Council in spending squeeze faces £3m flood bill

North Yorkshire County Council has confirmed the flooding which affected the region last month will cost taxpayers an estimated £3m after the rising waters caused widespread damage to roads and left at least one bridge needing to be replaced.

And senior politicians told the Yorkshire Post they fear a bid to claw nearly half of the money back from the Government will fail as Ministers have tightened up rules for claims to be made from a fund set up to pay for disasters such as flooding.

The county council, which is battling to make £69m in savings amid cutbacks in funding from Westminster, is preparing a formal application to the Government’s Belwin Scheme, which is an initiative where local authorities can apply for funding to cope with unforeseen emergencies.

But the council’s executive member for financial services, Coun John Watson, admitted the £1.3m claim could fail as it is on the threshold for a bid from the fund. The remaining £1.7m of the repair bill will be paid for from the council’s financial reserves as the costs fall under capital expenditure, and include replacing a bridge in the village of Scorton.

Coun Watson said: “The council is obviously already faced with an extremely challenging financial situation with the savings we are having to make, so to be faced with an unexpected bill of £3m is the last thing we needed.

“It is too early to say whether we will succeed with the application for funding under the Belwin Scheme, but the Government has tightened the rules for making claims and ours will be right on the threshold.”

Hundreds of homes and businesses were swamped in Yorkshire last month in the wake of a storm which saw nearly four inches of rain fall in just a day-and-a-half.

As many as 300 properties were affected across the region by flooding and the rising waters from rivers including the Swale, Ure and Nidd as well as the Wharfe, Ouse, Derwent, Aire and Dearne.

York was the worst hit part of the region, and 50 of the city’s properties were flooded by the River Ouse with a further 30 premises affected by surface water and over-spilling sewers.

The River Ouse peaked in York at about 16.5ft above normal summer levels - the second highest level since records began and only beaten by the disaster of 2000.

York Council said the financial cost of the flooding had yet to be finalised, but stressed it was not expected to go above £442,000 - the authority’s own threshold to make applications for funding from the Belwin Scheme.

A council spokeswoman said: “The defences which protect the city held up during the flooding, otherwise repairs costs would have been significantly more.”

The Environment Agency confirmed flood defences protected a total of 13,286 properties in the Yorkshire and Humber region during last month’s deluge, and a total of 4,460 flood warnings were issued to homes and businesses.

North Yorkshire County Council had previously been faced with a multi-million pound repair bill when devastating flash floods swamped large areas of the North York Moors back in the summer of 2005.

The council oversaw the £3.5m programme of repairs, which took two years to complete, to reinstate the road network centred around Helmsley, Hawnby and Thirlby in the areas worst affected by the flooding.

A massive electrical storm in the evening of Sunday, June 19, 2005, brought almost three inches of rain, the equivalent of a month’s fall, in only three hours to parts of North Yorkshire.

More than 6,000 lightning strikes left 37,200 homes without power, and key roads and bridges were left impassable. A total of 125 miles of the road network were damaged by the floods, which affected an area spanning almost 40 square miles.