ICE submission to the Environmental Audit Committee on flood resilience in England

The Environmental Audit Committee sought views on how the UK government can strengthen flood resilience in response to increasing risks from extreme weather, rising sea levels, and evolving flood hazards.

The ICE’s submission to the committee highlighted:

• Ageing flood defences are a major weakness.

  Firstly, assets designed and built before the current understanding of climate change did not account for the events the country is now experiencing. Secondly, the historic lack of funding and resources for asset maintenance means they now require significant investment.

• Asset owners are increasingly reliant on visual inspection as a measure of their condition, which is not dependable for understanding the performance of an asset in flood event conditions or during exceedance. The situation could be much worse than the data suggests.

• Traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure and nature-based ‘green’ solutions are required to improve flood resilience.

  To enable this, funding rules must be improved to support the development of both options as well as the hybrid schemes.

• The government must implement Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 to enable the widespread adoption of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS).

  This is something the ICE and many other experts have been supporting for some time. Surface water flooding is a long-neglected area, but for the country’s urban centres, this is only going to get worse without Schedule 3 being implemented.

• Regarding what ‘level’ of flood resilience is required to address flood risks, the government should in the first instance accept the advice and recommendations of the National Infrastructure Commission on resilience standards.

• The government needs to make significant advancements to encourage long-term private investment in flood resilience. At the moment this is largely leveraged on a scheme-by-scheme basis, which is inefficient and ineffective.

  ‘Resilience’ currently does not have a market value. Without an understanding of how regulators should measure and reward it, it is hard to incentivise private investment in resilience.