freedom over how to improve and decorate your property. It lifts from you the fear of paying the rent in your old age. There are not many people in their own home who want to rent, and little stopping them from doing so if they wish. I hope more of my constituents will be able to afford to buy their own home. It is an important change in many people’s lives, and gives people more freedom once they have managed it.