Aside from his ding-dong over floods with Ed Miliband at PMQs today, David Cameron also faced questions from backbenchers who have been affected by the floods. Conservative Graham Stuart asked whether the Prime Minister shared his ‘outrage at the false choice presented by the Chairman of the Environment Agency between protecting urban and rural areas from flood’. He was referring to Smith’s op-ed for the Telegraph earlier this week in which the quango chief pitched town and country against one another. The Prime Minister replied:
‘I think my honourable friend is absolutely right: there shouldn’t be a false choice between protecting the town or protecting the people who live in the countryside. I think what we need to see and where I think the debate is now rightly going is that from the late 1990s far too long the Environment Agency believed that it was wrong to dredge.’
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