Bill targets red tape for flood measures

27 February 2008

Senior Scottish council officers hope ‘a radical simplification’ of the process for building flood-prevention schemes will reduce delays.

The Scottish Government has proposed measures for a new Flooding Bill to replace the 50-year-old legislation for promoting engineering solutions to reduce the risk of properties being inundated.

The current two-stage approval process – requiring both a flood risk-prevention order and planning permission – would be merged, and possibly, not require ministerial approval.

However, councils would still need a separate approval from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency under the ‘controlled activities regulations’ (CARS), covering engineering works in rivers, lochs and wetlands. Local people objecting to projects could still force a local public inquiry, as now, but would not be able to object twice.

The Scottish Government said it had already speeded up the process, by removing the need for councils to seek a ministerial decision on whether or not flood mitigation measures should attract capital funding. But the size of councils’ single capital pot allocations would, in future, vary, according to SEPA’s assessment of the level of flood risk in their areas.
Councils in areas SEPA considered to be at significant risk of flooding would also have a new duty to prepare a ‘local flood risk-management plan,’ which would include a sustainable urban drainage plan. Controversially, this might include using local roads as designated flood routes for conveying flood waters.

Bob Stewart, director of environmental services at Moray Council, which is progressing a £150M flood defence programme, including a £21M scheme approved by ministers last week, told Surveyor that while the Scottish Government was right to streamline the system, ‘I’d be looking for a single-consent regime’. SEPA has twice objected to Moray’s £10M Forres defence scheme to protect 800 properties, first over the planning application, and then over the CARS licence. ‘Hydrologists examine the scheme for us.

Hydrologists in the Scottish Government then have a look, and, after that, hydrologists at SEPA. It becomes an argument among scientists, rather than an output-driven process.’ But Stewart hoped that rural authorities such as Moray – ‘contributing to Scotland’s economy with, for instance, 50 malt whisky distilleries’ – would not lose out in the new process for determining defence funding.

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