An admirable effort but I much prefer Stalin's method of dealing with the failure of State officials to do their job properly !

I don't see how the government can justify spending millions on flood prevention until the house has been flooded at least once to prove they are lin danger.

When the whole of the Netherlands is flooded the area where I live will be an island, still I have to pay taxes for flood defences. Niko.

The stupidity is allowing new developments and other actions that make the problem worse.

Near our house a large industrial park is going into the Trent floodplain and six miles away my mother-in-laws village has an going planning battle about a new housing development proposed for right next to the river. Insurers have already said they won't cover the homes if they are built.

If there was more woodland and heathland in the Lake District and other upland areas, along with restoration of the natural floodplain woodland along the length of the rivers, it would have held the flood peaks back, reducing the height and extent of the damage at the expense of slightly lengthening the duration of the flooding. The cost of doing this is miniscule compared to increasing hard defences, By rewarding farmers for the reduction in harm resulting from increased capacity of their land, rather than compensating them for profits forgone the changes in land use become a positive for all of society (and widllife) rather than an unwelcome imposition.

These ideas aren't new – I remember discussing issues around this with both Chris Baines and George Peterken about 25 years ago…

Neil

Couldn't have put it better Neil, & to add to that, we used to get our local river[the tees] dredged when I was a lad but never seen a dredger for years, a lot of the new houses get their "gardens" concreted because they don't like gardening thus adding to the surplus water.

Graham [with a large veg ,fruit & orchard garden] & workshop of course!!

Douglas, + 1. Climate has been changing for millions of years, nothing we can do about it but put up up with it. Much of North Africa was green 1000 odd years ago, trees , vegitation, rivers and lakes etc,then the wind changed, and everything dried up. Then the morons in government say we must do something about climate change, like what ?.

Yes extreme weather is a major cause. However the European Water Framework Directive has prevented us almost completely from dredging our rivers. For several hundred years our rivers have been dredged by the local communities. EWFD now requires us to allow our river to follow their own natural way. In particular to allow them to flood the flood plains. This has been the case since 2002. Government will not mention this as it is a major reason to get out of the mad house that Europe has become.

We have a problem in this country with land fill, or lack of it.

We have a problem with flooding, especially the Severn, but when you see it flooded it's all in farmland.

Why can't they tip non-bio land fill like rubble along side the banks of a river. It's a win-win situation, the developers ? have to pay handsomely to tip rubble, the farmer gets paid and someone else builds the flood defences for the area

Clean land fill is a very valuable "product" for filling holes. Locally we have a number of quarries that have gone through the water table. Therefore, fortunately, they cannot be filled with ordinary land fill, only inert land fill. One quarry, about ten miles away, is slowly being filled with the chalk from the Cannel Tunnel. So far it has taken 15 years.

I don't disagree with you, though.

JA

Part of the problem is we can't run our own country, see the link below. We live in an artificial landscape shaped and run by man and you can't take man out of the equation which is what some polititions and academics seem to want. We have interfered in nature for millennia and the fact is we cannot stop, local people have run and shaped the land for generations and understand how it works best. Dredging and clearing watercourses may well not have solved the problems entirely in this case but would certainly have helped if the EU had not interfered!

That said the level of flooding here in the north has been unprecedented and beyond anything any of us have seen, our local river exceeded the record level by over 5ft that's a serious amount of water and we have tides that are higher than most which if they happen to coincide with the peak river level it compounds the problem. Locally this is what happened and the water level rose extremely quickly.

**LINK**

Aha! Just seen that Colin J3 has beaten me to the EU rules 🤔

Edited By JohnF on 30/12/2015 18:17:19

They are called "flood planes" for a reason. Trying to get the water past quickly instead has never worked.

Farmers upstream get paid subsidies (yes, from the EU) – but only for land that is "maintained" as farmland, not as scrub or wild, so are encouraged to make the land clean and bare with little means of soaking / holding water, whether or not they actually do anything with it. This also includes moorland that has been burned back for pheasants etc. So they are being paid to cause flooding.

And developers are allowed to build properties in the flood planes even though the insurance companies have said they will never insure them. But with silly house prices, that's not considered an impediment.

Chances are you won't agree with his politics but here's an overview on how we are paying for our towns to be flooded.