Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
ENVIRONMENT AGENCY
27 JUNE 2007
Q100 Mr Bacon: Yes and the foundations
stay in place. I understand the difference. I am just asking,
without signing your name in blood, you can always send us a note,
what roughly do those barriers cost?
Mr Kersley: It is about £180,000.
Q101 Mr Bacon: To buy them?
Mr Kersley: Yes, to buy them.
Q102 Mr Bacon: So you spent £180,000
buying them but last night you did not deploy them, so Hilton
Road Worcester flooded and it would not have flooded, would it,
if you had deployed the barriers?
Mr Rooke: My understanding is
that the road flooded, but no property flooded. We did deploy
sandbags. What has happened in that particular case is that a
tributary of the Severn was higher than was predicted by the models
that we use to determine whether or not to deploy the defences.
We have to deploy them many hours in advance because of the time
it takes to mobilise and do all that. At the time to take the
decision based on the forecast, the decision was taken that it
was not necessary to deploy them. Because one river was higher
than had been predicted by the model and there was some flooding,
temporary sandbagging was taking place and my understanding from
the briefing today is that there was no flooding to property.
Q103 Mr Bacon: The Environment Agency
was quoted on BBC television news at lunchtime as saying that
what had happened at Worcester with the Teme and the Severn was
totally unprecedented. Is that an accurate quote? Is it the Environment
Agency's view that what has happened in Worcester is totally unprecedented?
Mr Rooke: Certainly the tributary
was higher than what has happened before and our models did not
predict that accurately.
Q104 Mr Bacon: I was talking to people
in Worcester at lunchtime today who said it was not unprecedented
and in February 2004 it was worse.
Mr Rooke: Yes, that is the case,
but on this particular event in terms of whether to deploy or
not, given we have to take this decision a considerable number
of hours in advance, the decision was taken not to.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: May
I just say that temporary and demountable defences are not necessarily
the answer to many situations? They are pretty expensive because
they are heavy on staff and storage costs and maintenance for
the future. Although we have a number of demountable defences
in place and though we have temporary defences available for specific
situations, they are not necessarily going to be the panacea.
Many communities are looking to them in the absence of a proper
flood defence scheme and we do not want to encourage them to believe
that they are the best answer.
Q105 Mr Bacon: One last question
on paragraph vii, page 7, where one of the recommendations is
that you should: "Assess the long term suitability of the
current computer database". This Report was published in
mid-June, so not that long ago, but you have known about this
recommendation for a while when the Report was in draft. Where
are you in terms of assessing the suitability of the current database
in terms of either improving it or replacing it?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
should say that we have made substantial improvements on the database
over the last two or three years to the point now where it is
actually a very effective data repository for our flood defences
and can generate a significant number of management reports to
us to manage more effectively, but we are aware of the fact that
the next generation of systems is available and we will need to
look at the longer term, how we can move to the next generation.
Q106 Mr Bacon: Are you saying that
the sentence: "The database... or the work management system...
it cannot hold data on the maintenance history of each flood defence
or clearly link the inspection results to records of maintenance
carried out" is no longer true?
Mr Kersley: It is true. It was
built as an asset register and we have continuously improved it
and we have completed a review of the scope to which we can improve
it further. Further work is planned this year and in fact some
progress has already been made which Lady Young alluded to there.
In addition to that we have scoped out further feasibility work,
which we shall be doing to complement our asset register, on how
we can further develop it and add further tools in so we end up
with a full asset management system. That work is due to report
back in the autumn.
The Committee suspended from 5.25pm to
5.32pm for a division in the House.
Q107 Mr Williams: On page 6, paragraph
5, it says: "...the Agency has only recently adopted a risk-based
approach". What does that mean?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: In
terms of our maintenance system, it means that instead of scoring
our assets as either very good, good, fair, poor or disastrous,
we now look at a whole system and try to establish what the quality
of the asset is that will be fit for purpose. So in some low risk
situations a fair condition of assets is fine because it is not
a huge risk if it fails. In some high risk systems we would want
them to be very good, so we take a fit-for-purpose view, a risk-based
view.
Q108 Mr Williams: This sounds quite
a useful innovation. How recently have you adopted it?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Tim
is the man who has introduced the vast majority of it.
Mr Kersley: We have been working
on this for two years now.
Q109 Mr Williams: Two years? How
long has your organisation been in existence?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: This
is our eleventh year in existence.
Q110 Mr Williams: So for the first
nine years you have operated without a proper risk analysis?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: For
some considerable period we did not have the full responsibilities
that we do now. We only acquired them sequentially. Since the
severe floods in 1998 we have acquired more responsibilities and
as a result it is only within the last two to three years that
we have had the ability to make judgments.
Q111 Mr Williams: Did you not say
it took two years, you have worked on it for two years, so that
means for nine years you did not work on it and you worked on
some jottings on the cuff for what the priorities might be.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Up
until 2004-05 priority decisions were made within budget by a
series of autonomous regional defence committees spending what
they saw as their own money because it was raised by the local
authorities who were the primary members of those flood defence
committees.
Q112 Mr Williams: This is chaos,
is it not? It was and it probably still is.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: That
is precisely the point we made after the 2000 floods and indeed
were successful in getting Government to change the systems that
we had.
Q113 Mr Williams: After seven years
of existence you discovered something you should have identified
within the first year or two years of existence. Why did it take
all these extra years to start developing a risk analysis.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
am afraid that in the early stages of the Agency's existence,
which I cannot speak of because I was not there, the role of the
Agency was not as full as it is now. In fact the supervisory duty
which meant that we had to take—
Q114 Mr Williams: Do you mean they
could not do it?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: It
meant we had next to no powers.
Q115 Mr Williams: You may not have
had powers, but you could have started a risk analysis, could
you not? Let us ask a simple question. How do you deal with risk
without a risk analysis? You are dealing with risk, are you not?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Of
course one must remember that the whole philosophy of risk-based
maintenance and capital funding is a comparatively recent philosophy
across all of those organisations which deal with asset management.
Q116 Mr Williams: That is strange.
If you talk to an insurance company, they work out the risk and
they work out your premium based on the risk. It is not a new
concept. Whoever set up this organisation should have started
with the proposition that the risks should be evaluated and the
priorities relating to risk should be identified. Is that not
the first question that anyone should ask?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Let
me describe the situation in one of the parts of the country which
is currently flooded and where the quality of our assets is not
as high as we would like.
Q117 Mr Williams: I am afraid you
are going to depress me. Go on.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: It
that area the flood defence committee chose as a matter of policy
to spend its money on creation of new defences rather than maintenance
of old defences on the basis that, if it did not maintain its
defences, they would decay and they would have a stronger case
for getting more capital funding for new defences. We had no means
of preventing that because it was local authority money disbursed
by a regional committee.
Q118 Mr Williams: Perhaps if they
had been better informed on better ways of doing it and if your
organisation had identified risk as a surprisingly important thing
earlier on in its existence and started giving advice to the organisations
concerned, they might have recognised the use of risk analysis.
Is that not so?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I
am sure that in the work that we were doing on capital schemes
full account was taken of risk because that was one of the bases
on which we prioritised capital schemes for the future and they
were handled on a national level. They were approved at Defra
level. On maintenance, it is only as we have been able to record
all the assets that we have—and we have had a huge task
because we were given responsibility for twice as many assets
as we had in the early part of the decade, so there was a big
task of simply establishing the register of these assets, understanding
what the assets were, collecting data on their quality—it
is only as we have been able to get that information into shape,
that we have been able to take a risk-based approach.
Q119 Mr Williams: What is the good
of you doing risk analysis now then, if they all do their own
thing?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: They
do not. The Government mercifully changed the system at our instigation.
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