The aftermath of the severe floods experienced by the county, especially last July, is an administrative nightmare. The more I have looked into what is going on, the more appalled I am.
The following ‘coordinating’ committees have been set up in the past few months:
l The Local Resilience Forum, which discusses planning of the emergency services and is meant to produce local county flood plans, is chaired by the chief constable.
l The Land Drainage Partnership, which deals essentially with flash flooding, is chaired by Worcestershire County Council.
l Working to this is the Technical Officers Working Group, chaired by Wychavon District Council.
l Wychavon also runs its own Flood Working Group.
l Meeting for the first time today is the Severe Weather Group, chaired by the Environment Agency.
To cap it all, I received a parliamentary answer this week from Phil Woolas, the parliamentary secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which said: “My department is not aware of any local authority bodies named as flood preventative planning committees”.
What this means is that none of these committees has any real authority. Despite the best efforts of some officials, the whole thing has the makings of a shambles.
Meanwhile in the Wychavon area alone, almost a year on, 56 households are still living in caravans as a result of flooding last summer and 256 households are still classified as ‘displaced’.
The person who has been put in charge of trying to find some solution to all this, Sir Michael Pitt, has not been of much help so far. In his interim report he proposes that more responsibility should be given to local authorities for flood prevention planning. He does not specify how this should be done. When I asked him about it earlier this week he said his full report would be “more specific”.
What is clearly needed is for central government to step in and set up a single chain of command, probably with the Environment Agency at the centre.
If left alone, the various bodies will merely fight to hold their own turf. For instance, the county council argues that so far as flash flooding is concerned it should be responsible for issues involving the drainage of land particularly where this affects highways.
Wychavon, however, says that it should be in charge because of the questions arising about the responsibilities of landowners and the effect that drainage is having on watercourses. The EA remains in charge where rivers are the cause of flooding.
This cannot go on. Government must take a grip.