The flooding across England and Wales this week has caused widespread chaos and, sadly, a number of deaths.
In parliament I paid tribute to the work of the emergency services and all those involved in providing assistance to those affected.
I also said that the increasing frequency of serious weather affecting the UK underlines the importance of robust flood defences. However, spending on flood defences has been cut by a quarter, delaying much needed schemes. And even the government’s own advisory committee on Climate Change warned in July that ministers aren’t doing enough.
And now, hundreds of thousands of people risk being unable to obtain insurance because the government has not reached an agreement with the industry.
The statement from the environment secretary earlier this week was welcome but I on Thursday at business questions I called for an urgent debate on measures to protect people across the UK from flooding.
Meanwhile, the government has been struggling to get its legislation through the House of Lords.
This government’s peers easily outnumber opposition peers – yet for the entire duration of the Labour government our peers never made up more than 29 per cent of the total.
I said to the leader of the House that the problem the government has is not with the quantity of their peers it is with the quality of their legislation.
There have been reports in the media the prime minister is planning to create another hundred additional peers – despite the fact the House of Lords is already the second biggest legislature in the world – after the equally democratic Chinese People’s Congress.
I said on Thursday that filling the House of Lords might be the only successful job creation scheme this government has come up with and asked the leader of the House find time for an urgent statement on the seemingly inexorable expansion of the second chamber!
Also this week, word reached me that this week’s cabinet was even more fractious than usual. Rumour has it that the chancellor blamed the culture secretary for failing to deliver on the government’s promise to roll out superfast broadband; the culture secretary blamed her predecessor with her aides saying she’d ‘done more in two months’ than the current health secretary had ‘managed in two years’; and astonishingly the welfare minister blamed the chancellor for the abject failure of his work programme while the prime minister blamed the local government secretary for the failure of enterprise zones.
So while the cabinet bickers we have: A broadband network that isn’t connected, a job scheme that isn’t working, enterprise zones where there is no enterprise and and the only growth strategy they have is for the House of Lords!
The prime minister called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, but isn’t he just the natural successor to Jim Hacker?
—————————————————————————————
Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle