Prime Minister ‘to be made aware of flooding’

David Cameron was in York this week to see the extent of the flooding, where he said another £280m was planned to be spent on flood defences in Yorkshire.

It had been hoped Mr Cameron would come to Whalley too to see the aftermath of the Boxing Day deluge, but the proposed visit to Lancashire was called off as darkness fell.

Mr Evans MP said: “I have been sending messages to the Prime Minister but I will make it absolutely certain he knows about it.

“We have had the Environment Secretary Liz Truss here and Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, so we have had all of the experts in to look at this.

“People are fearful of what is going to happen in the short term hence the sandbags which are arriving.

“We need to look at flood defences and make sure people are protected and are as safe as possible.

“I think we are all aware we had about one month’s rainfall in one day and we need to see what can be put in place for that Biblical event.

“There are clearly things we can do on some defence measures to prevent what we saw a couple of weeks ago to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

“Emergency planning is another area. I think Saturday was a lot better than what happened here in Whalley two weeks ago.

“In the longer term, I think we could look at whether the rivers need dredging. We need to see if it does work – to me it seems sensible.

“Also in the longer term, when we do get flash flooding we need to make sure we have the availability of fields to hold water, some of which are now being used to build houses and that has caused a lot of resentment.”