Flooding has hit the headlines again as the Efra committee released their report into last winter’s floods today. Funding and dredging were the defining debates around events in Somerset and from the press coverage you would be forgiven for thinking that the Efra Committee made a compelling case for turning back the clock to a time when rivers were routinely de-silted, re-profiled and straightened.
Where the Parrett meets the Tone: the location of the dredge
So, I was pleasantly surprised when I actually opened the report to find that far from claiming dredging was the answer to all our ills, the report threw its weight behind the findings of CIWEM’s report Dredging a reality check – a publication the RSPB supported alongside others from the Blueprint for Water Coalition. In fact, once you get behind the headlines the Efra report seems to be asking for little more than dredging where there is a good case for doing so stating...
“When dredging is beneficial as part of a portfolio of measures, Defra must give a long-term commitment to fund regular maintenance in the relevant catchment area. (Paragraph 35)”
Where we do part company is in defining what that business case should be. Efra suggest that the benefits of land drainage and defence of farmland should be given a greater priority in the funding system – something that, given the current state of public finances, would inevitably divert resources away from people and property towards an industry that, not only needs to do much more to clean up its environmental act, but also receives over £2 billion a year in public subsidy.
But perhaps my biggest disappointment in the report is its failure to address the question of what government should do to help communities, landowners and households who are finding themselves at increasing flood risk because, as the chair of the committee herself said “..to be honest, it is a bit like the health service: you will never have enough funding”.
I wish I could offer a simple solution but this cuts across a range of economic, political and ethical questions that can only be resolved if we face up to the fact that change is inevitable and start a public debate about what is fair and affordable for those affected by increasing flood risk.
What I can say with confidence is that if we don’t plan for change it will be forced upon us by climate change. I also believe that schemes like Medmerry and Holnicote that work with nature to reduce flooding and give nature a home will be central to building adaptation and resilience into our rural and urban landscape.
You are so right in your last paragraph Martin. Working with nature and not against it is so, so important. It is a lesson this Government seems to find extreemly hard to learn
As the report tells us, the Government's savings on EA have hardly been the greatest success and are an indictment of mindless cuts - for every £1 saved they've lost the economy £10 - quite apart from the suffering of the people whose homes have been destroyed. The sort of intelligent management, combining a range of soft and hard approaches, the approach to life I advocate in 'Forest Vision' has to be the way ahead - and I'd argue that our countryside needs a restructuring similar to the complete turnaround forestry has engineered in the last 30 years - for starters, don't forget that between 1950 and 1970 we spent £100s of millions speeding water off the land - we can reverse that, turn the middle catchments back into grassland to hold water and restore riverine woodland - of which over 90% has been lost across Europe and I agree very much with what you say, martin, about switching priority back towards protecting farmland - that is wrong, but what we should be doing is paying farmers to 'farm' water when their land is needed to protect houses.