One in 13 of England’s most important flood defences are not being properly maintained, leaving communities vulnerable as the UK faces more extreme weather, The i Paper can reveal.
Ministers are facing pressure to boost long-term funding for flood protection as experts and MPs warn that the Environment Agency (EA) does not have enough resources to maintain the country’s creaking infrastructure.
The EA is failing to meet its targets for maintaining England’s flood and coastal defences, according to the agency’s most recent annual report.
In 2023-24, 7.4 per cent of England’s “high-risk assets” fell below their target condition, which the EA admitted had led to “an increased risk of asset failure and flood risk which is likely to persist”.
The EA is responsible for maintaining around 76,000 flood assets in England, including things like embankments, pumping stations and flood gates.
Of these, 38,000 are considered to be ‘high-risk’. These are thing like flood storage reservoirs and tidal barriers that protect a large number of properties.
Around 6.3 million properties in England are currently at risk of flooding, however this is expected to increase to eight million – or one in four – by 2050, a recent report by the EA found.
Climate change is the main driver behind the growing flood threat – a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, resulting in more extreme rainfall.
In 2023 and 2024, the UK has experienced a number of serious storms, which have caused damage to thousands of properties and resulted in some communities being forced out of their homes for months at a time.
But experts and MPs say the EA has faced a number of challenges that have hindered its ability to maintain England’s flood infrastructure, including funding cuts, high inflation and difficulties recruiting skilled engineers due to Civil Service pay bands.
While most agreed the UK has some of the most advanced flood forecasting capabilities in the world, they said infrastructure failures could risk overwhelming towns and cities.
Former environment secretary George Eustice told The i Paper the UK was well-equipped to predict when extreme weather will take place and respond with appropriate support for the people impacted – but that more long-term planning and investment was needed to improve flood defences.
Eustice, who was secretary of state from 2020 to 2022 after serving for several years as an environment minister, said: “We had floods every year that I was there. And my view was I was always very impressed by the accuracy with which hydrologists at the Environment Agency predict where the problem would be and then be able to mobilise the fire brigade or the police to go knock on doors to get people to move. I would say they’ve got pretty good at forecasting and the response side.”
He said that high inflation, and a lack of planning around spending on maintenance and the improvement of infrastructure, had hampered the ability to protect people from flooding that has become so regular in parts of the UK. “There’s then a separate side of this, which is long-term planning and investment,” Eustice explained.
Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at the University of Reading, agreed the UK had “very good technology” for predicting floods, but said the maintenance of flood defences was a “massive issue”.
“We don’t have the right investment at the moment. The investment is split between maintaining our flood defences and building new ones. So everyone’s interested in how many flood defences we’re going to build, and we’re certainly not doing enough of that, but maintaining the ones we’ve got is really important,” she said.
Professor Cloke highlighted several recent “big failures” of flood defences, including a fault in a sluice gate in Lincolnshire that contributed to 80 homes being flooded during 2023’s Storm Babet.
She also raised concerns over the Thames Barrier, which the EA has said must be significantly upgraded by 2050, 15 years earlier than expected as a result of climate change.
The Thames Barrier was designed primarily to protect London from tidal floods, but now closes frequently to prevent fluvial flooding, which is when a river bursts its banks due to excess rainfall. Closing the barrier regularly impacts the ability of EA staff to carry out maintenance, so the body has taken the decision to stop closing the barrier for fluvial flooding events in west London from 2035 onwards. Professor Cloke said this decision was an indication the agency is failing to keep pace with climate change”.
“It takes a very long time to get these large infrastructure projects in place. So if we don’t start now then we won’t have that project ready for when we really need it,” she said, adding that a combination of a large storm surge and river flooding “does have the potential to overwhelm London”.
During the 2023-24 storm season, the UK experienced 12 named storms, breaking the record for the highest number of named storms within a year.
This year, the UK has already been hit by a number of named storms including Storm Bert, which resulted in over 500 properties being flooded in places including Wiltshire and South Wales.
Ministers indicated that they are aware of the need for longer-term planning, announcing the Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure scheme to analyse the impact of extreme weather conditions, identify where incidents are likely to occur and plan to limit their impact.
The Government also set up a Flood Resilience Taskforce, which essentially brings together existing bodies but is designed to meet to co-ordinate preparation for extreme weather ahead of time, rather than in response to it.
But there are still questions over adequate funding in the long term. Under the Conservative government, a £5bn settlement was agreed for flood protection. The Labour Government has confirmed £2.4bn of this but said this would be reviewed next year for future years.
Eustice said the spending power of that original settlement had been eroded by high inflation, particularly in the construction sector, which resulted in projects being scaled back. And he said that Treasury funding on floods was often focused on capital spending and replacing assets rather than maintenance. This results in a situation where, as revealed in the EA report, assets are not up to the job and money can end up being wasted.
“It was a problem trying to make sure that the EA had the funding they needed to do the maintenance work. But it was also the case that sometimes the senior management would – if they had a difficult spending round – say ‘we are not going to do the flood maintenance’, rather than find other ways to save the money. And that sometimes led to some quite difficult conversations. It was often a cause of tension between ministers and the Environment Agency.”
Eustice said during his time in government there was a move to look more at so-called “upstream” flood defences or “more nature based solutions” to divert floodwater to rural land rather than urban centres.
But he added that the EA also had the challenge of being able to retain the highly qualified engineers and experts needed. “Because of central government Civil Service pay scales, they do have a problem retaining very good civil engineers and hydrologists in those technical roles,” he said.
Ministers are coming under pressure to ensure long-term funding for maintenance of flood protection assets.
Dr Neil Hudson, Tory MP for Epping Forest and shadow environment minister, recently questioned in the Commons the effectiveness of a taskforce that meets every few months, pressing ministers on whether it should be meeting more frequently to be effective.
And he has urged the Government to commit to no cuts in flood spending when the budget is reviewed in the coming years.
MPs in areas prone to flooding speak of incidents in their constituencies where existing flood defences, which were built at a cost of millions, were not operated correctly when it came to the time they were needed.
They blame this on the way the EA is centrally managed and have also argued for more spending transparency around how the agency is using funding for floods.
Joe Robertson, MP for Isle of Wight East, has urged the Government to consider establishing a dedicated flood defence agency that would operate independently of the EA, arguing that it could lead to more efficient spending.
He said: “Over the last few years we have seen a significant rise in the amount of flooding across the UK and this is set to increase further.
“It’s vital that we have adequate resources, funding and decision making structures in place to increase resilience and defend our communities from this growing risk.
“I believe the Government needs to reconsider how the Environment Agency is structured and funded, and consider the merits of establishing a dedicated flood defence agency which is better able to respond to flood warnings.
“As we have seen in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, bad decisions have been made centrally resulting in flooded homes and misery, which could have been avoided if decisions had been made on the ground with appropriate expertise.
“The risk of inaction is apparent to anyone that has had to suffer the consequences of failure to prevent flooding.”
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “The EA’s priority is to protect people and the environment. We are investing over £1.25bn this year to scale up national resilience through building new and improving existing flood defences.
“The Thames Barrier continues to provide vital flood protection to the nation’s capital, it is staffed 24/7 and our experts make operational decisions on when to close the barrier depending on the river flow, tide and surge levels.”
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