Plain Dealing: Building for flood resilience
This paper assesses flood resilience in the UK. There is much riding for the government on the back of its ‘Building Back Better’ agenda as a ubiquitous mantra. Equally, having set in law the world’s most ambitious climate change target to cut emissions more than three quarters of the way by 2035 compared to 1990 levels, departments are being commissioned across Whitehall to achieve the ambitious cross-government Net Zero Strategy, published in October 2021. But building back better risks being merely a vapid slogan if the overriding domestic political issue, the long-term failure to fix a broken housing market, isn’t addressed. This means the actual building of beautiful homes for new and existing communities at scale, at affordable levels for first-time buyers, and in parts of the country where demand is greatest.
The recommendations this paper gives include:
Planning reforms
- Floodplain development should be avoided wherever possible and should be accompanied by appropriate flood defences, constructed alongside new developments, where unavoidable.
- Local authorities with planning teams should appoint a chief resilience officer who is:
- Required to sit on local resilience forums.
- To become a single point of contact for English local government districts on the issue in county/district areas, or in unitary authorities depending on governance systems.
Funding recommendations
- Specific funding should be made available to establish a new cross departmental task force to look at flood-risk development. A new ministerial post, between Defra and DLUHC, should be set up to oversee and provide accountability for this task force.