The Government has pledged to announce how it will spend the remaining £14.7M allocated for surface water-management plans (SWMPs) by 2011 on the ‘highest-risk areas’.
In an update on the implementation of the recommendations of the Pitt review of the summer 2007 floods, it said that the six SWMP pilot authorities spent £190,000 in the last financial year, and they would receive a further £110,000 this year.
Gloucestershire County Council, one of the pilot councils, told MPs last month that to cover all the county’s urban areas, the authority would need to produce 34 SWMPs at a total cost of around £3M (Surveyor, 18 June).
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has also just launched a scoping study to look at broad options for improving local authority capacity, so that county and unitary authorities can perform their new leadership role on all forms of local flooding.
To date, DEFRA has provided funding for 27 places for local authority participants on the Environment Agency foundation degree programme.
The update on the implementation of Pitt also revealed that each Whitehall department would be publishing a climate change-adaptation plan by next spring, in response to Sir Michael Pitt’s recommendation that ‘the Government should give priority to adaptation and mitigation’.
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