By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Homeowners should no longer automatically expect to be protected from major floods, ministers will announce in the coming weeks.
Under a radical policy shift drawn up by the Environment Agency, flooding will be seen as inevitable due to the predicted effects of climate change.
Instead of spending millions on “limitlessly high walls” and barriers, the government will help people to rebuild their water-damaged homes or to move away from flood-risk areas.
It comes after the Environment Agency was accused of leaving parts of the country at the mercy of Storm Dennis, which continued to cause devastation on Monday.
Not all agree though, as the Telegraph report:
On Monday a former environment secretary accused the Environment Agency of using climate change as a “cop out” to avoid having to strengthen Britain’s flood defences.
Owen Paterson, whose Shropshire North constituency has been affected by Storm Dennis, said: “It has always rained in the UK in winter. The trick is to get it to go down again. You have to manage the countryside and you have to manage the rivers.
“It is a complete cop out to blame it all on climate change.”
Meanwhile the Environment Agency was also accused of “hiding behind” EU directives to avoid having to pay for Britain’s clogged waterways to be dredged.
Innes Thomson, chief executive of the Association of Drainage Authorities, claimed the flood risk in some areas would be “massively reduced” if silt was removed from swollen rivers.
“The Environment Agency has been hiding behind EU rules supposed to protect wildlife,” he said.
“But the technology exists to safely remove silt and the EA knows it. It’s happening in some places, but not nearly enough.”
Mr Paterson, who served as environment secretary between 2012 and 2014, accused the EA of having a “mentality” that dredging is a “bad idea”.
“What these people have unwittingly done with their idiotic views, they have delivered an environmental catastrophe of the first order,” he said.
As we have known for a while, the EA is attempting to abdicate their responsibility by simply blaming climate change.
Regardless of its exact effects, Owen Paterson is quite correct in stating that Britain has always had bad floods, and it is the EA’s job to mitigate them. If they are not prepared to, them they need to be replaced with an organisation that can.
Having said that, I have no objection in a bit of lateral thinking. We all know that far too many houses have been built on flood plains. We also know that, even in places like Hebden Bridge, the number of homes actually flooded are actually a very small number. Maybe it would make more sense rehousing these people, or flood proofing their homes, instead of spending hundreds of millions erecting flood defences which can often end up simply transferring the problem downriver?
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February 18, 2020 at 04:18AM
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