Dismal Truss out of her depth on floods
How perfectly symbolic was that picture of our Environment Secretary, Liz Truss, standing next to the remains of a 200-year-old bridge whose collapse into the River Wharfe has condemned the residents of Tadcaster to a 12-mile detour to get from one side of their town to the other. She was unable to explain why, despite repeated pleas for the clearing of trees and other flood debris dangerously piling up against the bridge, nothing was done.
What a contrast this was to the response of her predecessor, Owen Paterson, when two years ago he rushed down (at my instigation) to see the floods covering 65 square miles of my county of Somerset. Within 24 hours, after conferring with a team of practical local experts, he came up with a detailed plan to prevent any repeat of this disaster, beginning by cleaning out the main drainage river that had been silting up horribly ever since the Environment Agency abandoned dredging after 1996.
In recent days, thanks not least to a widely quoted article by a Cumbrian ex-farmer and lawyer, Philip Walling, there has been much talk of how flooding in the North has been greatly exacerbated by the agency’s failure to dredge the rivers which have again been disastrously overflowing their banks. When I spoke to Mr Walling he had just been inspecting the Cumbrian Derwent, where failure to dredge has led to its gravel bed being raised by six feet, which he ascribed to the agency complying with the EU’s Water Framework Directive.
But as I explained to him from our experience in Somerset, this is only part of a dense thicket of EU and UK legislation that has led to the wholesale abandonment of the old system of drainage management that for generations minimised flood risk over much of the country, in which dredging played only a part.
As we discovered in 2014, the Somerset and Thames Valley floods were not caused only by EU rules, as implemented by the Environment Agency. In Somerset, the flooding was deliberately engineered, under a “green” policy designed to put the interests of “nature” above those of the human population – ironically causing an environmental disaster, as every kind of wildlife was killed off by the resulting floodwaters.
This is what Owen Paterson grasped in 2014 and, despite the recent heavy, but not unprecedented, rains, Somerset has this year escaped serious flooding. But so swayed was David Cameron by what Paterson calls “the Green Blob” that he replaced his most effective minister with Ms Truss, who has yet again shown herself to be completely – if appropriately – “out of her depth”.