The independent Committee on Climate Change(CCC) has warned MPs on the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee over the lack of information on critical infrastructure assets at risk of flooding in the UK.

The EAC was hearing oral evidence in a one-off session on climate change adaptation following on from the recent publication of the Government's Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017. The assessment drew primarily on the independent Evidence Report commissioned from the CCC's Adaptation Sub-Committee.

Opening the evidence session, EAC Chair Mary Creagh MP, said the Committee on Climate Change had identified five areas where stronger policies and investment is required: flooding, health, risk to the water supply, risk to natural capital and risks to food.

Flood risk management, natural capital were among a wide range of issues discussed during the session – others included food security, soil quality, farming, the impacts of Brexit, land use and the Water Framework Directive.

Not enough action to reduce risk in key areas of flooding and natural capital

Commenting on the current National Adaptation Plan,  Baroness Brown of Cambridge, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC)  Adaptation Sub-Committee, told the EAC:

“…although there is a lot of action going on at the moment, we don’t see that it is really doing enough to reduce the risk, particularly in key areas of flooding and health and natural capital.”

Mary Creagh said the EAC been particularly concerned with flooding and questioned whether the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had the staff and resources in its adaptation team to ensure that the UK does respond effectively to the risks posed by climate change.

Daniel Johns, Head of Adaptation at the CCC, explained that a lot of investment is going through the Natural Environment Research Council into infrastructure resilience:

 “They are looking very much at individual sectors—how resilient are the rail and road, energy and water sectors to climate change—but also how these systems work together as a system of systems to spot problems relating to bridges or the fact that everything runs on electricity and ICT these days so what potential there is for more systemic cascading failures as a result of point assets failing.”

He went on to comment on the Climate Change Act adaptation reporting power for the Secretary of State to ask infrastructure operators and other statutory undertakers to produce an adaptation report to identify the risks they face and the actions they are taking in response.

“The first round of ARP…. was a mandatory process and led to over 100 different organisations reporting. The second round, which we are just at the end of, was voluntary and what we saw was more people were invited to take part but less actually did.”

Daniel Johns agreed to provide the EAC with details of the 20 or so organisations which had declined to take part in the second round.

The CCC’s 2015 report recommended that the third round should be mandatory, something the EAC concurs with – its recent flooding report said that all infrastructure companies should have mandatory flood resilience reporting.

Lack of information on UK’s critical infra assets at risk of flooding

Referring to the Government’s National Flood Resilience Review which came out last September, Johns also raised the issue of lack of information on critical infrastructure assets at risk of flooding, saying:

“It also identified about 520 assets, from memory—we are talking about water company assets, electricity, gas, power stations, ITT—within the extreme flood outline and vulnerable to flood impacts. It highlighted that number but then went no further. “

“There has been no published account of what these assets are, where they are, how important they are, how many customers would be impacted should there be a flood in that part of the country and, importantly, what action is going to be taken over time to reduce the vulnerability of those assets to falling over.”

“There has been no published account over the last 10 years by the Cabinet Office, Defra or anybody else about the impact of all the activity that we know has been taking place in the background to harden infrastructure assets, to improve these risks of interdependency failures, so that we know now, 10 years on from the 2007 floods, how much better we are prepared and how much more resilient we as a country are in terms of our infrastructure and our communities to the flood events that we are seeing more and more of.”

Not enough visibility in interdependencies between sectors

Baroness Brown of Cambridge also drew the EAC’s attention to the issue of interdependencies between sectors, saying:

“That is one of the key areas that I don’t think yet works well enough, which is the visibility of interdependencies. I am sure it does for things like the police in general, but I am referring to the interdependencies between the organisations—their reporting does not necessarily address that—the increasing interdependencies between communications, finance, electricity and water, the ability to know what risk you are suffering from your supply chain or the people you rely on, what the quality of their analysis of those risks is and your ability to assess the level of that risk to your organisation.”

National Adaptation Plan – long term flood strategy is missing

In response to a question from John Mc Nally MP as to whether the Government would be able to develop an effective, long-term plan for flood risk management as part of the National Adaptation Programme, Baroness Brown said:

“It is certainly one of the issues that we highlight that we think is absolutely critical as well. In the short to medium term, not the last Budget but the one before allocated £700 million towards it, of which three-quarters has been allocated. In the short to medium term the funding is there, but we still feel that the long-term strategy is missing.”

“I think also, importantly, that there has been much more focus on coastal and river flooding and the big issue, of course, for cities is surface water and overflowing sewers. That needs much more focus. We would also like to see—and the Government’s recently published plan says they will do this—much more focus on combining engineering solutions with some natural capital-type solutions of tree planting and other forms of flood management. “

Lead local flood authorities risk planning questioned

In response to questions from John Mc Nally on local lead authorities’ plans for flood risk strategies, Daniel Johns commented:

Certainly, we recognise that seven years on from the Flood and Water Management Act we are still in a situation where many lead local flood authorities are not fulfilling the basic statutory duties that the Act contains. The first step in the process is for lead local flood authorities to produce and publish a local flood risk management strategy, and in March 2016 I think only 114 out of the 152 had published a strategy.”

“There was also a very distinct lack of asset registers… The lead local flood authority has to produce an asset register so that it understands the causes and potential solutions to local flood risk problems. Those asset registers just are not in place.”

He pointed out that the Government had said that if any strategies were still outstanding by the end of March, they would consider using their power to instruct a different risk management authority to intervene and do the strategy for them.

EAC Chair Mary Creagh said the Committee would follow the issue up with Ministers.

CCC – a need for stronger Government policy in favour of SuDS

Commenting on sustainable urban drainage systems, Daniel Johns said the CCC had been promoting the need for stronger Government policy in favour of SuDS in new development, before “we even think about trying to retrofit SuDS in existing developments, which would also be necessary.”

According to Johns, the general consensus within the construction industry, developers, planning authorities and so forth is that the existing SuDS policy is not working. “It is not strong enough because the basic barriers to the widespread uptake of SuDS, which Sir Michael Pitt identified back in 2008, still have not been addressed.”

In the second session of the day, commenting on infrastructure and the National Flood Resilience Review, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at Defra,told the EAC that the Government needed to make sure of the utility companies’ commitment to increase the flood protection of their key infrastructures.

EAC Chair Mary Creagh responded:

“Your failure as a Department to mandate and target resilience levels for electricity, for water and for telecoms means that we are completely in the dark about where the vulnerabilities in our city systems are. Don’t you think that is an unconscionable risk to be taking?”

Lord Gardiner told the EAC that more work would be needed on the risk to food production, natural capital and water shortages, saying:

“I think these are all areas where Commitment to investment in the agri-tech and the innovation centres is going to be very important, as is investment on water shortages, and understanding more on water shortages.”

Lord Gardiner went on to refer to the greater resilience duty for water companies set out in the government’s draft paper on strategic priorities and objectives for Ofwat which is currently out to consultation. The paper was seeking to ensure further confirmation of longer-term resilience because of the concern that by the middle of this century water shortages could be evident and that by the 2050s, England is projected to face a water deficit of between 8% and 22% of total water demand.

John Mc Nally MP told Lord Gardiner that the EAC had previously raised concerns over the lack of a long-term proactive strategy to address the challenge of flooding and still remained “unconvinced that such a strategy is in place.”

Lord Gardiner said that developing a long-term strategy for the increased risk of flooding as a result of climate change was a priority area for the Government - already shown by the investment in both capital and maintenance. However, he added:

“We recognise there is more to do in terms of investment, we recognise that the Environment Agency long-term investment scenarios are very clear about a need for continued spending.”

EAC - Government should regulate on SuDS

Commenting on SuDS, he described the sustainable drainage systems that new developments should implement, particularly in high-risk areas, as “clearly for new build” For DCLG, the whole purpose of the sustainable drainage systems was to ensure that with new build houses there is a greater recognition of flash flooding.

 Mary Creagh told Lord Gardiner:

“The issue on sustainable urban drainage is also that you have not mandated that, the Government have not mandated it to be followed. Given the choice, developers choose not to.”

“Regulation is the tool to solving this, not encouragement. That is the long lesson of those of us who have been involved since 2007 in flood risk areas.”

She also pressed the Minister on the flood resilience review which had  identified 120 infrastructure assets in extreme flood risk areas, commenting:

“We know that £12 million has been spent on temporary flood defences and they fail in a third of all cases. We are not interested in sandbags being moved around. I am asking about the infrastructure assets, the water, electricity, the telecoms assets in flood risk areas, what are they and how many people are affected if they are to fail?” 

Lord Gardiner agreed to write to the EAC with full details.

Lord Gardiner went on to say that prioritisation of water, wise use of water, recycling of water and grey water were all areas the UK would need to be much more conscious of and where there would be “a lot more work as the decades go on.”

The Government published their climate change risk assessment in January and will publish next year the next National Adaptation Programme, the action plan that follows up on the risks.