Thursday 23rd January 2014
David Warburton, the Parliamentary Candidate for Somerton and Frome, writes ~
So we hear that the Environment Agency is to lose 1,500 or so of its workforce. And once more we are submerged. Roads closed or impassable, villages cut off, houses, farms and businesses flooded, with – once again – devastating consequences.
Many believe, and I count myself among them, that the chief architect of this waterworld is the Environment Agency.
Their reluctance to regularly dredge and properly maintain our waterways means we have rivers with only a small fraction of their capacity available. So when it rains, as it does rather frequently here in the West Country, our rivers quickly fill up and overflow. It’s pretty straightforward.
So how can it possibly make sense to be reducing staff numbers at the Environment Agency, when it would appear that they’re already struggling to keep up with their remit?
I’ll tell you how. The Environment Agency needs a good sort out. Yes it sounds like 1,500 staff is a lot to cut, until you realise that the organisation has more than 11,000 staff. That’s more than its equivalent agency in Canada, or France, or Germany, or Denmark, Sweden or Austria. In fact, it has more staff than the agencies in all those countries combined. And that’s just to manage England.
Across the entire globe, only America’s Environmental Protection Agency has more people than England’s Environment Agency. And that’s to manage a country 80 times larger than England, grappling extremes from Death Valley in California to the snow-covered Alaskan mountains. Everything from Niagara Falls to Hawaiian volcanoes, from the sand dunes of Colorado to the soupy Floridian everglades. It manages all this with 15,000 staff. As you can see, that’s not much more than us.
So what’s going wrong? It’s certainly not funding. England’s Environment Agency also has the second biggest agency budget on earth, with £2.5 billion provided for flood protection alone in the current budgetary four-year period. But you only have to look around us to see that it has – by definition – failed in its purpose. We are flooded again. And we are flooded because our local rivers and waterways have not been cleared or dredged, and are not being managed.
It is time to look at the Environment Agency and its failings, its remit and its duties. Back in 2007, the National Audit Office concluded that the Environment Agency had not reached its targets for maintaining flood defences. It said the agency could reduce the need for extra funding by improving its cost effectiveness.
That same year the Public Account Committee concluded that the agency had “not delivered protection for the British people” after floods left 13 people dead, with 44,600 homes flooded and £3 billion of damage. And not long ago, Defra announced another independent review of the Environment Agency after it emerged its directors had received five-figure “performance bonuses”. It’s the old story. Legions of managers but not enough people with JCBs, shovels and sleeves rolled up.
No one expects some areas not to flood now and again. But there is a world of difference between the occasional covering with water and total widespread and utterly unmanaged annihilation.
Our homes, businesses, farms, villages and towns left reeling and fighting for their livelihoods. This is not acceptable. The Environment Agency is not fit for purpose and needs to be hung out to dry.