Common sense submerged
The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, 'reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses though the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street'. The year was 1770, though it might equally well have been 1793, when the water 'reached ye parlour of ye Unicorn and Mr Stickley's oven', 1799, when 'Mr Lunn was drowned', or any of the many other years when the Avon burst its banks. So assiduous was the Reverend Thomas Beale, vicar of Bengeworth in the late 18th century, at recording flood levels that his diaries are still used as source material for students of river flooding in Britain.
What the Reverend Thomas Beale never sought to do, on the other hand, was to apportion blame. There is no mention in his diaries of climate change, nor of the failings of the burghers of Evesham to foresee what was coming: all was assumed to be an Act of God. In our own more secular society, of course, Acts of God have long been abolished, which is why over the past few days newspaper columns and news bulletins have been awash with attempts to shift the blame for floods upon ministers, quangocrats and developers who build houses upon flood plains.
It is perfectly right, of course, that public agencies, and private developers too, be held to account for their actions. But all such judgments require a historic perspective — something that has been markedly absent in recent days. While this magazine acknowledges the weight of scientific evidence pointing to manmade change in the climate, there is nothing unprecedented about this week's deluge, neither in the quantity of rainfall nor in the river levels which have resulted from it. In fact, the climate change models have tended to predict a contrary outcome: a trend towards drier summers in Britain.
In as much as human agencies are to blame, there is at least one inconvenient truth which ministers cannot avoid. The government has been warning for years of flood and tempest from man-made climate change, as a pretext for increasing our taxes. So why did it cut the Environment Agency's flood defence budget by £14 million last year, and why is the housing minister, Yvette Cooper, still insisting that it is perfectly all right to build new homes on flood plains?
On one point, Ms Cooper is correct: there is a nimby tendency which has exploited this week's floods as an argument for opposing in principle the government's planned construction of three million homes. But it is impossible to ignore the poor planning evident from the numerous aerial photographs of the flood published in recent days: many of which feature the historic core of a town, sitting just above the floodwaters, surrounded by Victorian and modern housing developments which lie submerged.
The government has been promoting the construction of housing on flood plains because it presents the line of least political resistance. There is little opposition to the idea of new houses on marshland along the Thames Estuary, especially those sections which resemble industrial wastelands. Propose a housing estate on the North Downs, on the other hand, and planners can be guaranteed a furious reaction. The result is that half a million homes now lie within areas predicted to flood at least once every 75 years. Even without climate change, we can expect over 6,000 homes to be flooded every year — never mind the electricity sub stations and other industrial installations which are threatened. On Monday night, the Walham electricity sub-station in Gloucestershire came very close to succumbing to the deluge — and leaving 500,000 people without power. That was a very close call, with lessons for future policy.
For an example of what is going wrong with our planning and flood defence, let us take Lewes in Sussex. Lower parts of the town were badly flooded in 2000 when the River Ouse burst its banks after two days of exceptional rain. The town did supposedly have flood defences, but they had been built in piecemeal fashion. One brand new development boasted a large floodwall — which did its job. However, the development was still inundated when the waters took an indirect route via a river bank which had no defences.
For thee years after the floods, the Environment Agency worked on plans for a coherent flood defence scheme for the town — only to drop them in 2003 when the government introduced a new points system for proposed flood defence schemes. It might have been different if Lewes had more interesting wildlife: the points system gives a maximum of eight points for protecting houses, but up to 12 points for creating new wildlife habitats. In spite of the absence of flood defences, however, new houses continue to be built on Lewes's flood plain: there are plans for 760 of them on the site of a light industrial works which was badly flooded in 2000.
There will always be floods, but there is no reason why they should be allowed to inundate homes and businesses. The government's lack of ambition and forethought when it comes to flood defence contrast strongly with the approach of the Dutch government. In Britain, river defences are built to a standard to protect against the severity of river flooding which might be expected once in every 100 years or against the severity of sea flooding which might be expected once in every 200 years. In Holland, the standards are once in every 1,250 years, for river flooding, and once in every 10,000 years for sea flooding.
The burghers of mediaeval Evesham didn't have the statistical tools that we have to calculate flood risk, which is why Evesham and other historic towns are always going to be vulnerable. But for us still to be building homes, factories and electrical switching stations on even more vulnerable positions, on water meadows which ought to be left alone to take the floods, is a poor reflection of the competence of our planners. Nature is capricious, often brutally so, and there is nothing we can do about that. But we should do our best not to compound the consequences of her caprice.
Previous page
