Anthony Browne should have pulled his finger out on flooding

“More robust flood defences are needed” wrote Conservative MP Anthony Browne in his recent Cambridge Independent article. He’s right about that — flooding is a constant risk in this region — but he failed to mention that this year’s floods were almost certainly a direct consequence of his government’s systematic neglect of our flood defences! 

As a Cambridgeshire County Councillor, I sit on the Regional Flood Committee for the River Great Ouse, which is the interface between local government and the Environment Agency (EA), and I see at first-hand the hard work and good intentions of those in the EA. Believe me, they try! But, as a result of this government’s spending cuts, they seem to be fighting a losing battle, both to maintain existing flood assets and to install the new flood prevention measures we already need. It’s a clear case of the government’s programme of austerity coming back to bite us, and bite us hard.

 The EA is charged with maintaining flood assets, and it is supposed to keep 98% of them in good working order. But hasn’t met this target in any of the past five years and its performance has been declining. In the 2021 Spending Review, the government recognised that the EA could not afford to meet its target at current funding levels — but rather than address the problem, the government simply shifted the goalposts, reducing the target to 94%.

That scandalous decision led the National Audit Office to conclude that “EA’s maintenance of its assets is not optimising value for money. For the lack of £34 million in annual maintenance funding for 2022-23, more than 200,000 extra properties are at increased risk of flooding.”  The NAO also noted that the Government is failing to deliver on its 2020 commitment to “push back the flood water and protect 336,000 properties.” Again, all we got was a shrug of government shoulders and a reduction in the target to 200,000 — a figure that the NAO thinks they’re still unlikely to meet.

The January floods this year, about which Mr Browne wrote, devastated the homes of many people around Fen Drayton, St Ives, Crystal Lakes and the Pike & Eel Marina, and sadly they’re a prime example of how these cuts affect real people and businesses. These locations lie between two Environment Agency Flood Defences on the River Great Ouse.

When operational, the St Ives Sluice and Brownhills Staunch allow the EA to control the flow along this stretch of river — but this year they were (and, incredibly, still remain) on a long list of broken flood assets that the EA can’t afford to repair purely because of a shortfall in government funding.

At the Flood Committee’s January meeting I demanded an urgent investigation into why these sluices were out of action. At the April meeting, I was told that these assets are on the programme for repair, but the EA cannot afford the £70,000 bill — towards which Mr Browne’s government has pledged a miserly £7000. 

The problem extends well beyond St Ives and Fen Drayton, and in both directions. Brownshill Staunch marks the tidal limit of the River Great Ouse, and is the gateway to the Fens — a vast area that, largely below sea level, is highly vulnerable to flooding from rising sea levels and climate change impacts. The Fens 2100+ program estimates an investment of £4.5 billion is needed to manage flood risk in the Fens, based on today’s costs and not yet accounting for climate change impacts. More than 50% of this is unfunded in the government’s plans and, ultimately, this puts at risk the 400,000 people living in the Fens, and 50% of England’s grade 1 agricultural land.

But with many more defences sitting on the ‘backlog maintenance’ list, those living and working further upstream — in my hometown of St Neots, say, or down the road in Godmanchester — are just as exposed to the risk of flooding as the good people of St Ives and Fen Drayton.

So I welcome Anthony Browne’s offer “to use whatever levers I have to get more robust flood defences in place.” Can I suggest he starts by getting his government to cough up the £70k required to repair the St Ives and Brownshill Sluices? And then perhaps work their way through the long and growing list of other flood defence repairs to which they’ve so far turned a blind eye…