MPs call for review of Environment Agency flood failings in England
MPs in areas of England worst hit by Storm Babet have called for a review of Environment Agency (EA) failings, after reporting residents only received flood alerts after their homes were flooded.
Toby Perkins, the Labour MP for Chesterfield, said some people at Tapton Terrace in the Derbyshire town, where 83-year-old Maureen Gilbert was found dead in flood water, only received a phone call from the early warning system after their houses had been deluged.
“The EA are doing their best but clearly they’re not up to the task. It just feels like an organisation ill-equipped to deal with flooding in the 21st century with the demands that are on it,” Perkins said.
“We had the EA representative on TV on Thursday night telling us not to worry. There needs to be a major review, and there needs to be a bolstering of the ability and capacity of the EA to do its job. You can’t remove the context of the level of funding cuts they’ve had in the last 13 years.”
Perkins said people felt “angry and let down” about the level of warning they were given, and that even an extra hour’s notice could have made a significant difference to the level of damage.
“I met a pub owner today who said if we’d had another hour [notice] my business would probably be sustainable, but I now think I’m going to go bust with the amount of damage,” he said.
In Catcliffe, South Yorkshire, where about 120 homes were flooded on Saturday after the River Rother burst its banks, the local MP Sarah Champion said a volunteer flood warden warned the EA that nearby flood plains were swamped with water but a flood alert was not issued for another six hours.
“He called them at about 8.30pm, but a lot of people literally didn’t know about it until the fire brigade were knocking on their door at 4-5 in the morning,” she said.
“People feel they’ve been let down and it took their choices away. If people had been properly notified, then they could remove their cars at the very least. It’s been appalling. The area has got quite a few council bungalows that got flooded out and you could have literally been drowned in your bed.”
According to the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, one reason for the EA’s unpreparedness was the direction of rain.
She told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs committee this week: “Most of our rain tends to come in from the west … This was rain coming from the other way, and we don’t have quite as much experience on that and therefore our accuracy of predicting where such heavy rain would fall was not to the same degree as if it had been otherwise.”
Champion responded: “It’s just nonsense. I mean, rain goes down and it’s wet, it still falls in the same river. I think that there was just straight complacency that they’d done enough. It basically completely caught them by surprise.”
She called for updated flood modelling across the country to ensure it still accurately reflects flooding risks, and a new rapid information system to ensure people are given sufficient warning of flooding.
“The world has changed, the environment has changed, but I don’t think the EA have updated their plans to take into account that,” she said, adding that in Catcliffe two new housing estates, along with the effects of the climate crisis, are likely to have exacerbated the flooding risk.
Coffey said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the EA would be carrying out a “rapid review” to understand “what could have been done better”.
The EA has been approached for comment.