More Than Living

Draft Flood and Water Management Bill publishedDefra consultation launched

It’s nearly two years since the floods of summer 2007. Since then we’ve had the Pitt Review, which poin­ted out all that no-​​one had clear respons­ib­il­ity for deal­ing with loc­al­ised flash flood­ing – the kind that caused such dev­ast­a­tion in Hull and else­where. And we’ve had plenty of warn­ings, from local author­it­ies, insurers, emer­gency ser­vices and envir­on­mental groups, that mil­lions of people in the UK remain vul­ner­able in the meantime.

Which means that two sig­ni­fic­ant devel­op­ments today are likely to be wel­comed across the board. Firstly, and most tan­gibly, the new Flood Fore­cast­ing Centre has offi­cially been opened, and will allow the Met Office and Envir­on­ment Agency to work along­side one another to pre­dict flood­ing prob­lems and issue warnings.

Secondly, there’s the draft Flood and Water Man­age­ment Bill, which aims to sort out how the vari­ous bodies involved in man­aging water – from water com­pan­ies and drain­age boards to local coun­cils and developers – can co-​​ordinate respons­ib­il­ity for flood risk and work together to put the neces­sary improve­ments in place.

It also pro­poses tighter restric­tions on water use in times of drought, with amended laws regard­ing the use of water to clean patios or fill swim­ming pools.

The bill’s been wel­comed by Nat­ural Eng­land, the offi­cial envir­on­mental advisors to the gov­ern­ment, which wants to see meas­ures that increase rural land’s capa­city to retain large amounts of water – such as the res­tor­a­tion of upland peat­bogs and low­land floodplains.

And the Asso­ci­ation of Brit­ish Insurers has applauded the arrival of the bill too, but emphas­ised that the detail now needs to be rap­idly agreed upon by the polit­ical parties and that a way of fund­ing the neces­sary changes must be found.

This bill is out to con­sulta­tion until 24 July, and anyone can provide feed­back by email­ing Defra.

HEADER IMAGE by Flickr user qbik

CYCLING IMAGE by Flickr user the mech­an­ical turk

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​04-​​21 15:30:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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