County and unitary authorities will take a leadership role on local flood-risk management and assume responsibility for Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), under proposals announced this week in the draft Flood and Water Management Bill.
Their new responsibilities will not be reinforced by a duty or additional central government funding, but a duty will be placed on district councils to comply with local flood-risk management strategies developed by top-tier councils.
Strategies must include flood-risk assessments and flood-risk action plans, such as surface water management plans. Councils will need to ensure all relevant partners are engaged in developing a strategy and securing progress in its implementations. ‘This will allow them to develop centres of engineering and flood-risk expertise, alongside their existing highways functions,’ the document states.
A duty will be placed on all partners to co-operate and share information of local drainage and watercourse systems, in order ‘to build up a much more comprehensive dataset for local flood risk’. There may also be a duty for local authorities to collect information from private landowners or riparian owners.
Elsewhere, developers will be required to include sustainable drainage in new developments, and seek approval from a SUDS approving body (SAB). Responsibility for adopting and maintaining new-build SUDS in the public realm will rest with county and unitary authorities.
There will be no additional funding for SUDS maintenance, but from April 2011, local authorities are expected to benefit from savings arising from the transfer of private sewers to the sewerage companies.
Local authority funds released by the transfer of private sewers, together with savings from better flood-risk management, are expected to ‘more than cover’ the additional activities that local authorities will be required to perform.
However, long-term costs beyond 10 years would need to be considered as part of future spending reviews. The Bill proposes the cancellation of the automatic right of new developments to connect their surface water drainage to sewers, which is cited as ‘one of the key reasons why there has been such a slow uptake of SUDS’.
Dr Andy Johnston, spokesman for the Local Government Information Unit, said: ‘It is imperative that we strengthen the powers and responsibilities of county councils, as well as improve their co-ordination with smaller district councils.’
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