The Government has pledged that its response to the Pitt review into last summer’s floods will ‘ensure that the net additional cost to local authorities is fully funded’.
Pitt’s final ‘lessons learned’ report into the floods of last June and July acknowledged that placing a new duty on local authorities to manage surface water flooding ‘will have resource implications’. However, he also appeared to suggest that it was possible for local authorities, ‘ahead of the game’, to tackle surface water flooding without new funding from Whitehall.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has now held out the prospect of new funding, saying the £34.5M set aside to implement the Pitt review is only ‘an initial planning estimate for the three-year spending review period’. DEFRA, in its response to a select committee report into flooding, also provided more details of the new legislative framework to be provided by its proposed Flood and Water Bill.
The department agreed that the role of the Environment Agency – to have a new strategic overview for surface water flooding, while councils were responsible for local delivery – should be limited to ‘providing guidance and advice to local authorities’. But it refused to be drawn on how the new duty on local authorities for tackling surface water flooding would be framed. The select committee had urged a duty ‘to ensure its area is effectively drained of precipitation to an agreed national standard of service’.
The Government promised to set out detailed responsibilities ‘quickly’, but in ‘full consultation’ with councils and others.
Flooding: Government response to the committee’s fifth report of session 2007-08
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