Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
ENVIRONMENT AGENCY
27 JUNE 2007
Q40 Dr Pugh: They are not totally
disconnected as in some places rivers run into the coast.
Dr King: I do not have a feel
but would I would like to say is that it would be totally wrong
to think that the coast was lower risk. If you look at the Government's
Forsight study, the two things that it is telling you is that
risk will increase against the background of sea level rise and
climate change and in some places, depending on the emissions
scenario, it could be as much as 25-fold. The issue about the
coast is that if you get a tidal surge, it can be much more devastating
than the floods we have seen over the last few days.
Q41 Dr Pugh: Obviously it would be
very interesting for this Committee to see how much you are spending
protecting us against rivers and how much you are spending protecting
us against the sea and also where the floods actually occur, to
see whether you are spending money in the most pertinent places.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
am not sure we would want simply to follow floods. One of the
problems that we had in the past was that schemes tended to take
place where floods had been. They had flooded and therefore a
scheme was done. What we are trying to do now is to assess risk
and sometimes risk is not what is likely to be happening, but
what the results would be if it did happen. On the coast the likelihood
may be slightly lower at the moment, but if it does happen, it
has a heck of an impact and it is much more far reaching.[4]
There is no firm distinction between expenditure
on sea flooding and river flooding. This is because most of the
low lying areas around the coast are at risk from a combination
of sea flooding and river flooding. For example the Norfolk Broads
are at risk from flooding through extreme sea water levels flooding
up river or breaching sea defences and also also susceptible to
flooding from fluvial events alone.
Notwithstanding the difficulty in differentiating
between areas of flood risk through Sea and River we do model
risk on a national basis and are able to confirm the following
proportion of properties at risk as follows:
48.5% at risk from sea flooding;
3.5% at risk from both sea and river flooding;
48% at risk from river flooding.
Since before the 2000 major floods, the majority
of actual flooding has been inland, with a substantial proportion
from urban drainage systems rather than rivers. It is estimated
that 80% of the current floods are as a result of urban drainage
system failure.
Q42 Dr Pugh: I looked at the model available
to us on page 24 of the NAO Report where you have a priority score
system with a maximum score of 44 points, obviously for the most
vulnerable places. I understand what factors that system is made
up of, but is there a kind of situation you can get into where
you look at the score for a place, you look at the cost of securing
that place against flooding and you decide that it is not worth
doing? Or do you simply always act like King Canute and try to
preserve every single stretch of the current British coastline?
The reason why I say that is because the Communities and Local
Government Select Committee recently produced a Report on coastal
towns and they did suggest there were certain situations where
essentially one had to call it a day rather than throw more and
more money into protecting the coast against the sea. Are there
places in your model that simply would not be value for money?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Certainly
there will be places where either the scheme does not achieve
a sufficient priority score or is not value for money that would
lead us to believe that we simply were not going to provide a
scheme. Indeed, as climate change increases, we will be looking
particularly at some of the smaller coastal settlements as part
of the shoreline management planning process which is run by local
authorities.
Q43 Dr Pugh: You do not have a formula
of points per pound and then it is not worth doing?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No,
it would be a case of looking at coastal stretches because quite
often individual locations have to be seen in the context of the
stretch as a whole because you cannot simply say you are going
to abandon this bit but hold the line either side of it. Clearly
it has to be done to reflect the coastal processes and the morphology
and the shoreline management plan process has gone through its
first cycle and is now moving on to its second cycle and that
process will be the strategic look at the coast.
Q44 Dr Pugh: Just following on a
point Mr Curry made earlier, there is a danger of looking at the
past and assuming that the future is going to be very similar
when in fact there is little reason to think that will be the
case. However, there are certain areas that are graded as flood
risk by the Environment Agency that have not had a flood for a
very, very long time; historical records show that there has not
been much incidence of trouble. Are you not then guilty in that
circumstance of a kind of blight being put upon that area, putting
their insurance premiums up, putting the cost of their houses
down on the basis simply of topographical evidence which is rather
crude?
Dr King: The first point I would
make is that we can never stop floods, we can only mitigate against
them and if you look at what has happened over the last few days,
Sheffield has been a good example. Sheffield has certainly not
seen the likes of that flood in living memory and unfortunately
it is the nature of probability that it could happen again within
a short timescale. It may be a one-in-200-year event, but that
does not stop us from having another one-in-200-year event next
week or the week after.
Q45 Dr Pugh: Would the lack of historical
evidence not indicate to you a flaw in your modelling, that you
had missed out something, you had forgotten something about the
terrain or whatever? You back your maps against experience of
centuries.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
have a post-event review of all floods, a lessons-learned process,
which allows us to look at what did happen and to take the data
from the floods that happened and insert them back into our models
so that we get a better perception of whether our risk assessment
was right or not. All of the information from floods will be fed
back in to allow that process to get refined more. There will
be some areas where, quite frankly, the risk is so high, the probability
may not be high but the impact is so high, that that means we
do have to take pretty strenuous measures, for example, in London
where we protect somewhere between a one-in-a-1,000-year and one-in-2,000-year
event because of the economic value in the capital. At one stage
when we were looking at the future of London's flood defences
for the sake of completeness we looked at a Move London
option, but we had to discount it very rapidly because clearly
economic issues were huge.
Q46 Mr Dunne: Lady Young, may I ask
you to turn to page 13 and look at table 6 which shows that expenditure
by the Agency was static for the first five years out of the last
ten and then rose and yet last year declined significantly; looking
at the table roughly £70 million. Could you confirm whether
that was the case and explain why?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Last
year we had some reduction in our spending as a result of a short-term
squeeze from Defra mid-year cuts in our budget, but that did not
account for the totality. The previous year had been a very good
year because in the process of changing the system for accountability
for flood risk management the Government gave us block grant rather
than it being raised from local authorities as was the case in
the past. Many of the balances that the local flood defence committees
had accrued were spent on schemes so they were put into useful
use and the balances inflated the 2005-06 provision.
Q47 Mr Dunne: What is your budget
for the current year?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: For
2007-08 it is roughly £500 million.
Q48 Mr Dunne: It is roughly the same
as last year.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes.
We had a reinstatement of our Defra cuts to a small extent, but
not totally.
Q49 Mr Dunne: I was just going to
ask you about the Defra cuts and the extent to which Defra has
sought savings across agencies. Am I right in saying it was £15
million last year?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes.
Q50 Mr Dunne: How much of that has
been restored since?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: £6
million.
Q51 Mr Dunne: Does that impact on
capital expenditure by the Agency or just on revenue?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: The
theory was that we were to protect capital and simply take it
from revenue, but in reality it did mean that some of the precursors
to capital expenditure had to slow down, things like the catchment
flood management plans and some of the work-up of schemes for
the pipeline. That is no hardship because we have so many schemes
in the pipeline that we cannot fund them anyway.
Q52 Mr Dunne: Can you confirm to
the Committee today that some of the feasibility studies, in particular
in the York/Humber area, were cut as a result of the Defra cuts?
Mr Rooke: We did slow down our
production of catchment flood management funds.
Q53 Mr Dunne: Could I ask you to
kindly write to the Committee, in particular in relation to York/Humber
where the allegation has been made that the Defra cuts did lead
to the feasibility cuts applying there, which obviously may have
an impact on your ability to remediate the problems that we are
seeing there right now?[5]
May I ask you then to turn to page 23 and look at table 15? In
paragraph 3.7 the NAO refers to £125 million of funding available
for new or improved defences, this is for the current year, but
of that funding only some £20.2 million is set aside for
new schemes and most of these are schemes which have been in the
pipeline for some time. Given that there are only 33 such schemes
available, the average expenditure will be of the order of £750,000
both for the urgent and high priority schemes. Do you regard that
as remotely adequate for the urgent work that you will be required
to undertake in view of current events?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Our
programme of funding has always got a number of schemes ongoing
because these are multi-year schemes and because of that high
level of expenditure with the balances that we talked about a
large number of schemes were going through the programme at this
stage. We try to get as many new starts as possible and to leave
a modest amount for urgent works and they are truly urgent works
where there is danger of something going completely wrong if we
do not address it quite quickly. We have taken a view in the past
about how much it was necessary to allocate to urgent works. It
would be unwise of us to reserve funding for a very unusual event
like the one we have had in the last two weeks because we would
simply be leaving money fallow.
Q54 Mr Dunne: Does that mean you
do not have any contingency funds for emergencies?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
have the ability to control our programme by starts, so there
will be a number of starts and a number of stages in each of these
many schemes that we can use to slow down or speed up. If we did
have a huge amount of remedial work to do as a result of this
flood, and I am sure we will have a large amount of remedial work
to do, we will have to slow down some of the capital programme,
but we can do that.
Q55 Mr Dunne: You can to the extent
of £20 million of the uncommitted schemes.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: There
are ways in which, with the phasing of many of our schemes, that
we are able to—
Q56 Mr Dunne: Can you confirm whether
or not the BBC report that you have applied for £150 million
of emergency funding from the Government is correct or not?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: To
my certain knowledge we have not applied for any money for emergency
funding. We are not eligible for Bellwin money. We will, once
we have assessed the impact of the event, have to look at what
remedial work we have to do and at that stage we will be talking
to Defra about our budget. However, in their current parlous state
I find it difficult to believe that we will get much from them,
so it may well be we have to seek Treasury funding. I suspect
we will have to swallow quite a large proportion of it from our
own resource.
Q57 Mr Dunne: How do you expect to
be able to do that? Have you any estimate at this point, ballpark,
of how much the current floods are going to cost?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We
are up to the neck, if you will pardon the pun, in just coping
with the emergency. The most important thing is to protect property
and life at the moment.
Q58 Mr Dunne: I understand. Are you
at all involved in allocation of funding under Bellwin? You said
you are not eligible yourselves.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No.
Q59 Mr Dunne: Could I turn to the
emergency awareness? On page 32 of the Report there is a reference
in section (vi) under "Flood warning and preparedness"
that as at 31 March 2006, 78% of households had been offered a
suitable flood warning service and the NAO comment is that at
that time only 41% were actually even aware that there was this
warning service available. Can you give the Committee any update
on how many people actually take advantage of the warning service?
Do you have a proportion of population that is actually signed
up to it?
Dr King: We do have detailed breakdowns.
We offer three levels of services depending on the risk involved.
For a high risk there is an opportunity for people getting direct
warning either through fax, telephone, internet, et cetera. In
medium risk bands, there is the opportunity of using loudhailers
and sirens. In the low risk it is really about encouraging people
to be vigilant and listen to local radio. If you take the high
risk, up to about 12 months ago we had about 120,000 people receiving
direct warning. Because of the introduction of the new system
we have grown that now to nearly 300,000 people receiving direct
warning in a variety of different forms.
4 Note by witness: Over the last five years,
we have spent around one third of our capital investment on sea
defences, the remainder being spent on river and estuarine defences. Back
5
Note by witness: The Defra funding cuts had little effect
on the Yorkshire RFDC feasibility programme. Two small studies
(with a combined cost of £50k) at Borrowby in North Yorkshire,
and Ruswarp on the North Yorkshire coast were postponed. Back
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