(Title Image: Natural Resources Wales, Crown Copyright)
Environment Committee
Flooding in Wales (pdf)
Published: 9th December 2020
- Speed of Welsh Government response to flooding praised, but councils said to be left out of pocket by clean-up costs.
- The scale of future flood challenges is said to be under-estimated.
- Natural Resources Wales calls on councils to be brave enough to turn down planning applications in flood-prone areas.
While the Committee is generally positive about the Welsh Government’s quick response to the major flooding events earlier in 2020, there were noticeable shortfalls.
Many councils were left out of pocket despite Welsh Government emergency grants, while claims “required significant work” and the requirement to spend emergency grant funding within the financial year presented difficulties as flooding continued on-off throughout the period.
The Committee recommended “end of year constraints” are removed in future.
While at the time of publication the UK Government hadn’t made available funding to meet capital repair costs which the UK Prime Minister has promised at the time, since the report was published the UK Government has made £31million available.
The current levels of investment in flood prevention – totalling around £390million a year – was said to be inadequate given the scale of future challenges.
There were also problems in how flood management funding was distributed; Rhondda Cynon Taf Council receives under 5% of the funding despite having 21% of surface water flood-risk areas in Wales (presumably due to topography). The Committee agreed that relative flood risk should guide future local spending.
One bit of good news is that while revenue/annual management funding has the above problems, the amount of capital funding for new flood defence schemes was said to be adequate, if not good. Since the floods, the Welsh Government is 100% financing council designs and plans for new defence schemes.
The Committee also welcomed Natural Resource Wales’ (NRW) candour in their annual flood report, which underlined the scale of the challenges ahead. NRW say they’ll need an additional 60-70 staff to maintain services at the required level. The Committee has long-standing concerns over funding for NRW to carry out its functions.
New Technical Advice Note (TAN) guidance on developments in flood-prone areas is due to be published in 2021. NRW told the Committee that local authorities will need to be “brave” enough to refuse to grant planning permission based on their advice.
