Select Committee on Agriculture Sixth Report


APPENDIX 45

Letter to David Taylor MP from Mr Andrew Heaton (F71)

  I understand that the House of Commons Select Committee is holding an inquiry into flood and coastal defence. I don't know whether you are involved with that committee, but if not, perhaps you could relay the following concerns a colleague who is.

  Flood defence and land drainage is the responsibility of the Environment Agency on main rivers, Internal Drainage Boards in "areas of special drainage need", and local authorities elsewhere. It is the Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) that are of such concern to myself and many other people.

  The IDBs are archaic organisations, essentially self-perpetuating and undemocratic "clubs" of large landowners. They were mainly established many decades ago and are quite unsuited to the needs of modern society. They allow small groups of, mainly, farmers to raise funds through a drainage levy to undertake schemes that benefit only themselves. Although they are supposed to have electoral systems to allow people to join their boards, they are often rigged so as to maintain a core of self-interested people—in the Somerset Levels, for example, the RSPB, despite being the largest landowners in the district, were for long unable to get onto their local IDB.

  It is this disregard for environmental matters that is a great source of concern. A major problem is that the "areas of special drainage need" that the IDBs cover often, because of their geography, contain important wetland wildlife habitats—which can easily be damaged by land drainage. The IDBs, like the Environment Agency, have statutory conservation duties, to "further conservation", but very often they take little regard of them, and carry out works that are detrimental to wildlife. Even when their conservation duties are pointed out to them, they complain that they do not have enough money to take heed of them! There is in several areas the ridiculous situation of conservation bodies which are trying to protect wetlands having to pay drainage rates to IDBs which are trying to drain them!

  Fortunately, we do not have any IDBs in Leicestershire (the Kingston Brook IDB is in the Soar catchment, but it is just over the border in south Nottinghamshire). However, in many other parts of the country, such as Lincolnshire and East Anglia, these archaic bodies wield a great influence over rural land use. The needs of society have changed since they were set up—there is now a much greater need for conservation of remaining wildlife habitats, rather than drainage of agricultural land to produce more food surpluses. Surely now is the time to wind up these unnecessary quangos.

23 May 1998


 
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