Why the Conservative government is failing to progress a national flooding strategy - Yorkshire Post Letters

I’d like to offer an explanation as to why the Conservative government is failing to progress a national flooding strategy (Editorial, January 8). The issue is certainly one that can be portrayed as being complex; lots of conflicting demands on our land, needing to wait and see how climate change evolves, interactions between local authorities and interested agencies, are some of the more obvious excuses for kicking the can down the road.

There is a morsel of truth in some of those, but the real answer is probably that change to river management and land use is not in the interest of the Tory party’s sponsors.

Does the shooting lobby want boggy peat moorland soaking up rainfall and acting as a natural flow buffer? Not if it affects the number of game bird chicks that mature to be shot at.

Do all landowners downstream want beavers reintroduced so meadows flood rural valleys? Not if it reduces the acreage that can be let as arable farmland.

Do suburban landbankers want to market riverside properties? Not if they have to pay compensation for those new properties flooding, or insurance for cities downstream of their developments.

Do privatised water companies want to surrender their ability to pump effluent into our rivers and canals? Not if it reduces dividends to shareholders.

I suspect that local authorities don’t much want to surrender power to a larger regional authority with planning remit all the way up the river catchment area either; that would imply a One Yorkshire-type solution, which as Micheal Meadowcroft correctly pointed out in these columns last month, would be a powerful voice of opposition to central government’s diktat over Yorkshire.

Finally, if we include rising seawater levels inundating tidal areas, then the flooding strategy risks highlighting Mr Sunak’s moral failure retreating even from earlier Conservative decarbonisation targets.

Not everyone has lost hope, however; there is a General Election this year, and we have an opportunity to vote for a party that will invest for the longer term, and has a proven agenda to update our constitution, reform our land tax and protect our watercourses.