In response to some questions that I submitted, the following letter (containing interesting links) was received from the National Audit Office.
Dear Mr Larcombe,
Thank you for your correspondence to the NAO on 5 September 2024. This was passed to me as Director of value for money audit on Defra and the Environment Agency (EA). You set out two concerns relating to:
- a lack of maintenance by EA of existing flood defences, particularly a lack of dredging of the Thames; and
- the River Thames Flood Defence scheme’s increased cost despite a reduction in project size and concerns over Defra’s partnership funding policy affecting the project.
We have not done any work specifically on dredging of the Thames, but as you may be aware we did publish a report on Resilience to Flooding in November 2023 which examined Defra’s and EA’s approach to the issues you highlight at a system level.
The report found (paragraph 22) that EA is not maintaining its flood defences to a level that optimises value for money, due to a shortfall in its maintenance funding. EA has assessed that maintaining 98% of high consequence flood assets at their required condition will provide optimal value for money, and this would require additional investment. In summer 2023 only 93.5% of EA’s assets in high consequence systems were being maintained at the required condition, below the 94-95% level agreed with Defra in the 2021 Spending Review settlement. This meant that, as at summer 2023, 203,000 properties were at increased flood risk because more EA assets are below the required condition than planned. We make a recommendation about the maintenance budget at paragraph 27.
Inflation has also affected EA’s flood and coastal defence capital investment programme (2021 to 2027), affecting the cost and viability of projects (paragraph 17 and 2.16). EA’s original assumption for inflation across the six years of the capital investment programme (4% a year) was significantly below EA’s updated flood-specific inflation forecast (as at the time of our report) of an average of 6.3% a year. EA estimates that inflation is the cause of between a half and two-thirds of the reduction in the forecast number of properties better protected by the capital investment programme.
The report also found that partnership funding is one of several risks that could prevent EA better protecting 200,000 properties by 2027 (paragraph 20). This target was already revised down from the original 336,000 properties target for the capital investment programme. In July 2023, EA estimated that £800 million of partnership funding was yet to be secured for the programme. We make recommendations about the partnership funding policy at paragraph 28.
The NAO monitors how departments are responding to all our recommendations and publishes some information in our recommendations tracker. You may also be interested to see, if you have not already, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report which resulted from a session based on our 2023 report. The government’s response to, and progress in implementing, PAC recommendations is published in HM Treasury Minutes
Resilience to flooding is a subject we return to regularly and monitor on an ongoing basis. Your correspondence is a valuable contribution to our ongoing understanding of the issues relating to this area, and to our follow-up work with Defra and EA in how they are taking forward our recommendations.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Yours sincerely
Rich Sullivan-Jones
Director, Defra VFM
END
Source document:
GF 2660 24 – Reply – Thames flood defences
This is the response from one of my readers:
Many thanks, Ewan. What a pathetic picture of the EA is painted between the lines of that letter! And, in passing, may I direct you to this (if you haven’t seen it already): https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/jubilee_river_and_downstream_wat?fbclid=IwAR1119hOpvAunF7kA_nXJyMSspf9UDc5S6yUbdR4RgclWf_KAOQnQ2xWg5M
It is far beyond time to explain to the still-disengaged senior civil servants the desperate and dangerous fiasco that is in the making while government and EA continue to sleep-walk us into disaster.
The EA does admit that global warming is a growing problem for which they should be preparing the nation. But, having accepted that we face a steadily increasing volume and intensity of rainfalls, they only witter on about “flood defences”. Meanwhile our fundamental drainage network – our rivers’ channels to the sea – is decaying, degrading and everywhere losing the crucial maximum safe discharge capacity. And this is due solely to deliberate EA neglect.
The EA has no “plan”. It is run by people who see it as a nice little sinecure, with the public their meal-ticket. There’s no drive, no motivation, just the casual re-arranging of the deckchairs at public expense. For a brighter future, buy shares in suppliers of yellow hazard jackets. For the EA to talk about “flood defences” while ignoring overall riverine drainage issues is mere ‘pissing into the wind’, with the public getting wet feet as a result.
I don’t believe that those in government circles to whom the EA answers have the foggiest about the water (or hydrological) cycle, or how water flows, how channel shapes and dimensions affect this, how natural rivers evolve and how man has systematically re-engineered and tamed them for centuries. I see no understanding that, if all the rain-water that does not actually evaporate can’t get to the sea by flowing within the usual river channels, then it must overflow the banks and surroundings and then swell to inundate key locations and all within. What we see now will be trivial by comparison with what must happen if the EA’s Canute-like conduct continues. But the Civil servants, Ministers, and EA top brass, keep their fingers crossed that a) the public is as bloody ignorant and careless as they are and b) that it won’t happen while they’re in office.
This has to change. But how to make that happen?
Cheers – xxxx
[Link to ‘Mechanisms of Flooding‘ Report dated 2004]