Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER 2007
BARONESS YOUNG
OF OLD
SCONE, DR
DAVID KING
AND MR
DAVID ROOKE
Q1 Chairman:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to see so
many people here taking an interest in the Committee's first session
after the summer recess. Can I just deal with one small but important
piece of housekeeping before we start? As some colleagues here
may be new to the Committee or may have forgotten how we operate,
it would be very helpful if you could make certain your mobile
phones or other alert mechanisms are turned off. I welcome our
first witness in our inquiry into Flooding, the Environment Agency:
Baroness Young, their Chief Executive, Dr David King, their Director
of Water Management and Mr David Rooke, the Head of Flood Risk
Management. You are all very welcome and thank you for your comprehensive
submission and offers to the Committee of further briefing to
enable us to understand in even greater detail some of the lessons
learned from the summer's flooding. I would just like to say at
the outset that this particular inquiry has attracted an unprecedented
response, particularly from members of the public. On behalf of
the Committee I would like to express my thanks to those people,
some of whose lives were blighted by flooding, but nonetheless
have seen fit to share with the Committee their own thoughts and
indeed posed some very pertinent questions which I hope, as we
proceed with these hearings, we will be able to reflect and reflect
upon when it comes to reaching our conclusions. I would like to
start, Baroness Young, if I may, by asking you a question borne
out of the fact that there do seem to have been an awful lot of
reports on the subject of flooding and flood management with lots
of very good advice. I looked back to the predecessor committee
of this and I think it was in the Session 1997-98 when they published
a report on Flood and Coastal Defence and in their recommendations
they made an important observation that there needed to be integrated
management of flooding issues.[1]
They concentrate on main rivers, non-main rivers and internal
drainage board areas and made the distinction between that and
coastal activity. In the case of our own Committee we published
a report, Climate Change, Water Security and Flooding on
16 September 2004 in which we made a number of pressing recommendations,
including asking the Government to publish a White Paper on the
subject of the Foresight Report which very accurately predicted
the onset of more extreme weather conditions and made some very
important recommendations about should be protected, including
vital infrastructure.[2]
The Government's own activity in terms of their response to Making
Space for Water for example had conclusions which said (and
I quote): "The aim will be to manage risks by employing an
integrated portfolio of approaches which reflect both national
and local priorities." Their first thought was that these
were all aimed at reducing the threat to people and their property.
With so much advice how come it went so wrong?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Thank
you for giving us an opportunity to say that we do not think it
went wrong as a result of the advice. The reasons why these floods
were so severe was because the weather that prompted them was
indeed severe. There was an unprecedented amount of rain in June
and July, more than ever before.
Q2 Chairman:
Just to interrupt, you say it was unprecedented but Sir David
King's report alerted everybody—albeit on a long timescale—to
the onset of more extreme weather conditions associated with climate
change. If you look at the scientific evidence in volume two of
his findings a lot of the kind of the things that we saw happen
in the summer—for example the lack of protection for vital
infrastructure—were flagged up as work areas in that document.
What did you, as an Agency, do when Sir David published his findings
in terms of giving advice to the Government?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
have looked, as you have, at all the reports that have been done
on floods since 1998 and if you look at all the recommendations
coming from these reports a considerable number of them have been
acted on and implemented. Some of them are currently part of a
process of implementation as part of Making Space for Water
which is the Government's strategy for flood risk management.
I think the issue really, as far as the previous findings are
concerned, is the pace at which they are being implemented. In
some cases this is as a result of the pace that can be achieved
through funding; in other cases it is changes in legislation;
sometimes it is cultural and a change in hearts and minds. It
is a big and complicated process of implementing all of these
reports. I believe we need to move faster and I do hope that the
reviews that are currently taking place—your own and Sir
Michael Pitt's—will in fact reinforce the need not to come
up with new conclusions but to implement the ones that have already
been reached.
Q3 Chairman:
Let us get to the heart of the matter. It is refreshing to hear
you say that things should move faster and this is borne out of,
if you like, a reaction of some very harrowing situations which
occurred in the summer. Going back to 2004 when that report was
produced—indeed, you are continually working in the area
of dealing with flood prevention issues—did you sit down
formally with government and in 2004 deliver a hurry up message
in the context of the then available resources?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: There
has been a huge amount of sitting down with government on the
Making Space for Water strategy, which is the primary vehicle
for changing the way in which flood risk management is delivered.
That has achieved a whole variety of changes including the work
that has gone on to take a risk based approach to flood risk management
for the future. We have delivered more techniques of assessing
risk, we have made considerable progress in delivering our mapping
and warning systems. As a result of that report there was also
the injection of additional funding into the system through the
spending rounds and there are a number of things that are currently
underway, including giving us a role on the coast to integrate
(you made the point about integration) and consulting on whether
we are going to have a role in flooding in-land from all sources
of flooding. So some of these things have been done and some of
these things are currently out to consultation and some of them
remain to be done. I do not believe that any of the messages from
previous reports or indeed from the report that you are referring
to have not been worked through in the Making Space for Water
strategy.
Q4 Chairman:
You made a very telling statement at the beginning, a candid statement
in which you said that things should happen quicker. When did
you start to deliver to Defra the message that things should accelerate?
Was it as a result of what has happened this summer or was it
as a result of study and thought at an earlier time?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: It
all depends very much on which of the elements of the report are
taken into account. One of the things we have done in the review
of all the various reports is to work out who, in fact, was responsible
for taking the lead. Some of those things we were responsible
for taking the lead in, others it was parts of government, others
it was local authorities, others it was individual agencies, parts
of government, whatever. I think the important thing is that we
have pressed on as fast as we possibly could with the things that
we were responsible for. We have urged government to move forward
on the things that they are responsible for and there are quite
difficult conundrums to face in terms of the wide variety of responsibilities,
particularly for surface water and urban flooding where Defra
was consulting prior to the floods on a "minded to"
basis about our role in co-ordinating all of the organisations
that are responsible in the urban and surface water areas, for
example local authorities, water companies, the Highways Agency,
highways authorities, the development and re-development process
where clearly at the moment there is huge confusion to the public
and a lack of co-ordination.
Q5 Chairman:
I think it would be helpful to the Committee if you could lay
out in writing and in more detail, bearing in mind the reports
to which I have referred, to give us some kind of time line of
activity in terms of your exchanges with government to see the
type of recommendations that you were making to ministers, what
degree of urgency you, as an Agency, attach to them; the kind
of response you were getting from Defra as to whether, in your
judgment, they were motoring fast enough in the light of the advice
that you were giving.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
am certainly happy to do that as far as our responsibilities go,
but I would not want it to be left on the record that we are responsible
for all flood risk policy. That is a Defra role and that is one
you will have to put to them.
Chairman: We are going to come
on to who else may be responsible because in your evidence you
put forward some quite candid conclusions about better co-ordination
of bodies. You alluded to them in your remarks a moment ago and
we will want to probe that in detail. Before I go on to look in
more detail at the June and July floods I want to bring in David
Taylor.
Q6 David Taylor:
In your comments a moment or two ago I think you were suggesting
that you were going to take a risk based approach to flood risk
management. What on earth other approach would you take? I do
not understand that.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
can probably turn to David King or David Rooke on this because
they have been around flood risk longer than I have, but my understanding
is that over the last ten years or slightly less we have been
increasingly able to map and assess flood risk and to direct our
activities and our resources towards the areas of higher flood
risk than we have been previously in the past. History played
quite a large part and indeed if you remember the 2000 floods
to some extent history played a bit of a part there in that the
prime minister of the day went around standing on bridges, looking
at flooded communities and saying "This must have a flood
risk management scheme". So it was very much that if somewhere
had flooded we tended to say that we should look at what needed
to be done to resolve that situation rather than stepping back
and saying, "Where, in these flood risk management areas,
are the highest priorities? Where are the places that are most
at risk? Where can resource and focus save the most in the way
of property and risk to human life, rather than simply going on
the basis of where had previously flooded. The two Davids may
want to comment.
Dr King: I think it is worth saying
that the underpinning philosophy in the 50s and 60s and right
up through the 80s was about flood defence. Almost implicit in
that was that you could build defences that would stop flooding.
The reality is, of course, that you cannot do that; you can only
be better prepared against the impact of floods. Therefore it
is a change of view; it is about looking at how you manage the
risk down and it is also accepted that you manage the risk down
by a basket of different interventions which on one side might
be about development control, keeping buildings away from inappropriate
development of a flood plain to, of course, building and maintaining
defences. It is a whole different thought process that now exists
around managing floods.
Q7 Chairman:
Let us look briefly at what happened in June and July because
the view has been created that the floods that we experienced
both in the rural and the urban settings were unprecedented and
very different from anything that we had had before. Perhaps you
could comment on that.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: They
certainly were different from what we have experienced before
to an extent that there was a huge amount of rain in a very short
space of time. They were the wettest June and July ever recorded.
Much of the flooding came not from what we would regard as a traditional
flood, as it were, from the rivers or the seas but from the huge
volume of water simply overpowering the surface water drainage
systems and causing fairly instant flooding, quick flooding. That
might later on have been complicated by flooding from the rivers
in many cases as well, but the initial flooding was very much
surface water flooding. For those of you who remember seeing some
of our motorways running like rivers, that was certainly the cause
there. I think there were some big lessons to be gained from that
about these heavy rainfall events if they are going to become
increasingly common with climate change. The other complicating
factor was, I think, that it was a summer flood rather than a
winter flood and indeed there were two events very close to each
other so that we had a series of very saturated catchments and
very little capacity either in the river systems in the second
case or indeed in the ground itself to take more water. So that
made the situation worse. Generally speaking in terms of a traditional
flood, as it were, the systems that were in place worked well.
We had good collaboration with the Met Office, although we have
to make the point that the capacity of the Met Office to predict
to very fine grain that helps us then predict floods to very fine
grain is not yet technically there. We issued warnings for flooding
from the river systems pretty well. There were a few occasions
when it did not quite go right but mostly it went well. The big
problem was of course that the majority of floods were not from
the river systems, they were from surface water systems which
are not currently subject to flood warning and indeed are not
currently able to be mapped. They are very unpredictable and the
title gives a clue on occasions in that many of them are very
flash floods so there was not much time to warn even if the technology
had been there. Our defences generally stood up well in that we
did not have catastrophic collapse or failure of defences other
than a few where structures that are mechanically operated or
electrically operated failed as a result of their power supply
going out. There were a small number of defences in that category
but of course the majority of our defences that were implicated
were simply overwhelmed by the volume of water because the sorts
of design standards to which they had been designed were insufficient
to take this unprecedented flood. We did have a number of flood
defences that worked extremely well and did defend communities
and worked well to their design standards. The message from us
for the floods and what makes them so different was very much
the huge volume of water in a very short space of time and the
fact that it was the surface water systems that failed to respond.
I think the third thing is the critical infrastructure issue.
Q8 Chairman:
We are going to come on to discuss that so you will be able to
go into it in more detail, but there is a concerning point I want
to conclude on this. You said that at the moment you do not have
a model that can deal with the kind of urban flooding situation
that we saw and yet you as an Agency, in defending your position
about responding to these floods, have made great play about your
flood risk mapping, about your helpline and your Floodline (the
information that can go to people). It does beg the question that
if we are looking forward what you are going to do to try and
address the impact of what we currently regard as unprecedented
but which might become the norm. One of the things that worries
me about the modelling arrangement is that you do it on a frequency
basis of one in 50, one in 100, one in 200 or even one in 1000
year events but nobody seems to have actually gone back and said,
"Well, if this kind of rainfall occurs anywhere, what would
the flood risk map actually then look like?" We have had
a lot of focus on coastal and river flooding in terms of your
mapping, but you have admitted that there is a gap in terms of
the urban environment and there seems to be a dearth of mathematical
modelling to say that if we get so-called unprecedented events
anywhere, not trying to predict when it is going to rain but just
to look at the country as a whole and say, "If this lot drops
anywhere, what are the risk factors?" What are you doing
to improve the modelling and the anticipation of this type of
event in the future?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can
I make some points of principle and then perhaps pass to David
Rooke to talk about the whole issue of characterising urban flood
risk? We are not working on modelling of urban flood risk at the
moment because we do not, as yet, have a responsibility for urban
flood risk other than from rivers.
Q9 Chairman:
Why not?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Because
as yet the Government has not given us that responsibility. They
were consulting on whether they should put together a proposition
before the summer events but we are not responsible for urban
flooding from all sources.
Q10 Chairman:
So at the moment it is local authorities, is it, who are supposed
to be responsible for that?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: At
the moment it is a very complicated mixture of responsibilities
of local authorities, of owners of land, of the Highways Agency,
the highways authorities; in circumstances where it is the water
company assets that are involved—sewers and drains—it
would be the water companies. So it is a very mixed and uncoordinated
picture. In some areas there has been a degree of co-ordination,
for example following the floods in Carlisle there has been very
good work to bring together all the parties and put together a
surface water drainage plan and flooding plan combined. However,
in the vast majority of urban settlements at the moment that will
not have been done. As yet we are not looking at modelling floods
from surface water issues within cities. Let me just take one
point of principle also about your extreme events happening anywhere.
We could in theory look at our flood mapping and risk approach
and work out what was needed to protect everywhere against the
possibility of a very extreme event. I personally do not believe
that that would be the best use of public money because it would
be highly unpredictable. Where some of these very extreme events
will happen, although they may be increasing in frequency with
climate change, only once in a lifetime or two lifetimes or three
lifetimes in some locations. To engineer the whole of the country
to that standard would be quite expensive.
Q11 Chairman:
I am not suggesting that that was the outcome I was seeking, it
was "do the modelling and then decide from the response the
approach" which seems to be lacking.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
certainly think that nationally there needs to be a discussion
and debate at government level about the standard of protection
that we believe is important and how frequently we would regard
as acceptable an event that would overwhelm the traditional defences.
We also need to look at other ways of making sure that if these
extreme events occur that proper contingency planning is in place
and that generally speaking we build our buildings and our settlements
with more resilience.
Chairman: We are going to come
onto that but Mr Williams wants to come in here.
Q12 Mr Williams:
You have talked about the consultation that is taking place as
to whether the Environment Agency should take the legal responsibility
in urban flooding from surface water. How did that consultation
arise? Was it because of a ministerial announcement?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: It
is part of the Making Space for Water strategy and this
was the beginning of the process of looking at integration. We
have gone through the process of Defra consulting on integrating
the roles in coastal flooding and coastal protection. That has
now been agreed and we are going to have a combined role in coastal
flooding and coastal protection. This was now moving onto consulting
on the inland role integrating surface water drainage with flooding
from the rivers as well. It was partly the process of implementing
Making Space for Water.
Dr King: Making Space
for Water is the Government's strategic framework for handling
flood risk over the next ten to 15 years. Sitting under that strategy
document are somewhere between 15 and 20 programmes of work which
largely sweep up all of the recommendations that the Chairman
made reference to. Many of those have progressed but it is true
to say that most of the focus over the last number of years has
been on fluvial and coastal flooding. However, the issue of urban
flooding, for example last December the Government set a number
of pilots looking at urban flooding, surface water flooding, specifically
to try to understand how we might best manage the surface water
issue. In addition to and as part of that Defra are consulting
on the need for a strategic overview. There are five or six different
organisations involved in managing urban flooding. They all have
an important part to play and must continue to do so, but there
is a need for a strategic overview part of which would be the
characterisation of national risk. My belief is that in terms
of characterisation mapping surface water flooding, which is a
lot more difficult for a whole variety of technical reasons, we
are significantly behind where we are with our understanding of
characterisation and mapping of fluvial and coastal.
Q13 Mr Williams:
Can I just ask how far the consultation has proceeded? What conclusions
have you come to?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: It
has gone through the consultative process and Defra now has the
responses. They are not going to act on those until the review,
chaired by Sir Michael Pitt, has come to some conclusions.
Q14 David Lepper:
Could I concentrate on your responsibilities for flood warning
systems and public information. There is no doubt at all these
have been under very heavy pressure during the summer. I think
you talked of some 43 million hits to your website during that
period, but you concluded in your evidence to us that the current
system stood up to the challenges of increased usage. On the other
hand, we have a number of those organisations and individuals
who have submitted evidence to us which suggests differently,
for instance Sheffield City Council say that severe flood warnings
were only given when the water level was already up to the windscreens
on vehicles. The National Farmers' Union says that farmers who
had been signed up for a flood warning did not receive the warning
until it was too late for them to rescue their livestock. Residents
in Oxford complained about incorrect and confusing information.
Would you agree that you do need to review the processes of warning—accepting
the fact that this was perhaps a once in however many years occurrence—that
pressures were put on the system and many of those individuals
who were relying upon the Agency's own warning system and information
felt that they were let down.
Dr King: The first thing I would
say is that when you get an event of the severity that we did
clearly there will be lessons learned and there will be improvements
that we will make. The second point that I would make is that
our warning system is exclusively associated with fluvial, so
flooding from rivers. In the dissemination of warnings we use
the Floodline Warnings Direct which enables you to give a warning
either by fax, phone or pager. We use the Internet and obviously
we use the local radio as well as Floodline. In terms of warnings,
we gave out 45,000 warnings and we strive to give a two hour warning.
We know that about 75 per cent of warnings were given with at
least two hours, but obviously there are 25 per cent where we
did not. Given the nature of the flooding that unfortunately has
happened. In terms of our website, you mentioned we had 43 million
hits from 4 million people and although there was some minor slowing
of the system we are talking about seconds. Normally 95 per cent
of the enquiries are within three seconds, it went down to a minute
in some periods.
Q15 David Lepper:
We had Tewskesbury Chamber of Industry and Commerce telling us
that in relation to Tewskesbury, where the flood happened on a
Friday night (or at least the worst part of it), they tell us
over the weekend it was impossible to connect to the Environment
Agency website. That is not just a matter of the slowing down
of the process because of the number of hits, but they are telling
us they could not get any connection at all to your website.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
can certainly give you the evidence from our own logging process
that shows that the website was active throughout. If people were
not getting onto it obviously we need to look at it. Perhaps I
could just comment on one or two of the examples you gave. Sheffield,
for example, was one of those areas where there was considerable,
very rapid flooding from surface water drainage issues and that
was the primary cause of most of the flooding in Sheffield and
therefore it was very difficult to give warning at all. We currently
do not have a warning system there. The NFU issue, if there are
farmers who were signed up for a warning and did not get one,
we need to explore that but my understanding is that in many cases
it was that they did not feel they got it in time. Our standard
is a warning, if we can, two hours beforehand. I think the one
point I would want to make about the farmers is that we still
have remarkably few farmers and others signed up to the warning
system. Only 41 per cent of people who are eligible have signed
up and we would very much like to press for more people to be
signed up to it so that we can, where possible, give warnings.
Again we can look at instances where farmers are saying they did
not get a warning in time and see whether it was within our standards
and whether, therefore, the standards are not going to be sufficiently
long in advance for farmers to move stock which may cause us technical
problems. It may not be possible, we would have to look at that.
In Oxford the situation was very complicated. It is a very complicated
river system in Oxford and I must confess at one stage when we
were trying to predict the peaks of flooding points through Oxford
somebody said to me that we had more peaks than the Himalayas
because they were coming through in a very complex fashion and
there were occasions when, having warned people that there was
a peak, we then had a higher peak and they felt they had been
short changed as it were because the first slug of water coming
through which we would call a peak was obviously not the
peak, if you see what I mean. There are a whole load of complicated
issues about these flood warnings. Our local lessons learned reviews
will be looking in detail at how every single flood was caused,
what the issues were around forecasting these, around the warnings,
taking on board the issues that people have raised locally. Generally
speaking the reality of these floods is that the vast majority
of our warning systems worked well. We dealt with a huge volume.
There was a strong possibility that our systems could have fallen
over with the degree of hits that they were taking and they did
not. Part of the issue is that many of the floods that occurred
were indeed not floods that we would normally warn against because
they are from surface water issues. So there is a complicated
picture there.
Q16 David Lepper:
Just to take up one point, Baroness Young, that you made a little
earlier and that was about co-operation with the Met Office. From
what you have said I get the feeling that maybe some of the information
the Environment Agency was receiving was perhaps not always as
accurate and as timely as it might have been. The Institute of
Civil Engineers tell us in their evidence that they believe the
Agency and the Met Office should work more closely together. You
have talked about the need to improve co-operation between the
two bodies, could you tell us a little bit more about the extent
to which it is lacking at the moment and what you are intending
to do about that?
Dr King: I think the co-operation
with the Met Office worked extremely well. As soon as the Met
Office were picking up a weather depression they were talking
to us from the Monday. During the week we had some forecasters
embedded with the Met Office forecasting team. What is important
to point out is that the Met Office did extremely well in some
of their forecasts in that they were giving an 80 per cent probability
that you were going to get heavy rainfall over a county. That
is very good except a county may have a number of different catchments
in it so, for example, if the rain was 20 miles north of where
it fell in Warwickshire the floods would not have been in the
Severn they would have been in the Trent. That is the issue. It
is not a criticism of the Met Office; they are working at the
limits of their forecasting at the moment but we must know where
it falls in order to translate it into a flood warning.
Q17 Lynne Jones:
Could I just explore that a little more? Just after the floods
I put down some parliamentary questions and what was conspicuous
by its absence when I got replies was the lack of response to
the "when" question. Dr King, you have just referred
to the fairly accurate predictions of the Met Office and at 10.06
on Thursday 19 July they were predicting an 80 per cent chance
of floods in areas centred around Tewkesbury. They were spot on
in terms of the area they were identifying as having a very high
risk of flooding. When after that did you start issuing warnings
through the Floodline and through your press releases? You issued
press releases the next day but referring to the weekend. It seems
not to have been really timely in terms of the warnings. I know
you say the surface water system is not subject to flood warnings,
but you had this information from the Met Office and it should
have informed the information that you already had in terms of
your own systems.
Dr King: My recollection is that
we issued a joint press release with the Press Office on the Thursday
and we have a tiered system of warning which goes from flood watch
to warning to severe warning and we were certainly issuing flood
watches on the Thursday and then we would have led into warning
and severe warning. There is a big difference between a severe
weather warning and a severe flood warning because a severe weather
warning is issued for a whole series of different purposes and
quite often a severe weather warning, even when it involves rain,
may not involve flooding. We have to translate the rainfall into
a flood forecast and that really does mean that we need to know
on what river system it is going to fall. We use the Met Office
weather radar, we use our own flow forecasting and we use a whole
system of rain gauges, but all of that needs to be modelled and
as I said 20 miles makes a big difference as to where the flood
is going to happen.
Q18 Lynne Jones:
I accept that it is difficult to be absolutely spot on, but you
have this quite localised area where the Met Office were predicting
widespread heavy rain and it still appears from the evidence that
we have that people were not getting warnings, so much so that
you had your own flood defences trapped in traffic on the Friday.
I still have not really got any perception of how you translate
the information that you have from your own evidence and the information
from the Met Office into warnings and the timescale for those
warnings to be issued.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Can
I just comment on the point that Dr King raised about the difference
between a severe weather warning and a flood warning. Our flood
warnings generally are based on our monitoring systems from rivers.
Q19 Lynne Jones:
It was widespread heavy rain.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes,
but what we had been doing was keeping in close touch with the
Met Office all the way during that week. Indeed I spoke to them
on the Tuesday, there was regular contact with them. By the Thursday
we were aware that this was going to be big and they were beginning
to be able to tell us approximately where. Up until then we could
not get much information as to absolutely where until Thursday.
1 Agriculture Committee, Sixth Report of Session 1997-98,
Flood and Coastal Defence, HC 707-I Back
2
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Sixteenth Report
of Session 2003-04, Climate Change, Water Security and Flooding,
HC 558 Back
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