During today’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Barry said that the Government was leaving itself open to the charge of gerrymandering flood defences to sparsely populated Conservative constituencies in rural areas.
He challenged witnesses from the Environment Agency on their staffing levels, particularly how many had been shed in the last decade, what was behind the Government’s seeming unwillingness to set standards of resilience with regards to flood defences and the need to ensure that due to promised increase in funding from the Government, the necessity to ensure that project were “shovel ready.”
The full exchange can be seen below;