Shropshire MP puts pressure on Government after Storm Darragh leaves thousands without power and water

North Shropshire's Helen Morgan said even this morning (Tuesday) around 2,500 residents were still without electricity.

Mrs Morgan has urged the Government to work with utility companies to improve their resilience to extreme weather events, after thousands of homes in her constituency were left without power and water.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mrs Morgan expressed her gratitude to the engineers working hard to restore services but raised concerns about the impact on essential infrastructure, including water booster pumps.

She says residents in Wem experienced widespread water outages due to low pressure, with other parts of North Shropshire including Gobowen and Melverley also hit hard.

Mrs Morgan has been in regular contact with both Severn Trent and Scottish Power, expressing particular concern for vulnerable people.

She stressed that this high level of disruption happened despite North Shropshire being covered by a not-as-severe yellow weather warning, underlining the lack of resilience in the system.

Mrs Morgan asked the minister: “This morning there were still two and a half thousand people in North Shropshire without power. That is down from 8,000 yesterday morning, and I'm grateful to all the engineers who've worked so hard to get those people back online.

“But we also lost power to water booster pumps on Sunday, so a large area of North Shropshire experienced low water pressure. The town of Wem, which is sizeable, had large areas with no water at all. 

"And this was despite it only being a yellow weather warning, so it really does feel as if the resilience of the utility companies isn't where it needs to be to respond to an event of this nature. Can she reassure me what she's doing with the utility companies to make sure that we are more resilient in future, because these events are going to happen more and more frequently as the impact of climate change worsens?"

Abena Oppong-Asare MP, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, replied: “We are working very closely and our colleagues are working very closely in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and, as I mentioned earlier, are receiving updates in terms of energy network associations.

“If any of her constituents are directly affected by this, I would like to urge them to call the network operator directly by dialling 105 or visiting the Powercut 105 website. But she is right to say that we should be exploring how this could impact us in the future.”