Flood prevention work in the UK was described as “fragmented, ..... inefficient and sometimes ineffective, and has let people down” in last week’s Parliamentary debate on future flood prevention. MPs heard that the UK needed to look at the Netherlands approach to flood risk management.

Neil Parish MP, Chair of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee was discussing the Committee’s Future Flood Prevention report published in November 2017. He told MPs :  

“Effective flood defences, both hard and soft, are a vital part of this country’s infrastructure. With the UK’s experience over the years of more severe storms as climate change continues, flooding is likely only to get worse.”

He went on to describes the Government’s response, which was published in January as “disappointing,…. not up to standard and addressed our key recommendations in only a cursory manner.”

Mary Creagh, Chair of the HoC Environmental Audit Committee which has produced a separate report on flooding, supported Neil Parish’s comments on climate change, saying:

“Flooding is the greatest risk our country faces from climate change. As hon. Members have said, the risks are already significant and will increase as a result of climate change. Even if global temperature rises are kept below 2°, the UK faces a rising threat from surface water as a result of the intense rain patterns, from coastal erosion and tidal surges, and from fluvial flooding.”

“Current levels of adaptation are projected to be insufficient to avoid flood and coastal erosion risks….. We are not yet doing what we need to do to match the scale of the risk.”

The Government’s approach to flood defence infrastructure during a number of Parliaments came in for strong criticism from a number of MPs, including those whose constituencies have been badly affected by flooding.  

Governance - UK needs to look at Netherlands approach to flood management

During the debate Neil Parish referred to the Committee’s recommendation calling for a new governance model to deal with flooding, suggesting that the UK needed to look to the Netherlands to learn how a low-lying country manages flooding. He said:

“We learned that 25% of the land there is below sea level, and that half of its 17 million population live in flood-prone areas, so they know a lot about flooding….. They know exactly how to deal with water, because if they did not deal with it, they would not have a country. It is as simple as that.”…

“The idea would be to set up a regional flood and coastal board and then involve local authorities and local drainage boards, where they exist, and then landowners and businesses in order to have a broad catchment basis. As such, the Government should completely overhaul flood risk management, to include a new English rivers and coastal authority that is accountable for the delivery of flood protection.”

“The Netherlands has a flood commissioner who is answerable to the Dutch Parliament and at a local level, which provides real focus. We may not need a full management system like that of the Dutch, but we can learn many things from it, such as how to alter the system through the Environment Agency and others to make it more answerable to Parliament, local authorities, drainage boards and landowners.”

Water is No. 1 priority in Holland – and should be in UK

Committee member Rebecca Harris MP said that the fact-finding visit to Holland had been critical to framing the Committee’s recommendations, commenting:

 “….every member was impressed by the rigorous approach taken by the Dutch to risk management. The Dutch system is clear and accountable—locally, regionally and nationally—and I am mightily disappointed that the Government were so quick to dismiss our recommendations, especially given the evidence we received that too much of what we do in England remains badly disjointed.”

“The Dutch model is particularly impressive in placing water at the heart of the country’s approach not just to water supply, but to strategic, spatial and economic planning. In other words, in Holland water—its management, its uses and its maintenance as an essential environmental resource—is seen as a No. 1 priority in the country, and so it should be in the UK.”

Commenting on the strategic approach the UK needed to take to flood risk management, she went on to warn that “…all the evidence is that the Government are not taking sufficiently seriously the need to consider larger, catchment-scale investment.”

Netherlands has “world-class flood prevention measures”

Scottish MP Dr Paul Monaghan, also a member of the EFRA Committee, said MPS had inspected world-class flood prevention measures in the Netherlands to understand how prevention was managed in a country where it is considered absolutely critical.

“The evidence that we collected in the Netherlands stood in stark contrast to the evidence collected in England. When visiting communities in England that had been badly affected by storms Desmond, Eva and Frank, we observed a great deal of activity directed towards the purchase of large displacement pumps and the implementation of risk management systems that could only sensibly be described as reactive. “…

“In the Netherlands, the situation could not have been more different. The people of the Netherlands would view a flood as a failure of water management governance arrangements.”

Government should establish new national floods commissioner for England

He said the Committee had recommended that the UK Government should establish a new national floods commissioner for England, to be accountable for the delivery of strategic, long-term flood risk reduction outcomes agreed with the Government.

The commissioner would deliver the strategy through new regional flood and coastal boards which would take on current lead local flood authority and regional flood and coastal committee roles, to co-ordinate the regional delivery of national plans, in partnership with local stakeholders. The boards and a new English rivers and coastal authority would assume the Environment Agency’s current role in focusing on the efficient delivery of national flood risk management plans.

Dr Monaghan described the approach in Scotland as seeming to be more advanced than in the rest of the UK, with a statutory basis for its flood management plan via the Flood Risk Management (Scotland) Act 2009, which compelled all 32 authorities across Scotland to come up with flood management plans. They had all done so: 42 flood defences were in the pipeline and 80% of the money had been committed by the Scottish Government.

 Government has not done enough to ensure resilience of nationally significant infrastructure

Commenting on funding for flood risk management, Neil Parish told MPs that the Government had committed to a six-year programme with a capital budget of £2.5 billion, but noted:

“Although welcoming that increased funding, our report noted that it is unlikely to deliver sufficient protection in future decades. We stated that, by the end of 2017, the Government must publish their 25-year ambition for flood risk reduction and the cost of securing that reduction against different climate change ​scenarios. Disappointingly, the Government rejected that recommendation. The public need to know how their communities will be affected in coming years, and plans need to be put in place to ensure that they will be protected against flood risk.”

Govt has taken rollercoaster, stop-start approach to flood defence funding

More detail was needed on how much of the £2.5 billion capital programme for flood risk management would use natural flood management, he added.

Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab), Chair of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, which has also published its own report on flooding said the Committee had found a lack of long-term strategic planning for flood risk and that the Government had not been doing enough to ensure the resilience of nationally significant infrastructure. She said:

“Crucially, there has been a stop-start approach to flood defence funding and a lack of support for local councils. Our report called on the Government to take a proactive approach to funding and to make companies that operate key digital, energy and transport infrastructure report on their preparedness levels for flooding and their resilience targets.”

“We called for more support for councils to prepare plans to deal with the risk of flooding, and for the Government to publish a 25-year plan for flooding alongside the long-awaited and much delayed 25-year plan for the environment, for which, yes, we are indeed still waiting.”

Large decline in the condition of mission critical flood defence assets

Mary Creagh went on to say that nationally, the Government had taken a rollercoaster approach to funding, with flood funding during the previous Parliament initially cut by 27% and then reinstated after the 2013-14 floods. Mark Worsfield’s review of flood defences, which was published by the Committee, showed that those Government cuts had resulted in a decline in the condition of critical flood defences. It showed that the proportion of key flood defence assets that met the Environment Agency’s required condition fell from 99% in 2011-12 to 94% in 2013-14.

“Therefore, in three years we had a pretty large decline in the condition of mission critical flood defence assets, which posed an unacceptable risk for communities….”

“….The more flood defences that the Government build, the more they need to increase the maintenance budgets. We cannot keep spending more on capital and then cut the revenue budget.”

Mary Creagh referred to the failure of the Foss Barrier in York “built on the cheap in the 1980s…. not built to the correct height and it had just two mechanisms” as showing what happens when critical flood assets fail.

She was also critical of current “so-called partnership funding”, saying that the Committee had looked into the sources of the funding and found that 85% of it was coming from public sector bodies. She said:

“Therefore, the Government are cutting funds centrally, and then putting pressure on hard-pressed local councils, which have seen their budgets fall by 30% over the past seven years, to boost their flood defence assets.”

“Just 15% of the money is coming from the private sector. Of course, it is not a level playing field, because any private sector company that gives the Government money for partnership funding gets tax relief on that so-called donation.”

Extra funding raised by insurance premiums is a “stealth tax”

Responding to the Environment Minister Dr Thérèse Coffey’s comment that the Government had increased the budget, not cut it, Mary Creagh described the extra £700 million that was announced in the Budget in March 2016 as coming from a stealth tax via an increase in insurance premium tax, saying:

“We can argue about whether that is the most transparent way of raising money for flood infrastructure.”

“The Government’s national flood resilience review, which was published last summer, found that 500 sites with nationally significant infrastructure are vulnerable to flooding. During the winter floods of 2015-16, nine electricity sub-stations, and 110 water pumping stations or sewage works in Yorkshire were affected by flooding.”

EFRA Committee member Rebecca Harris MP highlighted the issue raised in the Select Committee report of whether it was possible to engage water companies more in a catchment approach to handling flooding, pointing out that the recently published “Natural Capital Committee’s fourth state of natural capital report” had recommended natural capital catchment-based approaches by encouraging Ofwat in particular to get involved.

Flood defences are “essentially a sticking plaster solution”

On the Government’s national flood resilience review published in September 2016,  Mary Creagh said the Environmental Audit Committee believed that flood defences are essentially a sticking plaster solution: they are good as far as they go, but fail one third of the times they are used, so they work only twice in every three times.

The Government needed a comprehensive long-term strategy properly to deal with some of the granular issues around flood risk, in particular the way in which local authorities have to deal with flood planning and prevention. Some 30% of local authorities in September 2016 did not have a complete plan for flood risk, and a quarter of lead local flood authorities did not have a strategy. How were the public and MPs meant to scrutinise whether the plans and responses are adequate if they simply do not exist, she asked the Minister.

60% of businesses in Leeds unable to get insurance quotes since last winter’s floods

Commenting on insurance, Mary Creagh told MPs that last winter’s devastating floods had cost over £1.3 billion in insured losses and about £5 billion across the whole economy. In Leeds, where the floods were the worst since 1866, research had found that 60% of local businesses had been unable to obtain a quotation for insurance since the floods. “The Committee on Climate Change says that the economic viability of some areas is being threatened, and the way insurance companies are failing to rise to meet this risk and failing to stand with communities is putting whole parts of our country at risk of becoming economically unviable.” she added. “Failing to fund flood defences adequately is playing Russian roulette with people’s homes and with people’s businesses.”

Govt: structural change would get in way of delivering flood prevention, resilience & other measures

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Dr Thérèse Coffey told MPs:

“Flood and coastal risk management is a high priority for this Government. Compelling evidence suggests that climate change may lead to increases in heavy rainfall and increased risks from fluvial and surface water flooding by the mid-century. Both present significant risks, so we are putting in place robust, long-term national strategies to protect the nation.”

“…..this Government continue to play a key role in improving the protection of those at risk of flood. The historic £2.5 billion over six years to better protect more than 300,000 properties from flooding and coastal erosion is an important increase. ……We have also increased maintenance spending in real terms over this Parliament to over £1 billion.”

“We have allowed the Environment Agency to invest in mobile flood defences. It now has 25 miles of temporary defences and half a million sandbags located across seven key areas, and it can deploy them flexibly around the country.”…

“Overall, the country will be better protected and services for our communities will be more resilient to flooding. Over the next year, we intend to focus on surface water, which is a significant source of flooding, particularly in cities and urban areas.”

Commenting on governance, Dr. Coffey said the Government had “carefully considered” the report’s recommendations on structures, but did not agree that there is a need for substantial change—which did not mean to say that there are no ways to make it work even better.

She said:

“We should recognise that the current system means that, since 2005—stretching back into the last Labour Government—more than 500,000 properties are better defended today. I want to get it across that, right now, structural change would get in the way of delivering the flood prevention, resilience and other measures that will be undertaken over the next few years. Again, I am not convinced that just changing the name of who does what will improve the way that different bodies work together.”