Memorandum submitted by Roger Martin (FL
05)
1. SUMMARY
I submit three points:
(a) There is a neglected link between flood
risk and population growth;
(b) Building Regulations should require all
new development and major refurbishments, in any areas at possible
flood risk, to include built-in flood resilience features.
(c) In some situations, flood storage on
agricultural land with guaranteed compensation for demonstrated
losses, and better land management to reduce flood risk, should
be required even without the landowner's voluntary participation
in an agri-environmental scheme.
2. RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
I am a former senior diplomat, turned environmentalist.
I was the first "green" member appointed by the SofS
to the new NRA Wessex Regional Flood Defence Committee in 1989,
and now am again; I have been a member of FDCs and/or REPACs for
18 years; I am also for 10 years a SoS-appointed Member of Exmoor
National Park Authority; as I was previously on the MAFF Regional
Panel. I was the founder "green" member of the Regional
Assembly; a Wildlife Trust Director for 12 years; CPRE Regional
Chair and national Trustee for 5; and am now the elected NGO representative
on the regional Water Framework Directive Panel. I lecture on
water policy at UWE, from whom I have an Honorary Doctorate.
3. POPULATION
GROWTH: THE
ELEPHANT IN
EVERY GREENROOM
Over 18 years of environmental activism, I have
become increasingly bewildered, despairing, and angry at the mad
taboo that prevents everyone mentioning the common factor constituting
half of every environmental equation, namely population. I thus
feel obliged to mention it in every relevant context. It is, after
all, blindingly obvious that: total human impact = average impact
per person x number of people; total water consumption, CO2 emissions,
housing and transport demand, waste generation, etc = average
per person x number of consumers, emitters, people to be housed
and transported, waste generators, etc. Similarly, total flood
risk to homes = average risk per dwelling x number of dwellings/people
to be housed. Our population is currently growing by roughly 1,000
more people every day (globally it is 10,000 per hour), which
means there are 1,000 more people potentially at risk in the UK
every day.
4. In the absence of any awareness that
all population growth exacerbates all environmental problems,
and thus of any policy aimed at stabilising our numbers, all our
environmental policies are doomed to fail. The all-party Population
Panel concluded unanimously in 1973(!) (Cmnd 5258) that: "Britain
would do better in future with a stationary rather than an increasing
population" (para 33); and "The time has come when the
government should consider whether, and if so how, to influence
the rate of population growth" (para 35). By far the greatest
contribution your Committee could make to improving the sustainability
of the UK would be to give a lead in breaking the taboo, and resurrecting
this central issue.
5. BUILDING IN
FLOOD RESILIENCE
Giving evidence recently on flood defence to
the EiP on our Regional Spatial Strategy, I was struck again by
the extraordinary, bone-headed inertia of the house-builders in
the face of any suggestion they might change their methods in
flood-risk areas, as many of us have been urging for decades,
for instance: bringing the power supply down the wall to waist
height rather than up to ankle height; laying flood resistant
cement rather than wood flooring; coating outside walls with a
water-proof rendering; designing in pluggable air-bricks, loos,
and flood doors; etc. There are a very few, very simple techniques,
well short even of building on stilts or over ground-floor garages,
which would greatly reduce losses when the inevitable floods strike.
Building Regulations should require them, (along with the obvious
energy- and water-efficiency features), anywhere within the (increasingly
irrelevant because purely historic) "1:200 year" flood
risk area.
6. AGRICULTURAL
LAND USE/MANAGEMENT
Both in policy and in practice, past problems
of excessive agricultural land drainage exacerbating urban flooding
(because flood defence was a MAFF/farmer quasi-monopoly from the
war to the mid-90s) are now easing. In any case, sustainable food
security (from less oil-intensive farming) should be a much higher
priority than it is, given: our current mere 60% self-sufficiency
in food as a result of over-population; the imminence of peak
oil and climate change; and the centrality of food in human needs,
after only water. (Current blind faith in some abstraction called
the "world food market" to feed us for ever is dangerously
naïve). So the balance to be struck between protecting good
soils from permanent damage and occasionally flooding mis-placed
housing is not self-evident; and I thus do not join those conservationists
who advocate widespread wetland restoration on fertile silts.
(I also strongly oppose bio-diesel cropping—"Would
you rather eat or drive?" will eventually become a serious
question).
7. Having said which, there are some places
where shallow up-catchment flood storage areas for emergency use
can flatten the hydrograph enough to spare a town downstream from
flooding without damaging more than a current crop; in which case,
while of course negotiated land-owner cooperation is always preferable,
the public interest may require non-cooperation to be over-ridden—particularly
where it was public money post-war that funded the farm drainage
in the first place.
8. There are also, alas, a few very irresponsible
farmers around, who manage their soils so badly that they flood
roads or their neighbours. In such cases, where a farmer has ignored
site-specific written advice on how to avoid repeating harmful
water or soil run-off, the law should be tightened to aid prosecution
and conviction "pour encourager les autres".
Roger Martin
July 2007
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