Society joins Lib Dems in call to upgrade drainage

20 September 2007

The Government is facing a call for drainage systems to be upgraded across the country to cope with increasing rainfall, in the wake of this summer’s devastating floods.

The Liberal Democrats were this week poised to adopt a policy to place a statutory duty on private water companies to review and upgrade drainage, in line with increased needs due to climate change.

At the same time, the County Surveyors’ Society acknowledged a need to re-visit the standards on highway drainage capacity, and increase capital budgets . The Liberal Democrat conference will hear that there is a need to act, given the fact that the main problem in June and July was rainfall overwhelming drainage systems.

The Environment Agency has estimated some £270M of annual flooding damage is down to this. Technical officers have long maintained that getting water companies to support engineering measures on the highway network with their own improvements is an obstacle to upgrading their own systems. But the water industry questioned the rationale for a new duty.

A spokesperson for Water UK, which represents the UK’s water and sewer companies, claimed: ‘Such a duty would be difficult to define and implement.’ It was already ‘good practice’ to review systems, typically designed to cope with 1-in-30-year storms, ‘in light of increased flows,’ said the spokesperson, but making systems across the country bigger was ‘not a sustainable option’. ‘It would be better to deal with flooding at source,’ he claimed, by introducing a highway drainage connection charge, for example.

But Richard Wills, County Surveyors’ Society president, said councils were prepared to spend more to expand capacity, so water companies would also need to. Given that OFWAT controls water companies’ investment, ‘as a society, we are going to have to think through how we’re going to pay for this necessary work’. Local authorities around the country were likely to allocate additional funds to capital works to upgrade drainage systems, following multimillion-pound highways damage. An independent review of the devastating Hull floods concluded that the 1-in-30 design standard ‘should be a minimum’. ‘We need to re-think what a typical storm looks like,’ said Wills. ‘But we must also reconsider whether combined surface water and foul water sewers are a good idea.’

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Society joins Lib Dems in call to upgrade drainage

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