Starmer: Labour would get ahead of storms like Isha
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Labour would “get ahead” of storms, Sir Keir Starmer has said as he condemned the Government’s “sticking plaster” approach to Storm Isha.
The party’s leader said he feared for those with no insurance or high premiums whose homes have been flooded by the ninth storm of winter, which brought winds of up to 99mph and heavy rain to “everybody” in Britain on Sunday night.
About 70,000 people are without power, with rail and flight disruption continuing throughout Monday with another Met Office yellow warning for wind in force on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Addressing Storm Isha in a speech to the Civil Society Summit on Monday morning, Sir Keir said: “The storm and the floods are an example of sticking plaster politics in many ways.”
He added: “We’ve got to stop going out after the storm to try to help people rebuild their lives, we’ve got to get ahead of the storm and put the resilience in place first.
“So working with you not just on the response to storms or flooding or whatever it may be but on the resilience to stop that in the first place or mitigate that is hugely important. So there’s a strong preventative theme through everything that we want to do.”
The Labour leader’s criticism came as an 84-year-old man was killed when a car he was travelling in crashed into a fallen tree in Fife, Scotland. Some 70,000 people were also left without power and the storm caused widespread disruption to railways and airports.
Another storm, named Jocelyn, is forecast to bring strong winds and heavy rain to Britain on Tuesday and into Wednesday.
Last month, during another bout of stormy weather and cancellations on New Year’s Eve, Greg Smith, the MP for Buckingham, who sits on the transport select committee, said that train companies needed to find a way to deal with winter weather.
“We have bad weather every year, and frankly the train companies need to find a way of coping with it,” he said. “You don’t find this sort of nonsense in other countries, and crews need to stop refusing generous overtime and get on with it.”
As well as strong winds, Storm Isha led to heavy downpours in some parts, with 28 flood warnings being issued across England and 50 such alerts in Scotland.
Earlier this month, The Telegraph revealed how the Environment Agency planned to upgrade flood defences in Tewkesbury, one of the worst-hit towns in Britain, but then failed to complete the work during the pandemic.
Officials promised the owners of multiple historic homes in Tewkesbury, where the River Severn burst its banks earlier in January for the second time in recent months, that they would provide them with stronger barriers, floodgates and pumps in 2020, however the work was never done.
The houses in this area were among more than 1,000 properties across the country that were flooded in January, shortly before Storm Isha landed.
