Conservative views on flooding

The past six months have seen the rejuvenated Conservative party establish its clearest lead in the opinion polls since the early 1990s. Experts say that it is still not sufficient to cost Labour the election but it is starting to look a close run thing.

People are starting to search for clues as to what policies a Conservative government might pursue. Sadly, the recent round of party conferences shed little light on this.

There are some areas where reasonable guesses can be made, however, and one of those is central to the insurance industry's current concerns - flooding.

The Conservative's power base is rural England. Many of their constituencies are vulnerable to flooding, including that of the chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance and Financial Services, John Greenway. His office in his Ryedale constituency has flooded twice. The cutbacks in prevention work have not been well received by Greenway and his colleagues. They would expect a Conservative government to restore some of this expenditure.

As a group, they will also be more hostile to large-scale developments, especially on flood plains, and will take a lot of convincing that the over-ambitious building plans set out by John Prescott should be persevered with. It is not hard to imagine that a few of the schemes, such as the Thames Gateway development could be cutback or even ditched entirely.

This would change the terms of the debate over flooding and the impact of climate change quite dramatically. Flood prevention would jump up the agenda, to the satisfaction of the insurance industry.

Peversely, it might actually lessen the public's awareness of the impact of climate change as there is hardly a more vivid indication of the changes, at least in the UK, than the widespread flooding following intense rainfall hardly ever seen in the UK in previous generations. Take this seasonal reminder away from people's televisions and you can see the support for energy saving measures ebbing away.