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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now we don’t need a bail out, just get the Environment Agency off our backs. That was the pithy message from the local Conservative MP to the government yesterday as the flooding on the Somerset Levels still shows no signs of abating. Questions of course are now being raised about the Chair of the Environment Agency, he’s the former Labour Minister, Chris Smith, who we hear has ten other jobs as well. I just want to let you know we invited both the Environment Secretary, Owen Patterson and the Chair of the Environment Agency, Chris Smith, on to the programme to talk about flooding but neither said they were able to join us. I’m joined now by the Shadow Environment Secretary, who is able to join us I’m delighted to say, Maria Eagle and a very good morning to you. What do you think about that? It’s always said, and you know about this more than most, that in politics you’ve got to be seen when there’s a crisis to be taking control. Shouldn’t the Environment Agency and indeed the Department be out there reassuring people they are doing all they can?

MARIA EAGLE: Well I think the Secretary of State should certainly be out there doing that. The reality is that when he came in to the Department he removed flood protection from the priorities of the Department and we’re seeing the consequences. The fact is he was warned a year ago by the Association of Draining Authorities specifically about the Somerset Levels, that if there was more bad weather this year that this would happen. What has he been doing in the interim? Nothing and that is the problem, so I’m not surprised he doesn’t want to come on to your programme because he’s lost a grip on the crisis. He’s responsible in government for flood protection, where is he?

DM: Okay, so this is work that hasn’t been done, work that has to be done for the future. What about the immediate crisis though, the people suffering so badly in these floods, what would be your prescription about what can be done for those people?

MARIA EAGLE: Well first of all they should have got a grip before Christmas instead of just letting this go on and so we’ve now got a worse situation.

DM: Be specific, how get a grip? More pumping, what?

MARIA EAGLE: Yes, well I think the problem for Owen Patterson is he doesn’t really believe in climate change, he doesn’t really believe in flood adaptations to mean that local people in places like the Somerset Levels can cope with the increase in volatility that climate change scientists say is being caused by climate change.

DM: But climate change scientists, even the most ardent, say you can’t ascribe one weather event in particular to climate change.

MARIA EAGLE: Not one in particular but what they’re saying is that over time we’re seeing more volatility and more adverse weather and that’s what we’re seeing and he is in charge of dealing with that and the problem is he hasn’t been dealing with it partly because he is, as Prince Charles has called these people, one of the headless chicken brigade, he doesn’t really believe in it, he’s removed flood protection from the list of priorities of the Department.

DM: So the Labour analysis is there is lots more of this to come, be it in the form of floods or precipitation, if it is joined in with some cold air it could be heavy snow falls, so Labour will prepare us by large investments for this kind of thing?

MARIA EAGLE: You do have to look at the level of investment and the Committee on Climate Change has talked about that. He has removed a lot of money from the Environment Agency and from its budget in respect of dealing with this in the future and I’ve said quite clearly that my priority would be to try and get more money into the flood protection aspect of the Department. Now obviously that doesn’t mean you can always spend as much as you need to but that is a reason for making sure that you have proper discussions between the agencies about how to deal with places like the Somerset Levels, which is below sea level, over a longer period of time and not just try and deal with things when they go wrong. Now that may include some dredging, it may include all kinds of other alleviation measures but the fact is this Secretary of State doesn’t believe there’s a problem and he doesn’t believe money should be spent on it so he has removed it from the list of priorities and he’s not been doing the work.

DM: Is that core analysis that there’s more to come because you can prepare for all kinds of eventualities and they don’t happen and in the end spending the money on it turns out to be a bit of a waste. I’m referring there, if it is precipitation, we’re told by the meteorologists that if it had coincided with some colder Arctic air it would be falling as snow. Now presumably we have got fleets of snow ploughs standing ready at the moment after all the problems we’ve had over recent years, we’ve got tens, hundreds of thousands of tons of salt ready for the roads and it may not be used at all. We’re prepared but that’s cost money.

MARIA EAGLE: Well of course and you can’t ever completely anticipate every…

DM: Do we prepare for a plague of locusts? Where does it stop?

MARIA EAGLE: Well exactly, you have to have a proper risk analysis and you have to deal with the agencies in a scientific way how best to deal with these issues and the problem here is even when the Secretary of State went down to the Somerset Levels last Monday, he ordered a report to come to his desk in six weeks and it wasn’t until the Prime Minister on Wednesday said that it was unacceptable that people were having to live as they are under feet and feet of sewage infected water for weeks and weeks and weeks on end that he has actually put a boot up the Secretary of State’s backside and told him to get on with actually trying to do something to alleviate these problems. Well it’s about time he did and he needs a better long term plan. He needs to take this issue seriously, which he hasn’t been doing. People are starting to ask at Westminster whether he’s up to the job.

DM: You talk about long term plans and you look back, when your Prime Minister was newly into the job, Gordon Brown in 2007, there was a lot of flooding and it was seen as one of his finest hours and he took control of the situation, he went out there to particularly the North of England that was affected but I remember him saying we, Labour, are investing in longer term flood defence programmes, what happened to all that then? Did he ignore the Somerset Levels then?

MARIA EAGLE: I’ll tell you what happened, I’ll tell you what happened to them. There was a big increase in investment following the 2007 floods which cost £3 billion in damage and we increased the budgets, we focused – flood protection was a priority in DEFRA when we were in government, what happened was when the current coalition came into office they cut the budgets by 30%, they’ve taken flood protection out of the list of priorities for the department so it’s not surprising that they’ve been caught by surprise. They now need to realise that they’ve got to do better and we’ve got to have a cross-party long term plan. Now the Prime Minister promised Ed Miliband a couple of weeks ago that the Environment Secretary by the end of January would come back to Parliament with a report about this. I received a letter the day before yesterday saying he needs more time. So we need to get a better grip, he needs a grip, he needs to show some leadership and he needs to take flood alleviation and protection more seriously.

DM: You’re focusing a lot on the Department and indeed the Prime Minister, what about the Environment Agency though, at the front line of this is another former colleague of yours, Lord Smith, in charge of it. How do you think he’s performing?

MARIA EAGLE: Look, I think I see with this government – and I saw it when I was sat here as Shadow Transport Secretary following the collapse of the West Coast mainline franchise, things go wrong because of Ministerial incompetence, because they’re in charge remember – what do they do? They blame civil servants, they blame officials and that’s what we’re seeing again. To be honest I think they need to get together …

DM: So you think Chris Smith’s doing a good job?

MARIA EAGLE: I think Environment Agency staff have been doing a great job trying to save – and in fact Owen Patterson has said so himself when he went down to Somerset, he said they were doing a great job trying to protect many homes. Now clearly they’ve not protected all of them but I don’t see going forward, bashing civil servants is the answer to making sure we can do better as a nation in flood alleviation and in flood protection. That’s just about trying to divert bad headlines and it’s not good enough. It’s typical of this government but it’s not going to solve the problem.

DM: We talked about this the last time we spoke, not too very long ago, with the projection that hundreds of thousands of new homes need to be built, they have to be sited very, very carefully indeed. They either have to have these flood defences if they are going to be built in areas that are prone to flooding or they won’t be built there at all, in which case the land may be more expensive.

MARIA EAGLE: Well that has to clearly be an important part of a planning regime for deciding where to build new houses. In fact the current government have removed some of those considerations with their planning reforms and I think that needs to be looked at because obviously in the future, the Committee on Climate Change says more homes will be at risk of flooding, we have to try and make sure we don’t just build houses where this kind of problem is going to come along in a few years and cause the devastation to people that we’re seeing in places like the Somerset Levels.

DM: But don’t we have to accept overall that you cannot say to people there is no area that will be, there will be no areas in the entirety of the United Kingdom that will ever again be affected by flooding if we have the right amount of money to spend upon it? Somewhere has got to flood.

MARIA EAGLE: Yes, you can’t say that, no. It has to be a proper risk-based analysis but the problem at the moment …

DM: So what do you say to the people who are still going to be flooded? The Somerset Levels is pretty low and was built to flood, as we know.

MARIA EAGLE: Yes, but you have to have a plan over a number of years across the agencies that will deal as best as possible with that and make sure that you’re prepared. You also I think need to …

DM: But what does prepared mean? Do you tell people it will flood?

MARIA EAGLE: I think there are measures that can be taken by both individuals, by farmers, by local authorities to try and minimise the flooding, to try and make sure that when you get a bad year or a bad incident that you do the best that you can but nobody can ever say there will never be a flooded house ever again, I think there is no doubt about that and I think we also have to get the water companies involved in looking at whether or not their investment levels are adequate because one thing is for sure, we’ve seen over the last year that the privatised utilities, the water utilities – who are keeping very quiet at the moment I must say about this situation – made £1.9 billion of profit and distributed £1.8 billion of it to their dividend holders, to their shareholders. So you have to ask whether or not they’ve got the right priorities when it comes to those of us who actually pay for water in this country, the bill payers.

DM: Maria Eagle, thank you very much indeed for coming in to talk to us on Murnaghan. The Shadow Environment Secretary there.