Protecting the region

Last week came news that an 80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters had been cancelled and this was swiftly followed by speculation that a 60m fund to help to turn Humber ports into manufacturing centres for offshore wind turbines was under threat.

And now it is feared that flood-defence schemes, designed to prevent a repeat of the disastrous floods that beset the region three years ago, may also be cancelled as the Government looks to cut further costs in the autumn spending review that will follow today's Budget.

It is all too easy, of course, particularly in the midst of a long spell of relatively dry weather, to write off the terrible floods of 2007 as a rare occurrence and extremely unlikely to be repeated during the lifetime of the present Government. But it is precisely such short-term thinking that has caught previous administrations out time and again.

Unless you are a local resident, for example, it is all too easy to forget that, only seven years before Hull and South Yorkshire were inundated in 2007, vast areas of York were engulfed. And while the jury may be out on the claim that such events

are becoming more frequent, their sheer unpredictability, along with their potentially tragic consequences, were starkly illustrated in Cumbria only last year.

So great is the scale of the public-sector deficit that the Government is right to subject all spending plans to forensic scrutiny. Such an examination should reveal, however, that providing vulnerable areas with adequate flood defences is not a luxury but a necessity.