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Further memorandum submitted by the Environment Agency (ACC35)
1. To what extent does the current Total Place
programme address adaptation?
From what we
understand the current Total Places Programme does not address climate change
adaptation explicitly. Key themes of Total Places are alcohol and drugs, health and social care, children, crime,
young people and employment. We have supplied data, on request, to the HM Treasury on the Environment Agency's spend in the
current pilot areas.
2. Would it make sense for adaptation to
be addressed by the Total Place
programme?
Total Place is a
new concept that offers both opportunities and challenges for delivering
environmental outcomes that are robust in the light of future climate change. Councils
have a key role in addressing the impacts of climate change in their area, and
they will need to work with a range of partners to ensure that their
communities are better prepared for a changing climate. The opportunities
provided by Total Place
to identify barriers to effective collaboration and enhance partnership working
are welcomed.
However, Total Place also
presents some major challenges, mainly relating to scale and cross-boundary
issues. The majority of the
Environment Agency's work, for example, has an implication for a whole river catchments,
which in many cases cross local authority boundaries. For example, decisions on
flood prevention schemes upstream can affect the flows of water and risk of
flooding in a neighbouring local authority area. The catchment approach makes
alignment of funding with strict political boundaries potentially misleading as
the benefits from our work are often wider.
In terms of
'counting' the spend of an area, we highlighted to HM
Treasury that the
Environment Agency administrative boundaries are determined by river catchment
areas, not local authority boundaries.
We report our expenditure at several levels, including national,
Environment Agency Region and Area, and by flood risk management and
environmental protection functions. We
do not currently break down or report our spending by local authority
area.
Further work needs to be done to determine to
what extent a Total Place
approach is appropriate for delivering climate change adaptation and other
environmental outcomes.
3. How might adaptation be built into the Total Place
programme going forward?
Currently, the most effective way of ensuring that adaptation
is built into the Total Place
programme is to ensure that both Government Departments and Local Authorities are
clear on their climate risks and adaptation priorities, so that these can be
incorporated into locally agreed objectives as well as the design of programmes
and projects.
Government Departments are currently developing their first Departmental
Adaptation Plans, which will begin to provide this centrally. All Local Authorities need to embark on a similar process as
that set out in National Indicator 188 (Adaptation)
of the Local Government Performance Framework so they are also clear on their
adaptation priorities going forward. Evidence
from the first year of implementing the LAA framework shows that most local
authorities are still at an early stage in assessing climate risks.
We would be interested in exploring how adaptation to a
changing climate could be best incorporated in the Total Place programme. This could be either
integrated into the programme as described above or as a specific issue where
local organisations can identify how to use their combined resources to
generate efficiencies in delivery of adaptation measures.
11 December
2009
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