The House of Commons environment food and rural affairs committee said it was ‘disappointed’ with the government's ‘cursory response’ to the report that it published in November 2016, Future flood prevention.
In its report, the committee called for substantial action to tackle fragmented, inefficient and ineffective flood management. It called on the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to provide greater safeguards and assurance to local communities through stronger planning rules and improvements to flood insurance coverage. It also argued that the government needs to develop long-term plans and to overhaul governance and streamline delivery of flood risk management.
The committee recommended, among other things, that the government impose by the end of 2017 a statutory liability on developers to meet the costs of flooding where their development fails to comply with planning requirements and increases flood risk, whether to a property sited on the new development or further afield. It said that the government’s commitment to build more affordable homes should not be achieved at the expense of flood resilience of new residential properties. Regulations must provide for developers to avoid such liability where they comply with planning conditions: local planning authorities should be required to issue as part of planning processes a drainage certificate to confirm compliance.
DEFRA said that there were already adequate planning policies in place to avoid and control development in flood risk areas and that it was up to local planning authorities to enforce planning conditions.
Among the other recommendations that DEFRA basically rejected were:
- require local authorities to publish annual summaries of planning decisions approved against Environment Agency advice
- give water and sewage companies a statutory role in consultation on planning applications to prevent new development adding to flood risk
- commit to a timetable to amend building regulations, if a voluntary approach cannot be agreed, to ensure that homes in flood risk areas are more resistant to flood damage
- give the Fire & Rescue Service a statutory duty to provide emergency flood response with guarantees of sufficient resources
- appoint a new national floods commissioner for England to bring greater co-ordination between the Environment Agency and local and regional bodies.
Jim Fitzpatrick MP, acting chair of the select committee, said: "People living in areas of flood risk need to be reassured that the government is acting to improve our disjointed flood management system. DEFRA has failed to give sufficient justification for its rejection of our recommendations for important new measures to improve flood protection.
“Ministers must give us more detailed information on how the government is using its £2.5bn flood defence budget to slow the flow of water across river catchments so as to stop communities flooding in future.
“Ministers must also update us on their actions to ensure that the insurance, planning and building regulation regimes reduce flood risk and improve property resilience."
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