At their AGM this summer, the CIC agreed to set up a new committee and role in relation to water, flood mitigation and resilience, hence my position as its chair and champion. The industry does understand the problem, is trying to engage with government, and hopes that it is now ready to listen.
The CIC and the All Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in the Built Environment set up a commission of inquiry into flooding in late 2014, resulting in the report Living with Water. What were its key recommendations?
These included a Cabinet position for a minister with specific responsibility for water management (don’t forget drought, as it’s equally a long term problem!), recognition that water is a critical infrastructure, long-term water infrastructure planning beyond one government term as is being undertaken for other infrastructure projects, that comprehensive integrated catchment management approaches are adopted, along with proper implementation of SuDS (probably now a forlorn hope), and comprehensive SuDS retrofitting.
But the report didn’t seem to get much of an audience. Has that changed now?
I think there’s been a bit of game change in the past month or so, and has put into stark focus the work we did last year. Everyone is now talking more about catchment management, so there’s definitely more traction in government. The Environment Agency has already been working on a catchment-based approach, but it’s about looking for a bigger-scale approach.
The floods we have experienced for these last few weeks have been exceptional, but all those involved in water management have been predicting warmer wetter winters, hotter dryer summers and more extreme events for many years. This is another incident that is both prolonged and extreme as happened in Somerset in 2014, but causing very different problems.
You mentioned SuDS, where the proposals in the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act were very much “watered down”. Do you think not fully implementing SuDS then could have had an impact on the degree of flooding we’ve seen recently?
There are two different issues, so one shouldn’t confuse them: SuDS deals with surface flooding, and what we’ve seen recently is river flooding, although they can and do combine.
But what we have at the moment is a system that’s advisory, not mandatory, so it opens up the potential for things to be done not as well as they could be – we could certainly have a more robust system for new development.
The system supposedly promotes SuDS and aligns with planning, but merely as just another factor in the “planning mix”. For larger schemes authorities can seek guidance from the Local Lead Flood Authorities as statutory consultees, but for smaller schemes many do not do so.
Some councils have adequate policies in place, and some don’t. And most don’t consult on all applications – and that is only on planning applications for 10 houses or more or on “major” development. Interestingly, many planning applications for housing are for nine dwellings or fewer!
And housing developers are not that happy either, as they now need to deal with a different set of requirements for each authority, instead of having a system that was universal and clear.
Also the government rules only require SuDS to be used in Flood Zone 3 [having a 1 in 100 or greater annual probability of river flooding] which utterly misses the point that it is applicable and effective everywhere if you design it properly.
What about the problem of building new housing in flood plains?
Building in floodplains has been increasing, and whilst much of that is in areas protected by existing flood defences, if those defences prove to be inadequate as we have seen recently, for instance in Kendal, then [because of new development] we have even more properties that will need support from potential flood risk, and it is likely that these properties do not have property level protection, as there is rarely a requirement in their planning conditions requiring this to happen.
It seems ludicrous that any property built in a flood risk area is not built to appropriate standards of resilience – something that could easily be required for every property, and delivered through the Building Regulations.
What will be you be advising government is the way forward?
Those involved in water management have long been advocating an integrated and comprehensive approach at the catchment scale, but up until the last few weeks response from the core of government has been minimal.
There are many small-scale EA/government-funded projects around the country that demonstrate how effective catchment management can be in reducing excess runoff, using fields and woodlands to hold back water. These, when combined with flood alleviation and protection schemes for larger areas of population, SuDS for all new build, and retrofitting SuDS throughout our urban areas, can start to offer a comprehensive approach.
But surely it all requires more funding?
I don’t think the government wants to spend more money, but I think it will listen to us talking about about spending the money differently, and more effectively – it’s about land management techniques, and doing different things in different parts of the catchment basin.
Because at the moment, they are having to spend money reinstating buildings and infrastructure that have been undermined by the floods, or replacing flood defences that have been overtopped, in some cases they’d only been in place for five years.
But you can’t necessarily protect everyone all of the time, you can only protect up to a certain level, and apart from that all you can do is make buildings more resilient.
