Failure to prepare for floods is ‘biggest betrayal’
Experts call for overhaul of UK disaster planning
ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERTS have described the Government’s failure to adequately prepare for flooding as the “biggest generational betrayal” since the Second World War and called for a radical overhaul of disaster planning and management.
Ministers have been told to consider introducing a new department for national resilience to co-ordinate investment nationally, get local authorities to work together better and set new building standards.
Dr Hugh Ellis, the director of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association, told The Yorkshire Post that Britain urgently needed new national resilience laws.
He said: “This is moving it into a wartime footing and national government needs to play an enormously enhanced role. That requires one thing above all else, a National Resilience Act. We need a new law and a new government department to go with it because this is going to keep happening.”
He added that local and national governments have known Britain would suffer major floods for 30 years but failed to act on it.
“Probably the greatest political betrayal of future generations ever to take place in this country was for national government to walk away from its responsibility on climate change.”
The Environment Agency was forced to defend itself yesterday after South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Alan Billings questioned whether the organisation should face more rigorous public scrutiny.
His comments come after the recent deluge which left parts of Doncaster devastated while Sheffield, which got new flood defences after 2007, was largely spared.
Dr Billings said: “The local authorities and the emergency services are all subject to local scrutiny and most of their decision-making is taken locally. This is less true of the Environment Agency. Do we need greater transparency around its decisions and
greater local accountability for them?”
An Environment Agency spokesman said there was a legal requirement that flood defences cannot increase the flood risk of communities either upstream or downstream, adding: “Flood defence investment takes place where the risk is highest, wherever it is across the country and where it will benefit the most people and property.”
However, some scientists applauded the Environment Agency for its quick and thorough response to recent flooding.
Dr Jonathan Bridge, an expert on flooding and a senior lecturer in physical geography at Sheffield Hallam University, said it was too simplistic to say prevention measures in one place would lead to flooding elsewhere as there are so many different factors.
He said: “It’s a collective ignorance. (As a country) we’ve assumed that we can manage and engineer the water, that flooding is something we can control. Extreme events like we saw two weeks ago suggest that we can’t control everything.”
DURING HIS lengthy career in politics, Dr Alan Billings has been a man to choose his words with great care. So it is worth listening when the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner questions the level of transparency around the decisions of the Environment Agency following the recent devastating floods in the county.
Dr Billings has seen at first-hand the extent of the devastation caused by the floods, describing visiting one traumatised family whose property in Bentley, Doncaster, was still full of brown, foul-smelling water which had their ruined furniture and possessions. As it is the second time their home has been flooded, they had the secondary blow of being uninsured.
The misery of that family and many others like them in the Doncaster area follows growing questions about the decisions which led to new flood defences being built in Sheffield after the devastating 2007 floods. Those defences were effective in largely protecting Sheffield this time around, but with the River Don bursting its banks further downstream leading to the flooding in rural areas and suburbs around Doncaster, many in the flooded areas believe their communities were sacrificed.
As Dr Billings simply puts it: “Many in the Don Valley believe they were the victims of decisions taken elsewhere.”
There is of course an argument that building flood defences in urban areas to protect the largest number of people and businesses possible is not only legitimate, but perfectly sensible.
But as Dr Billings rightly points out, with a lack of local accountability for the Environment Agency there are unanswered questions for those who have been so badly affected.
The very least they deserve is greater transparency and full answers about what has happened – and why.