Flooding was back in the news over Christmas and New Year. York escaped this time, but the risk to our city remains high.

The two bodies most responsible for protecting York are the Council and the Environment Agency. Both have been hit by the Government’s spending cuts.

Last year, the Government said it will cut the Environment Agency’s staff from 11,400 to 9,700. They have 775 staff in Yorkshire, and 155 in York. If we lose as many staff as other areas, 23 jobs will go in York and 115 across the region.

Following the Christmas floods, when the Environment Agency did so much to protect the public, I pressed the Government in the House of Commons to cancel the job cuts. After all, it costs much more to repair buildings and replace property ruined by flooding, than to invest in flood protection.

The Government would not change the cuts, even though the Environment Secretary, Owen Patterson, claimed when he answered my question that “the Government are spending more in this spending round than was spent by the previous Government”.

This puzzled me because last year he told me in a Parliamen-tary Answer that he inherited a budget from Labour of £646 million a year for flood defences, but had cut it to £533 million this year.

So I asked another question. He gave so many “facts” and figures that I had to ask statisticians from the House of Commons Library to unpick the truth. They confirm, based on the Minister’s own figures, that “Departmental spending on flood defences in 2011-15 will be lower than it was in 2007-11”.

The Environment Secretary should either apologise for misinforming Parliament or, better, actually increase funding for flood protection so he doesn’t have to axe all those Environment Agency jobs.

In April I shall be reintroducing my Bill calling for an end to the postcode lottery in the NHS. I continue to raise concerns about under-funding of the Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) which means that patients in our region are not getting treatments that patients in other areas are.

This was highlighted once again in the past week when I was contacted by a young woman in her 30s with two young children who is being treated for breast cancer, having also had ovarian cancer in her teens. She has to be positive for the sake of her children.

She and her surgeon believe the best course of action is for her to have a double mastectomy plus the removal of her remaining ovary in order to avoid any recurrence of the cancer, and, more importantly, to give her and her family peace of mind. But the CCG has refused to provide funding for this treatment.

I have written on her behalf to the CCG to press them to change their mind. If ever there was a case for funding to be provided for treatment, this is surely that case.