Councils must talk to experts over river flooding threat

I would like to comment on recent letters on flooding. River management was run by locally accountable river boards until 1965. The river boards were taken over by a series of government quangos and since 1996 rivers have been the responsibility of the Environment Agency. Government quangos are only accountable to government, and so local accountability was lost a long time ago.

My local river, the river Derwent used to be dredged regularly like other rivers, but has not been dredged since 1985. This can be proved by the evidence of tree rings etc, and there was a report on the Derwent in 2000. I believe dredging of most other rivers stopped at about the same time. Clearly the government of the time took the view that it could make economies with river drainage, and nobody would notice for many years.

Then came the floods of 2000, which badly affected Malton, Norton and Pickering. By this time, the expertise had been lost, and the rivers had become so silted up that it would have cost a vast sum to restore them to their previous condition.

So the Environment Agency argued that to take action would damage wildlife habitats, and that river dredging did not prevent flooding.

Instead, they began producing flood “management” plans, and their main concern was to prevent flooding of towns and conurbations by “allowing rivers to return to their natural flood plain” in the countryside. In other words, the countryside was to be allowed to flood in order to protect the urban areas.

Fortunately, public sympathy at a national level resulted in substantial river defences being built for Malton and Norton.

At Ryedale, I argued that the only way to confront the Environment Agency and get any sense out of them in regard to the country areas was to engage a qualified hydrologist who could talk to the Environment Agency on equal terms. It took four years to win this argument, but eventually a consultant was engaged. Politics is the art of the possible, and there then followed discussion between council, local drainage boards and others on what could be agreed without dredging the whole river. As a result, some water weeds were cleared, some trees were cut back and some efforts were made at water retention above Pickering. As a result, last year’s floods were not as bad for the countryside areas of Ryedale as the 2000 floods, and Pickering did not flood this time.

The solution to the flooding issue is therefore to get one’s local district council to engage an expert hydrologist to talk to the Environment Agency and see what can be agreed. This is not cheap, but in my view it is the only way forward at the moment.