Question: Are there lessons that Britain should learn from hurricane Katrina and events in America?

Baroness Young: I certainly think there are things that we can learn, though obviously the scale of the thing is one we anticipate would be unlikely in the UK.

The likelihood of us having something that would wipe out the entire country is fairly remote.

The biggest risk to the UK is a big east coast storm surge. If it was a sufficiently severe one it would over-top the defences and we could see substantial flooding to about 11km inland in some places.

That is about the biggest equivalent risk that we could face but it is far from being on the sort of scale that we see in New Orleans.

Question: Is our contingency planning robust enough for an event such as that?

Baroness Young: I certainly think that London is well prepared. We have got defences that protect London against a one-in-a-thousand year event - a really extreme event that would overtop the defences and barrier in London I think is a pretty remote possibility.

The general contingency arrangements about what to do if London is hit by some disaster are pretty well rehearsed because of the terrorism threat.

So I think London is pretty well placed both in terms of being pretty well protected and in terms of having a practiced routine for what happens if there is a big public disaster.

I think in other places in the country we have got less well-defended areas, particularly on the coast.

We have recently done an exercise, called Exercise Triton, which looked at what would happen if a one-in-a-thousand year storm surge hit the south and east coasts.

That wasn't just looking at the impact immediately, but also what all the emergency services would do in the first day of the disaster, in the first month handling the issues that came with re-establishing people, and then in the first year trying to get life back to normal and repairing the damage.

We have thought about these issues and practiced it. I don't think there is much more you can do.

But obviously there will be issues from New Orleans that we will want to learn from once they have got to the bottom of why it was so chaotic in the early stages.

Baroness Young on flood risks

Question: There has been a lot of focus on building on flood plains - are we in danger of making the situation worse with some of the developments taking place now?

Baroness Young: I think it is decisions over the last 30 years that have made it worse. Until we had the major floods in 2000 there was comparatively little focus on this as an issue.

There has been substantial development on the flood plain over the last 30 years, so there is no doubt that there are some places that are more at risk than we would like.

But since 2000 there have been stronger requirements in place for local authorities not to grant development in the flood plain against our advice. Although some of them still do it, most local authorities are taking account of flood risk issues.

There is a difficult dilemma in some of the bits of Lincolnshire when there isn't anywhere not in the flood plain, because you would be saying no development at all. So you have got to look at what appropriate development is - such as not putting in high-risk facilities like hospitals and schools.

And also building a degree of flood resilience into the buildings themselves so they could withstand it much more than they would do otherwise.

In the Thames Gateway there is no doubt about it, there will be more houses in the flood plain because the flood plain is already defended to such a high degree - to somewhere between one-in-a-thousand and one-in-two thousand year standards. So it would seem slightly bizarre to say no more development behind these floodwalls when we have already developed floodwalls that are protecting the substantial developments that are there already.

So these are the difficult decisions that have to be taken but the one thing that we have to be sure about is that we don't put people at unnecessary risk.

It has got to be a rational decision based on the sort of activity it is and the quality of the existing defences.

Question: Does global warming mean that the risks associated with these issues are going to become bigger?

Baroness Young: Certainly. In London, for example, we already know that the standard being provided by the defences is reducing as sea levels increase and as we see increased storminess.

We are in the middle of an exercise to work out the best way of increasing the protection for London. That will take until about 2015 and then we will build whatever is required which will probably be a slight raising of the Thames barrier and of the walls all the way down the estuary, and also some setting back from the estuary in order to create flood alleviation zones and water storage areas.

That will mean that by 2030 or so, when we otherwise anticipate that the level of protection would have diminished quite substantially, we will be back up to the one-in-a-thousand year standard again.

Baroness Young on Whitehall

Question: Turning to some of the wider issues - do politicians and civil servants pay enough attention to environmental concerns?

Baroness Young: Well I would say no, but I'm biased. I think if you look back 20 years and consider the degree of 'environmental literacy' that there is amongst civil servants, politicians and the public, there is now considerably more than there was.

People seem generally to have accepted the idea that climate change is the biggest threat facing us and there is a commitment in the UK sustainable development strategy to a whole range of environmental improvement targets.

Some considerable progress has been made, quite often driven by European legislation. The air is cleaner than it has ever been, the waters are cleaner than they have been for the last 150 years.

But we have still got some challenges that are just not being tackled sufficiently robustly - the future energy mix, reducing pollution from traffic, tackling some of the big issues in unsustainable resource use and waste.

We have also got more to do in terms of making sure that land management, particularly agriculture, is more environmentally sound.

Though there are measures going ahead in each of these areas I think there needs to be a degree more energy.

Question: Do you find that the rest of Whitehall is co-operative with the Environment Agency or can it be difficult to get green issues up the agenda?

Baroness Young: I think there is quite a lot of stated commitment to making sure that environmental issues are taken into account, but there are some departments which, when push comes to shove, will be more interested in the economic and social issues than the environmental ones.

That is why I think it is important to move forward on some of the issues where it is a win for everyone.

For example, energy efficiency measures, if the price of electricity is right, will pay for themselves and save people money.

The European carbon trading system, which means that companies have got to buy the ability to emit carbon into the atmosphere, can drive major programmes of energy efficiency and substitution to go for lower carbon fuels. That is good because it can quite often save companies money as well as being good for the environment.

So more economic instruments to encourage both individuals and companies to do the right thing, and to make it economic for companies and individuals to do the right thing, is part of what we are looking for.

Question: Would it be fair to say that you think the Treasury and the Department for Trade and Industry are the two departments that put more emphasis on economic issues than environmental issues?

Baroness Young: It would be putting words into my mouth to say that. I think if you look at what needs to be done to deliver sustainability in this country, it is practically every department.

The ODPM is a very crucial department, the Treasury is a crucial department, the DTI is a crucial department, Defra is a crucial department particularly as far as agriculture is concerned.

The Cabinet Office is crucial in terms of the modern regulation agenda - making sure that modern regulation doesn't mean no regulation or deregulation.

The Department of Health is vital because of the crossover between environment and health. There is another example where getting a better environment can often reduce ill health.

So I wouldn't want to single anybody out. All the departments have got environmental issues that they need to play their part in delivering.

Baroness Young on regulation

Question: Do you think we have the enforcement framework at the moment? Do you have all the powers that you need?

Baroness Young: There was a report by Philip Hampton who looked at regulation on behalf of the chancellor. One of the very useful recommendations he came up with was that there needs to be a more flexible range of penalties, measures you can take if somebody is getting it wrong.

At the moment we have to pursue people through the criminal courts with criminal standards of proof. It takes ages and by the time it happens the people who were involved have all moved on and the company has cleaned up its act.

What we are looking for are a range of administrative sanctions so that if a company gets something wrong and knows that it has got it wrong, we could apply an administrative fine that would be fed into an environmental fund for environmental improvement.

We are sure that would be much faster and much more direct, and it would also create resources to clean up and improve the environment in the communities that have already lost out because somebody got it wrong.

So we are looking for that - the government is now working on how it might introduce that.

We are also using Asbos at the moment, using new measures like community service for company directors and being able levy penalties against individual directors as well as the companies themselves.

We also publish an annual 'Spotlight' report which is a 'name, fame and shame' mechanism because it highlights companies that have shown good performance in the year and companies that have shown poor performance. It talks about the overall environmental performance about some of the key business sectors and is really a kind of league table that helps encourage peak performance and helps shame people if they are 'duffers'.

Question: Would you say then that we are heading in the right direction, if not quite fast enough?

Baroness Young: I think there are still some things that are deeply flawed and deeply broken.

We still aren't making enough progress on climate change, we are doing more on the recycling of waste but we are still a very wasteful society - for every 100 kilogrammes of materials that go into the system, in six months time only one kilogramme is still in active use. We really can't carry on with that degree of wastefulness of raw materials so there is a long way to go on that.

We have also got major task in encouraging, bribing, persuading farmers to do the right things for the environment in farming practice.

So there is still a long way to go.

Baroness Young on public attitudes

Question: You are talking about some big changes in the way the public, society and the economy behaves - what mechanisms are available to bring about such changes?

Baroness Young: We would like to encourage the chancellor to fulfil his early promise. He is the only chancellor who has ever stood up and said, as he did in his first Budget speech, 'and now for the environment'. It was a great moment.

But we do need to move faster in bringing in economic instruments than we have done so far. We have brought in quite a few since 1997 but we need to make faster progress.

I think what will encourage both businesses and the public is a combination of a variety of instruments - advice and information, incentives by way of savings if they do particular things, and getting up the price of things that we don't want consumed so that people can be encouraged to make less consuming choices.

That applies with the current argument about the cost of petrol, for example. It is always disappointing if government wavers in the face of blackmail.

Certainly as far as road hauliers are concerned, at the time of the last crisis with protests and go-slows, something like less than two per cent of the British haulage industry had taken advantage of the free government service that would give them advice on how to use fuel more efficiently.

They can save up to 25 per cent of their fuel bills by using fuel more efficiently, scheduling more efficiently and working out loads more efficiently - that is a damn sight more than the actual cost that the fuel had gone up.

We are always disappointed if the sabre-rattling that the haulage industry undertakes isn't met with a robust challenge for them to get their efficiency levels up.

Question: What are the challenges for the Environment Agency on red tape issues?

Baroness Young: We are working hard on the modern regulation agenda, making sure it isn't a deregulation agenda.

Most of the arguments about business being driven elsewhere by regulation are a load of old hooey. Why business goes elsewhere is to get cheap labour costs, and the costs of environmental regulation are miniscule compared with the variability in labour costs across the world.

So I think the argument that over-regulating industry is driving them away and creating an un-level playing field is not exactly sane.

We are keen to take part in the government exercise to reduce the administrative costs of regulation to business because we think that is something that can be done and still produce effective regulation.

So we are moving forward with that exercise and indeed have done quite a lot already with our own regulation.

But regulation creates markets, creates innovation, drives standards as well as protecting the environment so lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.