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The government have announced that more than 1,400 flood defence projects are to receive funding. The £2.3bn investment, which is not new money, is intended to save a possible £30bn damage in areas including the Thames and Humber estuaries in the next six years.
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Shadow environment secretary Maria Eagle said the government had cut the flood protection budget by more than £100m a year, and was "promising to put some of that back, but perhaps not until towards the end of the next Parliament".
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) welcomed the funding, but said maintenance of existing defences was being neglected. The CCC - an independent body that advises the UK government - said only a quarter of flood defences were being maintained fully. This means the remainder will degrade and need replacing at extra expense.
The condition of assets was in decline before the storms of last winter, mirroring the reduction in maintenance spending over the period, it said. According to the CCC, the Environment Agency now had 800 fewer flood risk management staff than in 2010-11, including in asset management and incident control.
Roger Harrabin, Environment Analyst at the BBC said "Critics will accuse the government of finding the cash for headline-grabbing projects while neglecting existing assets. The committee thinks lack of maintenance may have caused some defences to fail in past storms. The government appears to be following the logic that it is better to invest in big new projects in high-risk areas while allowing maintenance of some existing defences in low-risk areas to slip behind."
BRE welcomed the Treasury’s £2.3 billion investment in flood defences but Dr Stephen Garvin, head of the BRE Centre for Resilience, pointed out that with one in six homes now under threat of flooding from rivers, sea and surface water a new approach to dealing with the risks is needed.
The Centre for Resilience was launched earlier this year to address the issues around adapting the built environment so it can withstand the effects of climate change. Garvin said "There are 5.2 million homes at risk of flooding. This investment will protect 300,000 of these but a new approach to flood management is needed to reduce the risks further. The Centre urges the Government to think about the rise in surface water flooding, prevalent in urban areas as this requires a more adaptive flood management approach. Our urban environment continues to grow apace – surface water management needs to be embedded in the new developments we construct with things like sustainable urban drainage systems, green roofs to decrease water run off as well as localised flood resilient technologies."
Dr Garvin launched his white paper ‘A Future Flood Resilient Built Environment’ at the first international conference on resilience www.resilience14.com last week. The paper aims to stimulate a debate around the best approaches to flooding risk management. The paper can be downloaded from the BRE website.
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