EAC Publishes its Flood Resilience in England Report

The Environment Audit Committee has just published its 4th report of the session 2024 to 2026 covering Flood Resilience in England, for which ADA and a wide range of others provided written and oral evidence over the past 12 months.

It very much highlights that progress to make England resilient to flood risk and climate change is insufficient and that Government should be looking to invest at least £1.5bn per year by 2030 and make the sharing of investment fairer, more inclusive, equitable and responsive. Whilst welcoming the investment pledges on capital spending, the Committee report remained light on detail around the need to focus much more attention on everyday, operational (revenue) spending, although various Report conclusions implied as much.

As well as giving focus on the state of flood risk assets and the need to have a much better joined-up picture across all assets, the Committee expressed concern about increasing surface water flood risk, the disjointed approach to roles and responsibilities, the need to have clear resilience standards and, despite clear arguments made nearly 20 years ago, catchment-based approaches are still lacking. The Report went on to say that there is much more opportunity for embedding flood resilience across Government policy and public investment. Facts and figures put forward in the Report about the benefits of flood investment added to the already numerous other sources of similar information, and yet little heed seems to have been taken so far to the wider national economic benefit of making the correct levels of investment. The Committee saw a strengthened overview role for the Flood Resilience Taskforce, at the same time calling for proper empowerment of the Environment Agency to exercise its duties.

Environment featured strongly with natural flood management being recognised as an integral part of any future flood risk management solutions with a call that nature based solutions become fully integrated into a catchment-based system.

The Committee was critical of persistent development in high flood risk areas and challenged the limitations of current risk assessments and enforcement capability. The final section of the Report focused on people and communities, and in particular, the effect on deprived communities who are often at higher levels of flood risk and not covered by adequate insurance.

On the back of a series of conclusions reached in the Report, the Committee has made 21 recommendations to Government, some of which have already seen Government responses, in particular to the flood funding consultation for capital investment. That is only part of the story and unless revenue funding is properly addressed, we will have decreasing resilience to climate change with the consequent knock-on effect to our economic, social and environmental wellbeing.

The full EAC Committee Report can be read here

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