ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now just a week ago the government was being berated, accused of inaction in the face of the floods and storms battering the UK. Well since then a stream of politicians have donned their wellies to show solidarity with flood hit communities. The government’s emergency committee, Cobra, has been in regular session and troops have been deployed to help with all the sand bagging, so is the government now on top of the situation? In a moment we’ll be hearing from the man who sent in the troops and his own constituency has been badly affected, the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond. Well let’s say a very good morning then to the Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Hammond, very good to see you here. Do you accept now, with the benefit of hindsight, that you were a bit slow off the mark to at least show some solidarity with these communities that have been suffering so badly? Some of them have been under water for two months.

PHILIP HAMMOND: And the government’s emergency committee, Cobra, has been meeting since the beginning of December as these issues have unfolded. I think what has changed this week is that we’ve found a new role for the military to play in community support, over and above the sort of engineering tasks that they were previously being deployed on and what I discovered when I went out to Wraysbury on Tuesday was a real appetite amongst communities affected for just a visible presence on the ground and low level …

DM: We’re going to talk about that in a moment because as you know it was on Sky News, live on Sky News, that encounter. We’ll have a look at that in a moment but let me just put that point to you again, that a lot of the government’s response has been driven by public opinion. We’ve seen how you’ve suffered in the polls over this, the government was not showing leadership.

PHILIP HAMMOND: No, I don’t accept that. The Prime Minister has been in control of this from the beginning but the structure we have is that there are local civilian agencies leading in the response to a disaster, military resources are available to them if they need them. I think what we’ve needed to do over the last ten days is push ourselves, the military, push ourselves a bit more at the civilian authorities and what we’ve now got and had during the course of last week with military liaison officers implanted in the gold command headquarters, so that we can move military resources very quickly to provide additional manpower and equipment, has been very efficacious.

DM: But the question is, could you have sent them in earlier? Let’s run that little clip just to remind everyone. Su Burrows, who you met in Wraysbury and who appeared live on Sky News, it was Tuesday wasn’t it? Let’s have a look.

SU BURROWS: I’m sorry I am going to get emotional. There are a hundred people in this village currently working together, none of them agents, none of them, not one. There is not one Environmental Agency officer here, they’re in an office. They need to be here, they have no idea. We have been working for 48 hours evacuating people, risking our own lives, going into waters that would be over my head. We have had fire and rescue aid 40 people, we have evacuated 100 houses. We need the army, we said that yesterday, you don’t take us seriously, Gold Command don’t take us seriously. What will it take for you to understand we are seriously in need? DM: And it took that, didn’t it, it took a telling off on live television for you to send them in.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Look, as I was driving in to Wraysbury that morning I spoke to the Gold Commander and he told me that the troops were on their way to Wraysbury at that time, they had been asked for but as I said, as a consequence of that visit to Wraysbury we did go back to Cobra and suggest that there was a second role for troops.

DM: So that did have an effect then?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Oh it did, absolutely and there’s been a lot of talk this week about politicians doing flood tourism. Encouraging us to stay in Whitehall rather than get out and see what’s happening on the ground would be a very, very bad idea. It is only by getting out there, talking to people directly, seeing things on the ground and …

DM: That’s what I’m saying, why didn’t you get out there earlier?

PHILIP HAMMOND: But we did. Look, there has been a lot of criticism this week in the media about politicians in wellies. It is only because I went to Wraysbury on Tuesday morning and listened to what people were saying that we were able to develop this new approach to using the army in a community support role.

DM: Just as a side bar to that, isn’t that the kind of encounter that politicians like you hate? An articulate member of the public who can say anything she likes to you and it’s all on live television, were you thinking ‘oh-oh, this is a Gillian Duffy moment all over again’ which is what happened with Gordon Brown?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well actually I talked to the lady in question later on, we met in the pub and had a further discussion when she was a bit less emotional but very sensible, very good sensible practical suggestions many of which …

DM: She was being sensible and practical at your encounter.

PHILIP HAMMOND: By her own admission she was getting a bit emotional there but we took those ideas away, we talked to people on the ground there and we have evolved what I think now is a very positive model of military engagement with the community and let me say from the Ministry of Defence’s point of view and from the Armed Forces point of view, as we bring our troops back from Afghanistan and from Germany, we would like to see the military playing a bigger role in this kind of homeland resilience task in the future.

DM: Okay, but it says everything doesn’t it, about your response to it, you are saying to me now that the paths of the response were shaped by a random encounter with a member of the public? That you didn’t seek out those views beforehand, you ran into her and then you took that back and the response was shaped partly by that.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Of course and as the situation evolves you learn from what’s going on and you shape your response and I think we did that very quickly. We were using the military in support of the civil authorities, they were doing lots of tasks around in the Thames Valley and beyond, building sandbag walls. While I was in Wraysbury the military were in Datchett building sandbag walls but what we developed on Tuesday was an alternative use of the military just to provide this resilience and support to the community and I think it’s that role that the communities have appreciated very much.

DM: Okay, do you agree now that climate change is causing it and, as Mr Miliband is saying, it’s a national security issue and therefore the military will have to be much more closely involved with this for the foreseeable future?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well all the evidence suggests that climate change is a significant factor in the weather patterns that we’re seeing and Ed Miliband isn’t saying anything new, we’ve already identified climate change as one of the strategic threats that we have to deal with. We have a Threats and Resilience sub-committee of the National Security Committee that looks at these things regularly and the impact of climate change both domestically and internationally is one of the strategic threats facing Britain. The Ministry of Defence produces an annual report called Strategic Threats and it identifies climate change as one of the threats alongside rogue nuclear states.

DM: But you endorse that?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Oh it’s a national security issue, definitely.

DM: So then that begs the question about what level of resources will be ploughed into it. We’ve got this from the Prime Minister, it’s still ill-defined, that money’s no object when it comes to the flood relief, is that it, not flood defences?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Yes, of course. What we’re saying is that during this response to the crisis, everything that needs to be done will be done. There won’t be questions about whether there’s enough money or enough manpower, we will find the manpower, we will deliver the money that is needed to respond to the crisis. In the longer term we are investing record amounts in flood defences, we will have to go on investing record amounts in flood defences but all of the strategic threats that we face whether they’re threats of international terrorism or threats from climate change, we have to manage within the resources that are available to the nation and it is only by managing them prudently that we can keep our economy growing and respond to the challenge we face.

DM: You seem to be going through this mea culpa, and maybe I’m pushing you into it ever so slightly, but why don’t you stand up and say actually we feel we did really well during these floods, look at the floods of 2007, the most recent example – 55, 60,000 or something homes flooded and it’s under 3000 this time round.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well I have said exactly that, I’ve been saying that this morning, that the investment we’ve been making in flood defences is effective and the numbers, 2007 55,000 properties flooded and that was a much worse …

DM: So why don’t you then say, well it’s not a national crisis, it’s actually quite small compared to what happened last time?

PHILIP HAMMOND: You asked me a specific question, is climate change a strategic threat? Climate change is a strategic threat and we manage it as a strategic threat along with other strategic threats that the country faces. The National Security Council regularly reviews and responds to those threats. Are we doing enough? I think we have probably got the balance over the last few years about right, we are spending £2.4 billion over this four year period on new flood defences and as a consequence of that investment many tens of thousands of properties that would have been flooded in this weather event have been protected. As a consequence of the temporary defences that the Environment Agency has been deploying, 160 odd thousand properties have been protected so of course it’s a tragedy for everybody in a property that is affected by flooding, a property that floods, but we have to remember that many tens of thousands of people are enjoying the benefits of the investment in flood defences and flood preparedness that mean they are still dry today.

DM: And on this £5000, part of the money is no object from the Prime Minister, this £5000 grant that flood affected properties can get, that’s without taking into account what kind of property it is, is it not a subsidy for some of the richer houses particularly along the Thames? Why give them £5000 when there are other properties just down the road where the householder really needs the money?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well look, the intention of this £5000 grant is that as people rebuild their homes after flooding, they can use that money – insurance in many cases if they are insured, the insurance will pay for the reinstatement of the home but what it won’t pay for is improvements and I’m hearing constituents of mine wanting for example to raise the position of the electricity meter higher up the wall to keep it safer, to put in raised thresholds. Those things cost money and this grant will allow them to invest …

DM: But I understand that, Secretary of State, but some people can afford to do it themselves, why give them £5000? They may be millionaires, they may be benefiting from your tax cut.

PHILIP HAMMOND: In the interest of keeping it simple this is going to be a straightforward £5000 per household that has been flooded grant to support the building of flood resilience into homes for the future. This is a very … the EA is charged with making plans to reduce the number of properties exposed to flooding. By allowing people to make small modifications to their properties as they reinstate them, we will contribute to that target and that’s what we’re aiming at, making sure that fewer properties flood in each subsequent flood event. I hope that if we go on with the programme that we’ve set out, the next time we have a severe weather event like this, there will be even fewer properties flooding and eventually get that down to very, very small numbers.

DM: Can I ask you a philosophical question though about that money no object statement? What does it say about the austerity programme? It says austerity is not absolute, there are certain areas where we can dig deeper, money can be found and therefore austerity is conditional.

PHILIP HAMMOND: No, it doesn’t say that at all, it says that prudent planning, and this government does prudent planning …

DM: But money’s no object in this area, money’s not no object when it comes for instance to benefits.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Let me answer the question. Prudent planning of government resources includes holding a reserve, a contingency fund, for disasters, things that cannot be foreseen, cannot be planned for and we have contingency funding built in to our budgets so we can tap in to those reserves of funding to deal with a national emergency. Now it happens to be flooding, it could have been something completely different, it could have been a need to deploy troops somewhere, that would have been funded from the Treasury reserve as well.

DM: But this is not … I mean I mentioned benefits there and I’m thinking of Cardinal-elect Vincent Nichols when he says shouldn’t you be finding money when his analysis of some of the changes to the benefits system is that it is a disgrace, that the safety net is no longer in place for some people?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well I don’t accept his analysis and I think what we’re doing around the welfare reform, the benefits system, is two things. We’re addressing a growing budget that the country simply cannot afford, that we have to get under control but we are also addressing a culture of welfare dependency that has been allowed to grow up over many, many years in this country and that is actually holding people back from getting into work and …

DM: But the overall argument is that the money isn’t available here to alleviate some of the suffering there and it is then available for the grants for these flood affected properties, it is available to cut taxes for the very highest earners in our society.

PHILIP HAMMOND: We are talking in terms of flood response, the amounts of money that we are talking about are relatively small amounts of money because although this is a major flood event, the number of properties affected is relatively small, certainly compared with the numbers that we’ve seen in previous …

DM: So if there were more affected, money would be an object?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Look, we’re responding to the crisis that we are responding to and the Prime Minister has made clear that we will put whatever resources are needed into the response. I can only answer the question in respect of the event that we are responding to and we can manage this event within the Treasury reserves that are available to us so that money is not a factor in responding to this crisis, we will have the money and we will have the manpower that we need.

DM: Secretary of State, thank you very much indeed, Philip Hammond there, the Defence Secretary.