Come hell or high water

Future generations – or current generations in fact – really aren’t going to look kindly on the current government’s “dash for growth”, not least because thousands of them will be left looking from the upper floors of homes built under the current push for fast construction of one-and-a-half-million homes. They’ll be confined there because all-too-predictable flood waters surround their houses and, as they discovered after they moved in, insurance against flood risks was unobtainable.

Just this week, Newcastle professor of earth systems engineering, Richard Dawson, warned that already more than 20,000 homes a year are being built in the highest-risk Category 3 flood zones. In the unlikely event of the Government’s ambitions to accelerate house building even resulting in a tiny increase, and don’t fall foul house builder greed, that number would rise.

And those people, with the lower floors of their houses ruined by sewage-tainted flood waters, are likely to look for scapegoats.

Hello politicians who advocate greenfield sprawl.

When these unfortunate people realise, to their horror, that the clean up will involve junking half their possessions, steam-cleaning their homes and replacing the now stinking plaster up to ground-floor ceiling level, they’ll face the additional challenge that they won’t be covered by insurance.

“Having a place to call your own is the bedrock of security and aspiration,” said Sir Keir Starmer just before the general election.

Obviously – a secure home is part of the bedrock of any society. But unfortunately, the Government is mostly ignoring major issues around the security of homes – a key one of which is drainage and flooding in an age where extreme weather and sea-level-rise should be dictating some very radical rethinking on the way we build and the places we choose to live.

Instead of which, we have a massive assault on the planning system’s ability to prepare for this fast-approaching future and madnesses like “grey belts” or “the Oxford-Cambridge Arc”.

It’s not as if the Government is entirely unaware of the problem. In 2016, following Storm Desmond, we had a National Flood Resilience Review. In 2021, the Government reviewed policy for development in areas of flood risk. Last September, it launched a new Floods Resilience Taskforce to “turbocharge” development of flood defences and bolster resilience to extreme weather. Last December the Environment Agency published an update to its National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Assessment.

Etc., etc..

Source: Environment Agency

Sadly, none of this seems to penetrate Treasury-brain which goes on convincing itself that greenfield housing sprawl is the answer to a chancellor’s prayer. In the 2000s, it was supposed to achieve Gordon Brown’s desire to squeeze boom-and-bust out of the system. That was followed by the 2008 crash. Now it’s supposed to secure Rachel Reeves’ desire to increase economic growth. That’s currently heading south.

Meanwhile, one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases has decided to actively oppose efforts to reduce them and instead to ramp them up to achieve… er… what the hell is it meant to achieve? Anyone? Enriching oil industry billionaires?

All of which suggests that extreme weather and sea-level-rise are set to increase flooding faster than ever, while most of our national drainage and flood control systems are unfit for purpose as they were designed for gentler times.

But hell, let’s just build on flood plains. At least the owners of the biggest house builders will be able to ride out the floods – in the larger yachts the Treasury’s policies will have gifted them.

Jon Reeds