Anne McIntosh: Common sense the key to protecting our flood-threatened market towns

The original scheme for flood defences at Pickering was rejected by Pickering and District Civic Society, Pickering Town Council and others as being a potential eyesore in a market town, and too obstructive.

At an estimated cost of £6m, the scheme was incredibly expensive and totally undesirable as residents did not want a physical flood barrier. The Environment Agency subsequently cancelled this scheme, not just because of this opposition, but also because the scheme did not meet cost benefit analysis criteria.

Following the funding announcement in 2009, the project was given the go-ahead in 2010 as a scheme to protect 60 properties by creating two upstream bunds on Pickering Beck with a flood storage capacity of approximately 85,000 cubic metres.

This was an innovative and pioneering initiative; creating buffer strips along water courses, digging ditches and blocking moorland drains as well as planting trees to increase the time it takes rain falling on the upper catchment to join flood waters flowing through Pickering and Sinnington.

The scheme was created in partnership with the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission, Durham University, the North York Moors National Park Authority, Natural England and Ryedale District Council. If successful, the project will bring huge benefits to Pickering and to other parts of the country, too.

We were all extremely shocked and disappointed to learn last month that the Pickering Pilot Project would now cost an additional £2m owing to the requirements of the 1996 guidance to the Reservoir Act 1975.

The questions to be answered are these. How did the Environment Agency ever imagine they could design these bunds without them being considered a Class A structure?

How was the decision taken to halt the construction project only 24 hours before work was due to start on the structure?

How could the structure almost treble in cost from the £1.2m agreed to £3.2m and yet only protect 60 properties?

There are similar funding difficulties in Thirsk, which has also suffered in recent years. A similar solution is proposed there, amounting to a reservoir to combat problems of flooding from Cod Beck.

The common thread throughout these flood defence schemes is that they are over-engineered with structures that are too complicated and fall foul of the iniquitous 1996 guidance notes for the Reservoirs Act, 1995.

At the 11th hour, an independently appointed reservoir engineer advised that the Pickering scheme should be classed as a Category A Reservoir and would, therefore, require a much higher design standard.

There are three categories of reservoir; A, B and C with Category A requiring the tightest levels of protection as loss of life could result should it be breached.

The Reservoir Act of 1975 dictates that where a reservoir is built in close proximity to a community of 10 dwellings or more, then it must be built to Category A standard, and the nearby community of Newbridge has 10 dwellings.

Nine properties would not raise such issues, so perverse are the implications of this iniquitous piece of guidance, drafted by the Institution of Civil Engineers and approved by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency.

Unfortunately, information is not held on how wide the Beck actually is or its rate of flow and, therefore, a technical model is required.

There is an added complication because of the necessary safety measures imposed by the presence of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway line.

The alternative proposal is the construction of eight to 10 smaller bunds, which hold 10,000 cubic metres of water each.

I cannot understand how, from the beginning, the Environment Agency could not have designed a bund that met the guidance criteria. This criteria states that any bund must be able to withstand a one-in-10,000-year flood event which could affect a community of 10 houses. Or if they could not, why did they not realise so sooner?

In my view, there are four possible options: Go back to the drawing board for a simpler scheme, using the existing £1.3m funding; re-examine the engineer’s judgment about Category A status for the reservoir and see if there is any way of re-assessing it; waive the reservoir guidance note as not applicable as a one-in-10,000-year event is so unlikely to happen to a community of 10 houses; find extra money, exploring local authority options and development gain contributions.

Perhaps the moral is either dispense with the iniquitous guidance, dispense with highly complicated over-engineered and over-constructed structures, revert to working more closely with nature, dredge and drain more and use a little more common sense.

Local people are incredibly disappointed and feel very let down by the Environment Agency. I shall continue my dialogue at the highest levels with Defra.

I shall not rest until the Pickering Pilot Project is successfully implemented. We need action and we need it now. Above all, we need some Ministerial discretion and a little pragmatism.

* Anne Mcintosh is the Conservative MP for Thirsk, Malton and Filey. she is also chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select Committee at the House of Commons.