A new body should be set up to deal with flooding and water quality, the Environmental Industries Commission (EIC) has said.
The government’s review of national flood resilience should consider removing the Environment Agency’s responsibility for flooding, combined sewer overflows and water quality, transferring them to a newly created Water Agency, the EIC argues in a new report.
The commission said that, although there are clear theoretical benefits to including flood management within the agency’s general remit, in practice the resources and expertise required for regulation of issues such as waste management are very different to protecting homes in a flood.
There is a case for changing the structure considering the need to devote greater focus to developing future flood policy, it said. The report argues that the UK’s approach to flood risk needs a wider rethink. Defra’s push to allow the private sector to use its datasets should be extended to flooding so that risk and damage could be identified and anticipated, it said.
‘Flood policy needs a reboot, otherwise we will continue to see so-called 1 in a 100 year floods causing untold damage and misery every few years,’ EIC’s executive director of Matthew Farrow said.
The EIC’s recommendations include extending the FloodRe protection scheme to small businesses and making the Repair and Renew Grant permanent to encourage homeowners in at-risk areas to invest in protection.
It also recommends that the government re-evaluate the measures it uses to justify the commissioning of flood defences. The cost-benefit ratio for approving flood defences was raised from 1:5 to 1:8, meaning that they must now be predicted to save £8 for every £1 spent instead of £5.
Governments have tended to correlate flood defence priorities with asset value at risk, which means high-value areas are protected better than less economically and demographically significant areas, even though they may find it harder to recover from flood damage. Alternative approaches to prioritisation should be considered, the commission said.
Meanwhile, the government has shut down a service that helped businesses cope with flooding and climate change. The Climate Ready service was closed at the end of March.
