Recommendations
13. Without waiting
for the ASC's statutory report on the NAP in July 2015 or the
results of the Government's 'horizon scanning' of future risks
and threats, the Government should commission a review of the
physical resources, capacity and skills available for emergency
response as well as the coordination between all of the organisations
involved, at both national and local level. (Paragraph 18)
14. The Government
should make a clear commitment to allow the Environment Agency
to allocate flood defence funds according to its objective cost-benefit
models without political interference. (Paragraph 33)
15. The Government
has indicated that it will leave it to the next Government to
decide the NCC's long-term future. The NCC's work on valuing ecosystem
services, including those providing 'soft' flooding defences,
show its importance for climate change adaptation, but also offers
the prospect of finding funding mechanisms to link natural capital
'owners' and adaptation beneficiaries. The next Government must
act as quickly as possible to put the NCC on a long-term footing,
and encourage it to develop those funding mechanisms. (Paragraph
34)
16. The Government
should require the Environment Agency to provide flood risk advice
on all sizes of development, including small developments currently
exempted. The Government should reassess the Environment Agency's
future resources, skills and financial needs, to ensure that these
reflect the increasing risks from flooding in the years ahead,
and the volume of work needed to deal with these. (Paragraph 56)
17. The Government
must enforce the powers it already has under the Flood and Water
Management Act to require SuDS in developments, particularly on
floodplains, and remove the developers' right to connect homes
to the public sewer. (Paragraph 58)
18. The Government
should review the rigour of local authorities' flood risk management
plans, and put authorities' responsibilities to take action to
reduce flood risk on a statutory footing to prevent resources
being directed elsewhere. (Paragraph 59)
19. The Government
must ensure that its research in the Zero Carbon Hub addresses
these [health risk from over-heating] issues, and consider heat-stress
issues—including the use of more appropriate building materials—in
the next review of building regulations. (Paragraph 60)
20. The Government
should support further research into critical network 'pinch-points'
and interdependencies, starting by coordinating the necessary
data-gathering which is currently incomplete. (Paragraph 76)
21. The Government
should give a more explicit direction to all of the infrastructure
network providers and their regulators to give greater weight
to adaptation investment, and initiate a public debate about the
costs that will have to be borne by customers and taxpayers. An
early action should be to reconsider the case for introducing
universal water-metering in water-stressed areas. (Paragraph 77)
22. When the next
Government comes to produce the next NAP, it needs to take a more
top-down strategic oversight, with a strong spatial focus, and
create a set of measures and targets against which progress can
be measured. It should clearly assign, to specific organisations
and groups, responsibility for the actions needed to deliver the
required climate resilience. (Paragraph 93)
23. The Government
should consider making adaptation reporting a mandatory requirement
again, at least for organisations managing critical infrastructure
and services. (Paragraph 94)
24. In preparing the
next NAP report, the Government should assign explicit responsibility
to a named body or individual—an envoy—for raising
awareness of our climate change risks. Once the ASC produces its
statutory advice on the first NAP report later this year, and
thereafter reverts to informal annual progress reports, the next
Government should introduce a requirement for Government to respond
formally to those progress reports. (Paragraph 95)
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