Welcome, everybody, to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee. We are delighted to be joined by our panel here for the review into flooding resilience in England. We are joined by Baroness Brown of Cambridge and Professor Richard Dawson. I will invite you to introduce yourselves and your role on the Climate Change Committee, please.

Hello, I am Baroness Brown; I chair the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee.

Hello, I am Professor Richard Dawson; I am based at the School of Engineering in Newcastle University, and I am the Flooding Champion on the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee.

Fantastic. Thank you both for joining us. I will start with you, Baroness Brown. A recent survey highlighted that public confidence in the UK’s preparedness for climate impacts—particularly on flooding—is low: 78% of respondents believe that the country is unprepared and the number believing that we are broadly moving in a positive direction was below 20%. Given these findings, do you and the Adaptation Committee share this pessimism about the UK’s current readiness to address climate risks?

I do recognise that public sentiment and I think that stems from the problem we have right across adaptation in the UK, which is that the public has no idea what the Government’s targets are. In terms of the Environment Agency and its flood and coastal erosion management plan, we welcomed that second flood and coastal erosion management plan when it was published—was that back in 2020, Richard?

That sounds about right, yes.

Yes. It was a huge improvement on the last one and at that time the capital that was asked for—about £1 billion a year—was provided. Of course, we have had quite a lot of inflation since then. In terms of achieving what it set out to do. It is not quite achieving the targets that were set out then, but it is quite close to achieving them. The challenge is that the public has no idea what those targets are and, even importantly, even if they did know what they are, the public does not know what that means for them in their homes. That is a huge gap.

Clearly, if water is rushing up your drive towards the front of your house, the Government’s performance against target is not of a lot of interest.

Absolutely.

Putting to one side for the moment where the public are, where are you? Are you optimistic about how prepared we are as a country?

In our last progress report in 2023, we called this area an area of mixed progress because there has been some positive development with the new major infrastructure that the Environment Agency is funding to put in place, although that programme is now running a bit behind plan and it is not going to deliver as much as was expected when the funding was allocated because of things like inflation. We now have the new modelling of flood risk from the Environment Agency, which shows that a lot more properties have moved into the highest risk category. In this new modelling there is a 90% increase in the number of properties in the highest risk category—about a one in 30 year chance of flooding from river and coastal flooding—and there has been a 200% increase in the number of properties now thought to be at risk from surface water flooding. Surface water flooding isn’t usually quite as damaging because the water levels are not normally as high as river and coastal flooding. Improved modelling and understanding have led to a huge increase in the risk of surface water flooding—what we might see in central London—particularly in the centres of cities, where we are gradually paving over everything.

Are you saying we are now better aware of how dangerous it is or that there is an increase in the number of people who are threatened or both?

We are now better aware and of course, because of climate change, because of population growth, because we continue to do some development in flood zones and because we keep increasing the amount of impermeable surfaces in our developments, risk is increasing.

If you had been walking through the town centre and were approached by one of these pollsters, and they had asked you whether you thought Britain was well prepared, what would your answer have been?

I would have said we were not well prepared and, unfortunately, people do not know how to be prepared. People need a much better understanding of what the Government can do, what they need to do for themselves and how they can help themselves to become resilient to the things that the Government cannot actually prevent from happening.

What impact do you feel that flooding currently has in England to people who are affected?

It has a lot of impact. There is a lot of damage to property and things—I will turn to Richard for that—but one thing we do not talk enough about is the impacts on people’s health. We know that there is research that shows that people who are affected by flooding experience mental health impacts and, indeed, the longer they are out of their houses, the more severe those mental health impacts are. For vulnerable communities, we know those impacts are even more extreme. For vulnerable communities, the elderly, people on lower incomes, perhaps people who are less likely to have insurance, this can be absolutely devastating. We do need to take more cognisance of the health impacts. Let me ask Richard to fill in on the other impacts.

That is a very significant one. If we refer to a very recent example of flooding over New Year’s around Greater Manchester, there we see quite a nice example of the challenges that the nation faces in terms of trying to tackle and ensure our resilience. We saw surface water flooding, river flooding. We saw breaching of a canal asset, a canal flood defence embankment, and that led to damage to property. Baroness Brown has already talked about the social wellbeing impacts on the people. We heard about 1,300 people who were evacuated and moved. Those health issues are especially acute for people who rely on things like healthcare at home. That has a knock-on impact on our healthcare sector as well because those people need support delivered through other ways. I would also draw attention not just to damage to property but also disruption to our core infrastructure services. The Bridgewater Canal failure led to disruption to rail services. It led to flooding of a sewage treatment plant and all of those have a much wider knock-on impact across our economy, so people who are not necessarily directly wet will also experience the impact of that flood.

Baroness Brown, you talked about the mental health impacts. There are several members of this Committee who have constituencies that have regularly been victims of flood. I have been one of those in Chesterfield. One of the things that strikes me is that, when you have been flooded, the fear of being flooded again never leaves you. What we have seen is that people who were flooded back in October 2023 since then, I think, have had at least three flood warnings so they have relived the whole thing again. You are absolutely right about the impact of being out of their properties, but when they return there is the thought that they are a flood victim. They never stop being a flood victim and they are constantly affected. One of the things that people feel very strongly about—and there was criticism—is that they received the warnings too late. There is also criticism that as soon as there is a bit of rain there is a warning, but they can see the river is nowhere near high enough. It feels like the agencies are protecting themselves by sending these warnings out all the time and then, as a potential flood victim, you are sat there thinking, “Do we stop everything and move all the furniture upstairs three or four or five times a year or do we take our chances knowing that if we take our chances we might have disastrous consequences?” Tragically, in 2023, in one of these communities in Chesterfield, we had someone drown in their own front room. In terms of the work that your Committee has done, where do you feel that we are in our ability to actually provide predictions and reassurance to those who have been flooded as to whether it is likely to happen again?

I am not sure we are in that good a position in providing reassurance. There is an assessment made of the quality of flood alerts. Sorry, I do not have the data for the most recent assessment. However, typically a very high proportion of flood alerts are assessed as being good quality, giving people the right information in good time. At times of extremely bad weather, the quality level of flood alerts does decline and that is something we have seen. Richard may have further data on that. We look at it, as a Committee, from a macroscopic level, not from the individual community level, because we are trying to look at England or sometimes national data. Those are very real experiences that you talk about, and they probably do not come through very strongly in our reporting.

I understand. Professor Dawson, what are the major gaps or weaknesses in Britain’s flood resilience efforts?

As we were talking about earlier, we have a good understanding of the risks and the scale of the challenge. In terms of resilience, I think our response is well geared up to deal with and deliver capital investment in big flood defence infrastructure. A lot of the decision-making processes around “Do I spend?” or whatever, will favour and look at larger settlements, big investments. Where I think we struggle, in terms of getting the right balance, is in the smaller schemes for smaller communities, individual houses, delivering resilience measures at an individual property level and also implementing and integrating what are often referred to as a natural flood management or wider catchment scale measures. Some of that stems from the governance. We are often dealing with lots of different landowners and other organisations who have responsibility in those spaces. The other area we need to look at—and you have already touched on this—is not so much around the science of the forecasting but more the communication of those messages, because something does not quite seem to be joining up. I was trying to find the exact numbers, but it is around about half the people who received a message said in a recent survey that they did not know what to do, how to respond so we do have to address that, so a few issues there.

Professor, you mentioned about how some of the mitigation elements need to be done at an individual property level. Some of my constituents are flooded on a regular basis and they have had trouble getting funding from the local authority to pay for their own mitigation measures. It is a problem that repeats on a yearly basis. Do you have any thoughts as to how we might make that simpler for them?

Not explicit, but this has to be something that is looked at in terms of policy and at a macro level. The insurance industry has a key role to play here. Flood Re has set an important tone recently talking about building back better, but we also need to see more grants being made available to support that process.

Especially for more vulnerable households who are less likely to be covered by effective insurance. We look at dealing with vulnerable households and supporting them to do insulation to make their homes warmer, to enable them to move towards net zero. We also need to be thinking about, if they are in flood zones, how do we support them with making sure they can put in property level flood resilience measures as well.

Before we move off this topic, we will bring Julia Buckley in.

We often represent rural areas where we have a small number of houses that are flooded frequently rather than a considerable number flooded once every 10 years. How do you feel about proposing changes so that instead of grants being allocated on the basis of scale—so the number of properties—another factor in there ought to be the frequency, even if it is a lower number of properties?

I feel nervous about jumping straight into a specific recommendation, but I think that is an important criterion. We do need to think about this. One of the ways that we have been thinking about this in the Climate Change Committee is around—and this is endorsing as well—recommendations from the National Infrastructure Commission and having clear resilience standards, just as they do in the Netherlands. In some cases, those might be dominated by delivering flood defences and the typical hard, big infrastructure but in smaller more rural communities I think that we do need to see other ways of delivering that protection and resilience.

I cannot resist the temptation to chip in on this line of commentary, I suppose, because of two things that happen in my constituency, which is frequently subject to flooding. One is that, in order to get grants from the Government schemes, people have to demonstrate that they have applied every year for insurance and if they cannot get insurance one year—they have done that for several years, given up applying for it because they are never going to get it and then they find they are ineligible for grants when a flood does hit because they do not have the paperwork proving that they were rejected. That is a serious issue. The other thing is, of course, people no longer being able to sell their properties because mortgage companies will not give mortgages on properties that are increasingly subject to flooding. That leads me on to the topic of my question, which is about the impact of climate change. What we are seeing is effectively moving goalposts of flood resilience, aren’t we? I would like to ask Baroness Brown first: can you comment on how climate change, including increasing frequency and severity of heavy rain storms, is affecting the sustainability of our country’s flood resilience mechanisms?

The last Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA 3, that we did does indicate that the projections at that time showed that, by the time we get to 2050, even if we are on a path to net zero, there will be more properties at risk of flooding, more people exposed to flooding than we have today. It is saying that our programme is not designed to get us into a much better position than we are in today. In fact, it is not quite keeping up with changes in the climate, the changes in population growth, and the further development of houses in flood zones and the things that are going on. It seems to me that we need a national debate on what is affordable and what do people expect. This is a programme that is saying that what is cost-effective to do is invest about £1 billion a year in additional flood defences. If we want a programme that invests a lot more than that that money has to be found and there needs to be a debate about: is that the best place to put it? It is a really difficult one. I think the problem is that there isn’t a national debate. We do not have those national standards. We do not have an adaptation strategy for the UK that says, like the Delta Plan says in Holland, “This is the resilient standard, which is the Delta Plan and the committed investment the Government have in that”—the €27 billion or whatever it is—”which will be delivered to people. Therefore, beyond that, you need to be prepared in the following sorts of ways”. That is the debate we need to have, to say to people, “Is it acceptable that more people will be exposed to flooding by 2050, or do you want the Government to spend a lot more on this?”

Professor Dawson, we have already touched on the issue of needing to protect existing infrastructure from that moving goalpost of the increasing problem of flooding. We also have an issue, which I think you have mentioned, about the new infrastructure we are building now. Are we making sure it is sufficiently flood resilient? Would you like to comment on those two issues? In particular, I understand that the Thames Estuary 2100 project has been for some years now perhaps modelling an effective way to think about how we manage these risks long term. Any comments on that?

I will have a go at that and then I might pass over to Baroness Brown because she chairs one of the advisory boards for the Thames Estuary project. It might be best to hear directly from her on that. There is a big challenge for new infrastructure and for new housing. At the moment our most recent data suggests that we are still building about 7% of our new homes in flood zone 3—that is places that are likely to get wet—which seems like a surprising proportion given we know the risks. I welcome the recent changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, which I think does call for—or at least should consider—adaptation and mitigation to future climates within the new framework. That is a good start but, ultimately, the process that we go through is seeing a lot of infrastructure and a lot of houses still being built in places at risk. When they are, we are not seeing increased standards applied to those. If that is a decision made for other reasons, other drivers, we need to make sure that those properties, that infrastructure, is well protected and will not fall apart next time there is a big flood. Again, it comes back to this point about setting very clear standards about what we can expect, what people can expect and having that conversation around the trade-offs, what we can afford within that as well. I do think that this particular issue of new build is especially acute. If we are aspiring to build 1.5 million new homes over the next five years, we have to make sure that they are resilient to flooding and other climate change impacts as well.

Perhaps if I come in. The Thames 2100 plan is a very good approach to planning. It asks: what do we think is going to happen in the long-term future, what do we need to monitor now to see whether we are progressing towards that? What sort of sea level rise, for example, are we likely to be experiencing by the end of the century and what does current monitoring tell us? When do we need to make big decisions like, “Do we need a second Thames barrier?”? Indeed, in the last review of the Thames 2100 plan we moved forward that decision by 10 years. We now need to make a decision in 2040 for the long term. It should do things like reserving land, so that where we need to build that barrier the land is available. There are challenges with it. First, it is not a statutory plan. Secondly, there is a complex network of defences along the Thames estuary that protect London. Only 12% of that network is actually owned by the Environment Agency, so 88% of that network depends on the riparian owners—the people who own the land beside the river—doing the right thing and keeping those defences up to standard. Although the Environment Agency has some powers to try to ensure they do, they are not very strong. Then when we get to 2040, which is not a very long way away, there is no mechanism for saying, where does the funding come from? If the 2040 decision is that we do need a new Thames barrier, how is that going to be funded? It is a great example of what we call adapted planning, doing the “No regrets” things now and keeping our options open for the future and doing the monitoring so that we can keep reassessing which of those future options is the most cost effective and the best way to move forward. It is held up internationally as a great example of that, but it does have these challenges that it is not a statutory plan, and it is not a funded plan.

Richard is probably best placed to give you a good answer on that one.

When it came out a few years ago it was a big step forward, so I want to start with sounding a positive note around a lot of good thinking that has gone into that. In fact, one of the things I remember welcoming at the time was a view to take a much more integrated approach looking at all sources of flooding: coastal, fluvial and surface water. Where it has struggled perhaps to achieve some of that is predominantly around some of the issues that Baroness Brown touched on in terms of delivery. We have talked about a good start to the budget and capital investment, but inflationary pressures and some other drivers reduced that, so it is actually delivering far less in terms of what it hoped to achieve in that five or six year cycle. In terms of surface water management, what we see is still a very complicated picture of who owns assets, who is responsible and how to deliver robust surface water management in what are quite complicated spaces like cities, even, as we heard, along the Thames Estuary and so on, where there is multiplicity of ownership and of course drivers of cost put pressures on that. I think that would be one of the starting points and the other perhaps key issue is coming back to where we started around those wider issues of resilience. We have been good at delivering big capital projects for the most part but less successful at rolling out wider resilience measures to individual homes, smaller communities and implementing real change in the way we manage our land and slow down water flows in catchments, so a few things there.

The other area where it has fallen down because of the funding was that the capital ask was pretty much granted but the requirements for maintenance were not properly taken on board. The Environment Agency used to have a target that 98% of its assets were of a good standard. With all of the severe weather we have been having, the Agency has found its assets have been deteriorating faster than historically. Two years ago, it had 94% of its assets in good condition. I understand that now it has reduced its target to having 94% of assets in good condition but I think in the latest numbers only 92% of its assets are in good condition. It is not just the capital; it is actually maintenance of this growing base of assets as well that is really important. Then the issue that Richard flagged before that, of course, the plan is done on the basis of value for money. It is very easy to do a value for money calculation where you have a large town or you have a sewage works and some very important major roads, you easily get the value for money. Where you have smaller communities is when that sort of analysis does not deliver you particularly good outcomes for people.

It can be very complicated because there are so many different parties involved, particularly when you come to things like surface water flooding where you have particular issues around drainage, where the water companies may also be involved. I do not think we always get that co-ordination right and it is clear that we do not all get the communication right, particularly with homeowners and members of the public. There is more to do there, but it is quite variable. Some places do it very well and other places have fewer good outcomes. It is one of those things that, with all the pressures on local authorities, there are probably some who are better positioned than others.

Stronger oversight and better co-ordination would be really helpful and better funding at all levels of our Government, from local government as well as at the national government level. Richard, you have some thoughts on governance as well you were talking about.

Yes, absolutely. One of the questions and challenges around oversight that we always face when the Committee is trying to scrutinise these things is actually a mixed bag of data and information on what progress is being made, how many property flood resilience measures have been delivered, and what coverage of insurance do we see across floodplains. I suppose some of that reflects the blend of governance and the need for stronger oversight and co-ordination, where we are not pulling those things together and there is not that clear ownership. Coming back to the recent floods in Greater Manchester, what happened there was the breach of the Bridgewater canals owned by a private operator. That just highlights again—Baroness Brown made this point—in the Thames Estuary that, although we have DEFRA, as national strategy leader, providing the overall policy and a lot of delivery on the ground through its local operations. There is still a huge amount of actors out there and they are obviously even harder to have oversights and responsibility over.

We have quite a lot of rather important plans to do with flooding. For example, we have the shoreline management plans all around the coast of England that look at how the shoreline should be managed in the face of increasing coastal flood risk. Again, like the Thames 2100 plan, those are not statutory plans so when we did a review a few years ago looking at how many of the local plans actually even reflected their shoreline management plan, and looking at whether shoreline management plans that people thought they had would pass the value for money test, we found that many of them would not pass the value for money test and some local plans did not even incorporate their shoreline management plans. While we have all these useful plans, we think they do need to be put on a statutory footing, both the Thames 2100 and the shoreline management plan. The Environment Agency has been updating the shoreline management plans and they have been significantly improved but they still do not have a statutory basis.

One of my top priorities would be communication, making sure people know what protection they can expect in different scenarios and what resilience they can put in place for themselves. I am going to ask Richard to pick up on that if he wants to.

For me a key emphasis needs to be moving from just thinking about flood defence infrastructure to thinking about the wider issues around resilience. How well prepared are we? As Baroness Brown said, what can we expect? How do we respond? What is our approach to recovery? So, taking a much broader view and I would expect that that will start to bring in and tease out, I would expect, a number of these governance challenges and oversight issues that we have talked about.

I was really interested to hear you talk about that complex arrangement or that array of different partners, because that is exactly how residents feel—that it is highly complicated. They do not know who does what and they do not know who to turn to. You also talk about the need for more investment and better value for money. Do you see any ideas around if there were fewer actors involved, if they were combined in some way, that responsibility was held more in one place rather than fragmented, that that in itself could be better value for money, it could lead to perhaps economies of scale or the shift, which Professor Dawson is talking about, to not just looking at defences but looking at the longer-term solutions, because you can afford prevention from the same budget?

You make a very interesting point and at a local level for people to have a single point of contact is always hugely important. About your bigger question, it is a very interesting question, and I do not have an immediate answer. Richard—?

No. That may be a question for the taskforce that we were just talking about. I would emphasise the importance of local agency and actors, in that what we do see regularly in any flood events, that local knowledge, people having community members that they can trust and interact with is so key. I am sure that there are lots of ways you can create organisations that look like that and can cope with that, but there is a risk that, if we overly centralise things, we may lose that local connectivity, that local touch, when we are dealing with these sorts of extreme incidents.

It is sobering to hear your analysis—climate change undeniably increasing the intensity and the frequency of the risk of flooding. We have heard about the damage to businesses and households. In my constituency in South Cambridgeshire, it is also hitting farming. Last year, a farmer at Huntingdon Farm in Sawston said that it was horrendous. It was the wettest in his 50 years. He is along the River Cam. It is a sheep farm, and he was saying they had to take the sheep off all of the land because they were on islands, flooded islands around. It was also then the other farmers because he said it was all year round because it then delayed them being able to do the drilling for the seeds, the fertilising and everything. The impact on farming was great as well. Baroness Brown, you were talking about funding, and this is where the rubber hits the road. In the short term—let’s just look at the short term before looking at those longer term overviews. In autumn 2024, the Government said that they were looking at providing £2.4 billion for 2024 to 2026 for flood defences but added that significant funding pressures on this Budget may mean that they have to review those amounts. My question is twofold. Do you think, on the one hand, that this level of funding is sufficient to address the increasing climate risks and inflation costs? Secondly, do you think that the existing funding mechanisms are adequate to get the right level of funding to where it is needed at the right time?

We are probably not the very best people to ask those questions of. The analysis that goes into what is required for capital funding is based on where is it value for money in terms of the protection it will deliver to put new capital assets in place. We would assume that that analysis has been done correctly and, as I say, historically it has been coming out at about £1 billion a year for capital funding. I have seen some forward projections, which suggest similar levels to that, so £1.2 billion a year for two years sounds to be in the ballpark you would expect. The key thing is the basis on which those numbers are derived is that there is a calculation of where is it value for money in terms of the protection it will deliver for us to make those investments. If you want a different level of protection you have a different calculation. In terms of our national adaptation plan, this country has never had any strategy from the Government that says, “This is the level of protection we are going to provide. This is the resilient standard to which we will work”.

I heard what you were saying about the Dutch example in the Netherlands where they have resilient standards. By “standards”, do I understand you to mean this is the protection that is necessary across different areas and the standards at which it should be, therefore we can calculate the costs for that? Therefore, the amount that is being set aside by the Government at the moment is just for one type of protection, but it is insufficient if we are really looking at resilient standards?

It is insufficient if we want a different level of protection. That is the challenge.

At the moment, we don’t actually know?

I think in the last settlement the Environment Agency had a target initially of increasing the number of houses protected against severe flooding by 360,000. That by now has dropped to, I think, 200,000.

Yes, it was 336,00 down to 200,000.

That is the additional houses protected by the capital allocations that had been given in the last settlement. I am afraid I don’t know, for these two years at £2.4 billion or whatever, what the target for protection is going to be.

You are making us ask an even bigger, almost existential question, which is: we do not know how much we should be spending because we have not had the national debate and set the target for the country.

We have set the vision for what we think a well-adapted UK looks like and said, “Okay, if we want to be well adapted, what is the implication of that, what should people be able to expect?”

Within what is being given at the moment, with the Environment Agency, within that funding, saying that it is less able now to invest in the same number of projects as it was, do you think that more could be done to adequately resource the Environment Agency for its role and its tasks?

I am sure more could be done to resource the Environment Agency for its role, absolutely. It is a very crucial role. Yes. I think you have Paul Sayers coming in the next session as a witness. Paul is one of the experts in this country who does these sorts of calculations about levels of protection and things, so I think he would be a very good person to take your questions to.

We did talk about vulnerability, and you were mentioning the level of households. In what way do you think that we are able to provide those most vulnerable with some of the protection that is needed?

That is why Richard was saying that the local authorities are of enormous importance in this because they can map their communities. They know where they have clusters of vulnerable households. They know where they have care homes, where they have clusters of elderly people. When there is a serious event like a flood, they know where they need to be focusing most help. Also, when they have the funding to do it, where funding should be focused to help people to improve their homes, to make them more resilient, or where you should be focusing your communications with people to make sure these people have actually got the message, are signed up to the flood warnings, know what they mean and what they should do, have had information about keeping a bag upstairs with their key tablets in. I remember my elderly mother and the range of tablets she had to take, making sure they have that bag upstairs that has those in so, if they have to move out suddenly, they do not have to be collecting them from various places.

That social capital that is there is absolutely critical. It is very interesting that, following covid, police forces around the country are building on those neighbourhood groups that were helping each other. They are calling them community resilience groups, but they are not talking about the kind of resilience we are talking about at the moment, but it could be something that we need to broaden out. Most of these are voluntary, aren’t they? The flood forums. Do you think that in some way we should at least be funding the co-ordination of those forums?

We certainly want to be supporting and helping those forums be strong and broaden their reach. I think that some of their strength comes from the fact that these are bottom up community groups and there is always a risk, when you parachute in from above, of disrupting that dynamic. Baroness Brown highlighted a number of the really important vulnerability factors around individuals in houses, but we have just touched upon one that I was going to add as well: the importance of the social network, and the ability to support each other. We see repeatedly where there are community groups, family groups—and people have that social resilience as well as financial and other resilience in there—the impacts are far less severe, especially in the long term. When you do not have that, then we see much greater long-term social and mental health impacts arising from floods as well.

Just on that, the example then, also from the Netherlands, is there anything else that you think we should be looking at? We will have a visit, so it is interesting to know. Is there anything in your opinion we should be looking at, as well as the resilience standards and the plan that is in place? Any other things that you think would be useful for us in terms of taking on board as good.

One of the things that they do also have in the Netherlands is a clear funding strategy to deliver a long term plan. So, this isn’t one or two years ahead. They have a much clearer and comprehensive approach to supporting that investment as well.

They also have a lot of very good work on what flood resilient towns and cities look like and how you use blue and green infrastructure, to make it a nice environment for people to live in but also to make it an environment where water has somewhere to go. They do a lot of planning on, “How do we make our towns and cities more flood resilient with more porous surfaces and more places for the water to go?” because they need to do that. We could learn a lot from that in our planning.

If I might just follow up on that. It is not that all of those are unique to the Netherlands. There are lots of nice examples peppered around the country of small scale exemplars of these sorts of interventions and changes in our urban spaces, and perhaps where we can learn a lot from the Netherlands is how you scale up from small peppercorns of pockets of excellence and small-scale actions into something that is much more system scale, really thinking about how these little things contribute towards the bigger picture of flood resilience.

We are also looking at the house building targets, so this is something that we absolutely need to ensure has been taken on board with increasing climate risks but, as you say, with increasing house building, what impacts will that have on our ability to have those green or blue spaces, or our ability to manage water at the same time? When you said you thought it was very good in terms of the NPPF, would you think that we also need to have a look at incremental impacts on flood zones? At the moment every planning application is for itself, but not an incremental impact on the amount that we are paving over or making hard surfaces for.

Absolutely, yes. I used the term “excellence” to describe it, but I think it is a step in the right direction. We have to be considering adaption to the impacts of climate change in every decision we make. Otherwise, we are potentially racking up further risk to the country, which we will have to pay for in some way. Looking at that incremental change as well as the trends, individual actions are good but those longer terms trends, absolutely, and those interactions between multiple new plans and development sites and so on, can have a disproportionate compounding effect on each other.

The reason I am asking, Chair, is because it brings us back to the funding. We are paying the cost for not having planned up front in that way. Q26            Cameron Thomas: Thank you for stating out loud the impacts on mental health of people that are regularly affected by flooding. I have a resident who spent nine months of 2024 living from a caravan on his own driveway following flooding in January of that year. As well as the clear influence of climate change, residents in Tewkesbury are concerned that development of flood plains in the constituency has altered the direction and the intensity of fluvial flood water from the Severn and Avon as it accumulates. The flood water regularly enters homes, not only laterally but vertically up through the ground. They are further concerned that the development and flood mitigation measures to our north may have increased the intensity of flooding as experienced in Tewkesbury. To each of you, please, what policies are in place to address situations where land may need to be acquired for flood plains, for natural or engineered flood defences?

As far as I understand it, the approach is currently quite ad hoc and non-strategic. We often identify where these challenges might be emerging but, as I think we have repeatedly said—you are probably bored of hearing it now—these plans are often not statutory and so finding the funding to do that is very challenging. So, we absolutely we do need to address these issues in terms of linking up our approach to land use and our approach to flood management because—as you have nicely demonstrated there with those examples—the two are very closely intertwined.

I do not have anything to add to that. Q27            Cameron Thomas: I do note and respect that you are an engineer, which is why I wanted to add both natural and engineered flood defences. So, specifically to the Professor, what metrics are applied to measure the success of flood resilience efforts? How can they be applied to measure the impact of those measure on areas or constituencies as a result of measures implemented closer to the source?

Typically, we are quite good at looking at how individual actions might reduce the volume of flood water and, therefore, the damage that is associated with that, so a reduction in expected annual damages from flooding. That is a typical measure used to assess those sorts of actions. Where I think there is a much bigger gap is around understanding actions that prepare our communities either for an event itself, or for addressing responding, and recovering after those events. I think we are pretty lacking in clear indicators there. We mentioned that we have struggled to understand in our own assessments how active the country has been in terms of delivering property flood resilience measures, what level of insurance coverage flood plain inhabitants are able to access and so on, so there are definitely some important information gaps that could be acquired, or should be within our grasp already, and we are not being able to complete some of those pictures in our own assessments. Q28            Cameron Thomas: Will you accept that one of those gaps is, as experienced in Tewkesbury, that my constituency is further down the flow of the Severn and in fact may be impacted by flood mitigation to the north?

I would like to be clear in answering this that I cannot comment on Tewkesbury without specific analysis. Sometimes an oversight in some of the assessments is that we can have a compounding impact elsewhere. That is one where I think we need to look a little closer, but it is not always ignored, that is for sure. I can give examples of where people have looked at that too.

It is a potential challenge with the shoreline management plans as well and that, as you say, building up flood defences for one part of the coast has an impact on the adjacent regions and that has not always historically been very well reflected from one shoreline management plan to the next, so it is a challenge we see across the piece. Q29            Cameron Thomas: Thanks for stating that. Finally, to Baroness Brown, you spoke with my colleague Pippa Heylings about local flood forums. What other examples might you cite of good practice in involving communities and property owners in flood resilience planning? How can community participation in flood resilience measures be made more effective?

We are seeing increasing numbers of cities—and, indeed, combined authorities and other groups—having their own climate commissions and looking not only at how do we become net zero, but looking more broadly at how do we also adapt to the changes we now know are definitely going to happen and, indeed, they could be worse if mitigation does not move faster. There, we are seeing most of those areas. Yesterday in Parliament we had the Leeds and South Yorkshire group talking about what they had been doing, and that comes from various levels of bringing local government together in an area but also coming out and engaging with people. When I chaired the Climate Commission for the Peterborough and Cambridgeshire Combined Authority, we had some public events where we got the public to come in and tell us what they were concerned about, and we explained to them the sort of things that might be done. I do think there is real value in those local events, but I also know the pressure is on funding at a local level. Therefore, it is quite hard to do those at a level of real intensity.

Would you mind if I just add to that? I just want to draw upon some examples. Baroness Brown mentioned that the Environment Agency led a review of the shoreline management plans, which is the process on the coasts, and I was involved in that review. When we talk about these community groups, I think we often forget that we need to involve a lot of the key agencies, actors, landowners and other key organisations in some of those discussions. What we saw was the very best examples of the development of shoreline management plans brought in—not necessarily to everything but as part of those processes—not just members of the community but key organisations that had a role in the community, maybe it was the Highways Agency, Network Rail, utility operators and so on, which had a key stake in the resilience of those areas. That is a really important part. We often do not see those organisations so engaged at those community levels and I think there is an opportunity there.

Can I ask for some rapid fire recommendations that we could make. I am trying to summarise some of the things that I have heard you say. First, would you like this Committee to make a recommendation on the way in which we are informing and educating people about standards?

Absolutely. Engaging people in the discussion of what those standards should be because they are the taxpayers who are going to have to pay for them.

I just want to put it on the record, so we have it there when we come to make our report. Should the Thames Estuary plan be a statutory one? Is that another recommendation you would like to see?

I would love to see that recommendation. It was a recommendation I made, having chaired the advisory group for the last review, and we did not get a response from the Government on that.

Thinking ahead to land banking now for the 2120 barrier that we are going to have to make a decision on in 2040?

That would be the point of making the Thames 2100 a statutory plan. That would enable a lot of the things that will be needed to make sure that we can both do the things we need to do now, but also that the right things are in place for the future.

I want to refer to the residential and business split, because you spoke about where is the balance from money—the cost-benefit balance from money—and at the moment, in looking at some of the flood mitigation schemes, we are not taking into account the business cost, the commercial properties in the same way as we are residential. It is also skewed by the fact that we can have private sector funding coming in, in some areas. Some areas have healthier balance sheets and can contribute. That is skewing us getting to a standard, is it not, and how do we cope with that?

I do not know, Richard, if you can comment on that.

Some of the direct damages to commercial spaces are usually considered in national risk assessments, but those wider scale disruptions and secondary losses to the economy, which can be huge, are typically not because they are a lot harder to measure in advance. In terms of partnership funding, one of the reasons why the Environment Agency’s most recent capital plan has fallen behind is not just the inflation pressures, but actually a lot less was able to be extracted.

That has been picked up now, though, hasn’t it?

I think so but—

The latest figures are about £200 million or more coming in.

Yes. It is adding but it is not enough and, as you say, there is a huge inequality, depending on where people are, in terms of what they are able to get to make up that—

Let me drill down because we are pressed for time, and I want to push this as much as I can. When you are looking at the values, if you have a flat in London, close to the Thames, where some idiot has burrowed down into what was a basement, which was meant for flooding, and created a kitchen and bedroom down there and the value of that property is in the millions that gets precedence, doesn’t it, over somebody in a house in Tewkesbury because, by doing the flood alleviation scheme there, you are creating more value than you would be in Tewkesbury.

That is not quite right.

Good. Tell me why.

In the national risk assessment, assumptions are made about, I suppose, property values and property damage levels and those are applied uniformly, so you have an average property damage curve and that is how we calculate our expected annual damages. Why larger urban spaces get much higher investment is because there are more properties, more people, so I suppose the cost to benefit ratio stacks up like that.

Thank you. Finally, we know that 59% of grade 1 agriculture land is at high risk from flooding, so I want to ask you this, about when you are putting your full hat on as Chair of the Adaptation Committee and were thinking of adaptation in terms of food security. We need to have some wider metrics here about biodiversity, about food security and to be playing these into the metrics that we use. What metrics should we use to monitor our resilience, not just when we are considering houses and flooding or communities and flooding, but when we are looking at these other adaptation risks that we need to guard against?

You hit upon an area that is one that we have also said in every report to Government that we need much better metrics. We not only need proper targets, but we need much better metrics so that we can measure progress. Therefore, we end up using a large number of proxies, essentially almost any datasets that we can find, so we would look at the amount of agricultural land susceptible to flooding. We would also like to look at things like soil health, indicate how resilient the soil might be to some of these things, but these are some of the metrics we find it very hard to get hold of. We do not have good selections of metrics in these areas.

If we were making a recommendation from this Committee, it would be about setting out metrics with clarity. Could you perhaps write to the Committee to suggest what some of those metrics might best be?

We can certainly let you know what current proxies we have and our diagrams, which show you how we are trying to measure progress with work in these areas, yes.

Thank you, Barry, and thank you very much, Baroness Brown and Professor Dawson, for that excellent evidence. We will now bring this first panel to a close. Witnesses: Professor Jim Hall, Professor Briony McDonagh, Professor Larissa Naylor and Dr Paul Sayers.

We come now to the second panel. We are joined by Professor Hall, Professor McDonagh, Professor Naylor and Dr Sayers. Thanks to all of you for joining us, particularly Dr Sayers who joins us from holiday in Austria, where we hope the weather is kind, and we are very grateful to him for sparing us his time today. Starting with you, Professor Hall, can I invite you introduce yourself, your organisation and your knowledge and interest in this area, please?

Thank you. I am Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at the University of Oxford. I am an engineer. I am a Commissioner at the National Infrastructure Commission, and I am President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Hello. I am Professor Briony McDonagh. I am Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Hull, and I am the UK National Lead for the Resilient Coastal Communities overseas programme, and my own research interests lie primarily in people and climate adaptation and resilience.

I am Professor Larissa Naylor, Professor of Environmental Geography and Geomorphology at the University of Glasgow. I have been working on coastal processes and adaptations since 1997, starting with a fellowship at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, looking at the coastal simulator, and I bring a wealth of experience from industry, academia and the Environment Agency.

Just pause there for a second, we cannot actually hear you, Dr Sayers. Can we make sure he is unmuted?

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you now.

I am Dr Paul Sayers. I am a chartered civil engineer and hold a PhD in system approaches to flood management. I lead an applied research consultancy, Sayers and Partners, and we work extensively on flood and coastal risk issues, both in the UK but also, importantly, internationally in Europe and further afield. I was the lead author of the flood research element of CCRA 2 and CCRA 3. I collaborate closely with organisations like the ODI and various universities on issues on climate and resilience.

Excellent. Thank you, all of you. It is quite a large panel for us, but obviously a very knowledgeable panel indeed. I would just say to the panellists that some of the questions will be directed to one of you specifically, some of them to the panel more generally. Please do not feel the need to simply reiterate what you have heard. If the first person has made a comprehensive answer that is great. If other panellists have things they want to add we obviously want to hear them, but, really, we want to hear important additions or contradictions, rather than all four of you feeling the need to respond on all of that. Professor Hall, from your perspective to what extent do you believe that England’s system of flood resilience is currently fit for purpose?

There are some parts of the system that I think are working quite well and there are parts that, let’s say, are in need of further attention. I think the process of analysing flood risks, of mapping risks, of identifying areas at risk is good. It has got quite a lot better thanks to the Environment Agency’s latest national flood risk assessment and that feeds into a process of prioritisation, the principles of which I think are very good as well. The UK has pretty good flood forecasting and warning systems. It is not perfect. It never will be perfect, but the flood forecasting centre jointly between the EA and the Met office works well and people say that they respond to flood warnings. Areas in need of attention: first of all, the National Infrastructure Commission has recommended repeatedly now—and we heard this from the previous part of your session—the need for long-term targets with respect to what should be achieved in terms of managing flood risk. Secondly, there is an issue with how much this is costing. The National Audit Office reported on this, and you also just heard that there were to be 336,000 properties protected in the latest Environment Agency flooding settlement and that has been revised down to 200,000 because of increasing costs. Thirdly, I would emphasise surface water flooding as being an area where there is insufficient co-ordination. It is a very complex problem. No one is saying it is easy, but I think there needs to be more attention to surface water flooding.

Thank you. Dr Sayers, anything that you want to add on that general question about the extent to which the system is fit for purpose?

I fully support all of the things that Jim just mentioned there, but to add a couple of things, perhaps, where there is room for change or improvement. We do lots of our work through the exponential damage, which Jim mentioned there, which is a really good means of understanding the investment case, that average risk, but it is less good at helping us understand the risk we face in terms of the risk profile. For example, just to give you an illustration: with expected annual damage we would think of a low-impact, high-frequency event in the same way we think about high impact, low frequency events. We can unpack that expected annual version to help us understand the nature of the risk more, which helps us to manage it more. We are also poor along slightly technical lines, sorry, but the issues of spatial coherence in the events, we do not really understand how we manage events that are very widespread in terms of investment and our resilience. We do not really understand when there are sequences of events, when there is that conveyor belt of events, how that plays out into our investment case and our risk profile. The second point I would make, is around social vulnerability. When we think about our investments, the current focus is on the index of multiple deprivation. There is a weighting within the process that helps us invest in places that have a greater index of multiple deprivation, but that is not flood-specific. It does not cover the social vulnerability issues that drive vulnerability to flooding. There is an issue there around how we target our investment more specifically towards the most socially vulnerable from a more flood nuanced index.

Thank you. Professor Naylor, can you give us an overall sense of what is realistically possible in terms of reducing flooding and how big the gap is between what we currently have and what we might reasonably be able to expect?

Yes. Following on from the previous question, if I can respond to that and then lead on and then maybe you can ask the question again?

Yes.

There are several strengths of the strategy as the others articulated, but there are also several areas where it can be improved. One of them relates to your question about what we can possibly expect. One of the things that the new datasets allow is something that we could not possibly have imagined in the past. With these new datasets and the climate emergency, we have this gift, we have this amazing opportunity to see into the future, like previous generations have never had. The Victorians and the Edwardians who built a lot of the flood risk infrastructure, which we are still using today, could not see into the future. The engineers post-1953 floods who used a militaristic model because of the war, they could not see into the future. We can with ever-increasing certainty. Can we use those data to actually get the damage costs, to know exactly what Paul Sayers was just talking about, so we know what the future cost will be? A lot of my work is at the coast. We have a lot of hold the lines at SMPs. There is a caveat that says, if it is affordable, how many of them will be affordable? How many more estuary defences, barriers, do we need like the Thames? Where will we put them? How do we make that socially just? That, to me, is a really big area. We are not looking at resilience limits when it comes to the extent of flooding. The strategy talks about adaptation, but it is in the future. The majority of the focus is on resilience now, in situ, in keeping people in their places. Those places the Victorians and Edwardians designed for us without that future knowledge, without being able to use our predictions. We need to really focus on how do we strengthen what are resilience limits? The latest IPCC talks about physical adaptation limits, social economic adaptation limits. That is not in the framing. Can we bring that into the framing? The other thing in relation to that is about adaptation preparedness. We need to shift from being reactive to proactive. We have to adapt. We have to accept that there are those physical limits in these many places in our communities that our forebearers created for us. To adapt, Parliament and this Government need to rapidly transform our governance systems and act now to safeguard this space on land, for we know what is coming. It is not if but when the next storm happens just as the one that is coming on Thursday and Friday. I want to challenge you in some ways to say: what you would like the parliamentary legacy of this to be? Can Parliament work with these risk management agencies and the public to create those legal and financial frameworks that we need so that we can take bold transformative actions together across all of society to have this just adaptation? That adaptation piece is what really needs strengthening in the strategy. There is strength in the new NFP national planning framework, No. 186 in particular, and the other ones before it. They are really strong to help with this, but we have to live with the reality that there are places that the flooding will be too great that we cannot have enough property level protection or enough protection of our assets and infrastructure to sustain them in situ.

Professor McDonagh, from your perspective, is there anything you want to add on the question of both the extent to which our flood resilience is fit for purpose, and what the gap is between what is reasonably possible and where we are now?

I agree with my colleagues. Policy and plans around river and coastal flooding are generally credible. Coastal erosion risk needs much more attention. It needs statutory teeth and more funding with particular focus on resilience and adaptation and, as Larissa says, a focus on what is not sustainable. We will not be able to hold the line in some places in particular parts the country. The upcoming data is likely to show that risks are higher than we had previously anticipated, and we do need to think now how we plan for a better future, how we can be more resilient, what those communities look like, and what support they will need. The biggest uncertainty in all of what we are facing now is not the climate, it is not even the weather, it is how people will respond and what support we can put in place to allow our communities to be resilient now and into the future, and how we can do that in the fairest way possible, so, as Paul says, we are not amplifying existing vulnerabilities, that actually we are improving things for people within these places.

In technical terms that means not expecting we can prevent people being flooded, but expecting that we learn how to live in an era where people are flooded, is that what you are saying?

I am saying we need to learn how to help people be more resilient. That might be practical resilience interventions, so thinking about how we build homes on stilts, or it is even possible now to build homes that can lift up when flood water is coming. It is also in the case of the coastal context, accepting that some places will have to transition. There are communities now that will not be able to stay in place in the face of increasing coastal erosion risk. We are seeing that on the ground. That is happening today. It is not a future strategy. I have colleagues who were working in the Coastal Transition Accelerator Programme in both the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Norfolk and also in the Southwest, who are out having conversations with people about the fact that their houses are no longer sustainable, that they will have to withdraw. Our local government colleagues are doing that on a daily basis in some parts of the country. It is not in a future we do not know about. It is a future that is happening now. We have quite good data demonstrating what that will be like, but we need to understand better how we can support our communities in terms of education and awareness and their own personal flood resilience at community level.

That is an interesting question because I met with the Environment Agency fairly recently with regard to a street in Chesterfield that has been flooded. As I said, tragically, one person lost their life, but it floods extremely quickly when it starts flooding because of the geography of it. The Environment Agency said to me that they could buy the houses off those people more cheaply than they could protect them and, therefore, there was an economic case not for attempting to protect them but from effectively a compulsory purchase order. The people on the street were reasonably enthusiastic on the whole with that, but when we actually said, “Okay, great, well, let’s talk about this”, it was clear there was no planning Government, there was no funding Government that would actually allow this practical step to happen. While I understand exactly what you are saying that there are communities that will constantly flood, do you have any sense that the Government have a plan to actually move to that next stage and think about how we work with communities to move to alternative areas?

Schemes, such as the flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme that has a Coastal Transition Accelerator Programme, which is exploring some of those issues in detail in the context of coastal communities, there is innovation work going on there. There is work within the Resilient Coastal Communities and Seas Programme as well, funded by DEFRA and the UKRI that are looking at those questions, looking at what can happen, because of course, in a coastal context, there is no insurance for coastal erosion. People who are losing their houses to coastal erosion have to pay their own costs generally, or the vast majority of their costs. They can even be fined when the debris from their house ends up on the beach. They are doubly burdened with those costs. People do not always want to go. Their lives are there, their family may have been there for generations. So, no, to answer the question bluntly, I do not think we or the Government know the answers yet, but there is work going on in that space to try to work out in innovative ways how that can happen.

Professor Naylor, I think many of us will have been struck by what you said about seeing into the future. Earlier today, my colleague Anna Gelderd and I had a briefing with representatives of the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network, MEDIN. They were talking about precisely what you said about the importance of data. In particular, the role that AI was now enabling them to have to turbocharge that data and see into the future. What do you see as the role of AI here in what you are doing, particularly with morphology and so on?

I can answer that, and then I will draw it back if that is all right. I actually have a very talented PhD student, and a podcast was just released yesterday, a whole series funded by the Scottish Government on climate. She is working with AI, and it greatly accelerates the rate at which we can use these datasets. We have done a lot of innovation in the Scotland’s Dynamic Coast project around erosion, where you can actually use satellites to find the vegetation edge, and the vegetation edge is perhaps a stronger metric than mean high water springs and wet dry lines. It is more reliable. We have developed this new methodology that is publicly available source code, and they actively use AI to help write the code and do things. It is a huge area of innovation. It is one of the things that can be done well with AI. Moving back to the communities and the data, I have had people from the Scottish Government, people from Governments elsewhere in the world say, “We cannot act on this data. It is too uncertain”. What we do not want to do is get fixated on that. We have enough evidence to do the community planning, to take the bold decision, to set up a really strong process, a deliberative and consensual finance process to really take those accelerators, because there were the previous pathfinders as well, and make those much more normal rather than exceptions. I think there is a role for the insurance industry as well.

Can we bring Dr Sayers in on that? He indicated he wanted to come in.

Yes, thank you. With machine learning in particular, the methods that underlie the AI, we will definitely see huge advances in understanding what is there on the ground, what infrastructure exists, and so on. On that broader point of looking into the future, it is important to say that there are really quite tough, legitimate choices to make. Regardless of how well we know the future, there will be hard choices to make. We have been working on the fens, a regional climate change risk assessment, and there are really hard choices there about whether you do try to hold the line, which would be possible but expensive, or you maybe advance the line where the fences are, or whether you set back some of the elements and recreate salt marsh and wetlands, as well as protecting some agricultural lands. We are good at incremental adaptation, I would say. Our processes are built for modifying what we have been doing, adapting to a new climate in an incremental way. We are really not that good when it comes to that transformational choice, because they are really quite hard choices, not just the funding, but how best to do it. That is where I would say we are not that well set up. There are only a few studies that really explore that range of futures and have to get multiple organisations involved once you have decided that to buy into it. On a related point, most of the choices we make today have very long lives. If you choose to build a defence or if you choose to build a town, that is there almost forever. You have locked in that choice. We are not really very good at taking that long-term view when there is a transformational change required rather than just incremental adaptations.

If I might briefly come in on some specific instances of AI. One is in relation to weather and flood forecasting. Another very interesting one is around the use of generative AI to generate solutions. How can we come up with sets of interventions that are matched to particular places? That is a very human exercise at the moment, and we can foresee some of that being done by machines including the visualisations that help us to communicate to people what the options are. Thirdly, what we refer to as optimisation problems, so how do we rank solutions based on what our goals are, what are our objectives and how can we come up with much better priority lists? AI will help us with that as well.

I will go quite quickly because I am afraid I have some other business I need to shoot off to. My questions are in the first instance to Professor Hall and to Dr Sayers. There has been some quite some public debate over the role that dredging can play in reducing the impacts of flooding and it is certainly an issue that farmers in my constituency of Northeast Hertfordshire have raised with me. Would you like to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of dredging to reduce flooding impacts and whether you believe that dredging has been under or over-utilised as a flooding resilience measure?

Yes. The advantages are that dredging increases channel capacities, which it means that more water can flow downstream towards the sea, and in very flat areas like in the Somerset levels, it actually just provides a storage volume, a storage space for the water to go into. That is why people have done it for many years, many hundreds of years in some instances. What are the disadvantages? The first is the cost of it. This is something you need to keep on maintaining. You are doing something with sediments, with mud, which nature does not want you to do. Nature brings the sediments back into the place and you have to keep doing it forever. It obviously has environmental impacts for the aquatic biodiversity, and I suppose more fundamentally, this is an artificial version of the of the river and the floodplain and there are instances where actually one you are separating the river from the floodplain. You are not actually using that active floodplain to manage flood risk in the way that it would to some extent be done in nature. There are actually instances where people have stopped dredging and reconnected the floodplain and have managed to get the water levels down. Obviously, there are big implications of that for the people who are farming on those floodplains. I am afraid I am not going to answer the question, should we be doing more or less, because I think the answer is: it depends.

I do not know whether the Dr Sayers wants to feed into that before I move on to my next question?

Only to add briefly, it is definitely in the “depends” category, but the old system of thinking used to be trying to convey flows as quickly as you can. Jim has outlined whether dredging does that or not. There are places where it causes a blockage. Sometimes sediments cause a blockage to a bridge or a culvert, which is a legitimate part where you can think about conveying it more quickly to release that blockage. The general river channel dredging, yes, I would agree with Jim that it is context specific.

To follow up on that point then, are there specific locations where you would suggest across the country where dredging is a particularly relevant technique for continuing to manage flooding risk and how do you think that relates to the specific flooding risks that are arising as a result of climate change?

Paul just referred to one very interesting specific location, so places where bridges and culverts are prone to blockage, then that maintenance dredging is a good thing to do in that context. We know the locations where the current agriculture, to a greater or lesser extent, depends on dredging. It depends on very engineered land drainage. The big political and sustainability question is: do we want those economic agricultural activities to continue going on in those places, or are we ready to consider adapting them in the future? From a technical and scientific point of view, we can explore the implications of that, but ultimately this is a is a political decision.

On the same lines but slightly nuanced perhaps. Generally, dredging only creates storage. It does not actually convey much more water quite often because it slows the flow some, depending on where you are and just creates storage. You can dredge and you can put a lot of money into dredging and have no impact on flooding at all. It should not be the go-to. You need to understand it is not just a historical practice, but there are a lot of other ways that perhaps you could manage the sediment entering the river or reconnect the floodplain, depending on the time of year it floods and whether you can have that. I would very much say that should not be the first draw. You have to understand exactly what is happening to the system before you embark on the dredging process because it does have a lot of more negative components with biodiversity and with an ongoing cost that perhaps you do not need.

Thank you. Dr Sayers, off the back of that comment, are there particular techniques that you would encourage to be used either in collaboration or as an alternative where it is not the right option, where we are seeing dredging at the moment that could be used instead?

Everywhere is location specific, so everywhere needs thought in that context. If you are able to modify the farming practice to reduce sediment yields into the watercourse, that might help. If you are able to remove those blockages particularly, that often helps, that speeds the flow and keeps the river in regime a little bit more as it is called. It keeps the sediments moving through the system. It is definitely a case of thinking about that place before you just continue what you are doing previously as a dredging action because that is what has happened. You have to think, “Well, okay, is this actually reducing the flood risk?” It is, unfortunately, context specific. It is difficult to answer in the general.

Thank you. A final question to both of you. The Environment Agency has come into a fair bit of criticism for some of its approach to dredging from people who would like to see more of it. Do you have any recommendations that you would like to see us consider in our report for how the Environment Agency deals with the prohibition or encouragement of dredging?

Yes. I have tried to set out the pros and cons as best I can and from what I have seen of the debate on dredging in the media, in political spaces, I do not think it has been very useful. As you say, the Environment Agency has come in for a lot of criticism. I am not sure whether the Environment Agency has had an opportunity to respond to that. I would like to see a much clearer, more open debate around the pros and cons. As I have said, there are scientific aspects of that, which would be great if people understood a lot more. Also, the values aspects of it in terms of what we want and how we trade off those different things we want. I would like to see more discussion of that.

I am on the same line that there are well targeted interventions that include dredging some places, as we have said. There is no reason why the general reaction should be: either you should not dredge, or you should dredge. It is definitely a case-by-case discussion.

A question first of all to Dr Sayers. How comprehensive and how joined up is England’s monitoring of flood risk and water levels, especially in those areas most susceptible to flooding?

If I may, I will slightly modify your question and see if it is the same question. In terms of monitoring water levels, actually in river water levels or tidal levels at the coast or rain gauges, there is a very well-established system. There are some gaps in the network, but it is a very well-established system. How well we monitor flood risk is a quite a different question of how we understand where has flooded, what were the impacts, what are the conditions of our assets and those aspects. In terms of the basic hydraulics and hydrology, we have quite a well-established network that requires continued improvement and continued investment in. I would say that element is quite well resolved. Understanding and monitoring real asset condition and where floods have actually happened and to what depth is much, much less involved. For example, many years ago, in fact, I was involved in a pervasive monitoring campaign that would think about instrumenting large elements of the city for when floods happened, when storm overflows occurred or surcharged drains and thinking about where the floodwaters actually went rather than just the river levels.

Can I add something? From the coastal perspective on flooding resilience about people and assets in particular places, we monitor the water rather than where the landscape wants to respond. It is easier to understand at the coast—barriers like Slapton and Loe Bar, in Devon and actually in front of the Penzance railway line, where it used to be on stilts. It used to be wet by the sea. We are not planning for that sort of landscape change. One of the things we did in Scotland with the Dynamic Coast Programme is we actually looked at erosion-enhanced flooding. Where you lose a sand dune, or it breaches in a storm event, which you had at Cley in the 2013 storm surge, for example, that flood envelope is much, much wider. The same thing happens to rivers. Rivers will burst their banks. There are lots of burst banks. It is because the river wants to change its course in response to this increased rainfall. A really good example, which falls in the constituency of this Committee, is in Shrewsbury. It is an oxbow lake waiting to happen. The mainline railway, the A road connecting the city are right where the river wants to cut that oxbow lake. How much money will we continue to put in to shoring that up? Because it is working completely against nature. I know that is one of these big difficult ones that Jim Hall was talking about, but it is something I think we need to address. We need to monitor to predict when rivers will change their shape and position, when we will have these evulsions and plan for those. It is changing the course of flooding. Somebody described that earlier in the first session. We can use monitoring and prediction for that but also monitoring the social disadvantage. We did the first social disadvantage to erosion in Scotland, but the social disadvantage changes. Also monitoring these resilience measures. If all the metrics of index and multiple deprivation, all those statistics are the same, why is one community more resilient and adaptable than another? We need to understand that, and we are not monitoring that social side.

Dr McDonagh, do you have any more comments on coastal communities?

Coastal communities are where we need to try to fix things. They are vulnerable in all sorts of ways and if we can do it in coastal communities, I have good hopes that we can do it elsewhere too. The Met Office do a good job of predicting coastal storms. Coastal communities, especially estuarine towns, also get fluvial floods but they get warning of that because they are down river. We need more about compound flood events and cascading risks. The biggest lacuna in all of this—and it was signalled briefly in the first session—is about public compliance with flood warnings. We do not know very much about how people respond, how we can better help them to respond, how we can better understand the vulnerabilities of particular groups. Paul’s work is doing some of that, and it is really important. The support that is needed both in emergency situations for vulnerable groups and vulnerable places, which is schools and hospitals, a lot of those are in flood risk places. We need to know far more about what happens in those situations. We need support in emergency situations, but also about adaptation in the face of climate change. What can we be doing now, rather than waiting for it to happen? We know communities of good often form in the aftermath of disaster, but how can we intervene now to better support a range of different communities with a range of intersectional challenges better prepare for that to happen?

This question is for everyone. If you could prioritise any improvements to monitoring flood risk and water levels, what would they be and why?

Prioritise or privatise?

Prioritise.

I was worried. One of my suggestions is we need to better understand how nature-based solutions work. That is both large-scale river restoration and also urban scale, grey green infrastructure, sustainable drainage systems. We know they are good, we do not really at this stage know exactly how they function, what benefits they bring. We need much more monitoring, and we need to put the money in at the beginning of a scheme, so the monitoring is in place right from the beginning and often that does not happen. Money for capital goes in, it does not include money for monitoring. Monitoring is actually really fairly cheap in terms of the kit that needs to go in there. It is not a big additional cost. More of that. More follow-up where we have large-scale coastal realignments, where we see managed realignment and breaches, we need longer-term monitoring after that has happened in order to know how it works and why and be able to make recommendations. We have had pilot after pilot after pilot in the UK. We need to do a better job of monitoring and evaluation and sharing and networking that data. I know my colleagues will pick up on other suggestions as well.

Yes, if I might just briefly follow up on that very good point about monitoring nature-based solutions because we do not have enough evidence about the effectiveness of them and in some instances we are raising expectations about their benefits when the science is not fully settled and that implies not just monitoring from the start when they go in but actually monitoring beforehand. We need the baseline. We cannot turn back the clock, so it may not be possible to get a good baseline with a decent number of floods in it, but then can we find match catchments, which are similar looking places that we can monitor at the same time so we can compare the with and without nature-based solutions.

I will just bring Dr Sayers in on that because I think he was indicating a moment ago.

Yes, thank you. I am minded to say that all flood hazards, the flood itself, are modified by a whole range of assets and I would say they are or anything that modifies a flood hazard is a legitimate flood resilient asset or a flood asset. For nature-based approaches, it is definitely embankments, it is everything you can think of that modifies the way that flood waters behave. We are not really very good at monitoring many of those aspects. We focus primarily on agency-owned built assets, but understanding all of those assets as legitimate assets to be managed would drive a very strong monitoring case for those. In terms of the nature-based contribution, we did some work under a project called OpenCLIM that used the current understanding of science, and as Jim says there is gaps in that, but that suggested that nature-based approaches could contribute about a 10 or 20% reduction in expected annual damages across the UK. That is a significant contribution if you really maxed out those nature-based approaches, and of course they also provide a whole range of other benefits. My big point was all of those assets, nature and built, are all legitimate assets to be monitored and managed from that perspective of the flood resilience, which we do not quite yet do. Split off third party assets are more difficult, and so on. We need to get that whole system picture of what the asset system is.

A couple of small things to add. One is that there are international guidelines on natural and nature-based features for flooding and erosion at the coast and in rivers. They are an excellent resource around some of this. Yes, we absolutely need more monitoring, but there also there needs to be training. There is a real opportunity for green jobs and apprenticeships. One of the things that is in a green-grey report that I led on in Essex, it was pioneered where they changed the marine regime for pollinators. We have done work where we changed the type of rock material and the position of it to optimise it for marine biodiversity, to provide food for marine protected birds, for example. That was retraining the contractor. In terms of engineers, the engineers that I have worked with and Colin Thorne, who is quite an eminent academic in this space, talks about how we need to change how we monitor, how we inspect. Can we bring in things, for example, in the harder assets from the historic conservation, where we do minimally destructive testing of buildings like the one across the road? Can we be innovative? We need to then empower people and maybe look and refresh some of our criteria for defects and defects tolerances on the engineering design and work with the Institute of Civil Engineers so that we can afford things like green-grey processes to come in. Do we still need that defects tolerance? I remember talking to William Allsop, who is a really eminent engineer in coastal structures. He said, “We have a British standard, but do we need the British standard to apply to the icing on the cake? Or can we let the icing on the cake be modified by organisms, which then keeps it wetter, which then reduces salt damage, and then attracts species that then bioprotect?” We need to really rethink and transform things and that is about the people and about their approach as much as it is actually about what we monitor.

Dr Sayers, what role should short and long-term weather forecasting play in flood resilience and how effective has it been in preparing for flooding incidents?

Can I check: do you mean weather forecasting, not climate projections?

Forecasting.

Yes, the forecasting component. They can play a much more nuanced part in my view. Forecasting, at the moment, tends to forecast flood flows, large sea levels, or large wave conditions. I think there is a misnomer because I do not think they forecast floods. They tend not to focus on how all those assets that we have been just talking about may or may not perform. In terms of whether somebody living in a particular house is likely to flood, that is not just a function of the weather, which is a function of how our asset systems behave during that weather event. There are definitely elements to improve that to extend it to be an actual flood forecast rather than a flow or a sea level or wave overtopping forecast that really helps people then understand whether they need to act and who needs to act. By providing shorter and longer-term versions of that, if there is more uncertainty, you can start taking more minor actions that might help. Then when uncertainty gets reduced, you can take more explicit actions. That move away from weather forecasting to flood forecasting, actual places that may flood, taking into account those asset performance, which might take account of the antecedent conditions, how long has it been raining? Have the beaches been drawn down? It would be a real step change in how people are able to respond to that forecast because it would be much more specific about the flood that you may face.

You mentioned the improvements. A question for everyone: how can the weather forecasting and its use be improved to support flood resilience measures? Exactly how will it happen? To any member of the panel.

Paul has set out a very broad and correct end goal on the specifics of the weather forecasting. It is constantly improving, and we have referred already to what AI is now doing in weather forecasting and so it is getting better and that the time scales over which we can reasonably forecast are being pushed outwards. There is still an issue—just to refer to one specific part of this—to do with intense rainfall. We have talked about surface water flooding already. Surface water flooding is particularly challenging for forecasting because it is the consequence of a big downpour, usually a convective downpour in a specific place. It could be very variable spatially, which means you get it one place and not get it another. It is very intense, so it is quite difficult to forecast, and it happens quite quickly. Whereas if you are in a big river basin like the River Severn, it can take days for the full peak of the flood to materialise. It is that short-term surface water flooding where there needs to be more work.

There has been a shift in the type of weather we are getting worldwide. I come from Vancouver, Canada, and there was a big hydrometeorological river, and we have a weather bomb—those sorts of things are much more challenging to predict because they are relatively new. In British Columbia, we have some of the best geotechnical engineers, but Vancouver was marooned. No grain could get out of Vancouver to China, and no goods from China could get into Canada. Every railway, every road was cut off from the damage from those landslides. When we had the Hurricane Harvey down in Texas, it picked up the water. There was so much water on land, it picked it up and it created its own weather. I am not an expert in this; I defer to the Met Office in this. Do we have enough research in this, do we have enough capability in these real extremes, like the Copenhagen cloudburst? Also, when do we need to act? How much more monitoring do we need? Copenhagen had two in short succession. The economic losses, the business disruption, the social disruption was so great that people agreed to spend 10% more on their water bills and they have this an amazing, incredible approach, and they are changing. They are taking the city and looking at the geography and they are making roads rivers, they are making retention basins, they are transforming their parks. It is phenomenal. We need that level of transformation to manage some of these challenges ahead.

Professor McDonagh, just on the issue around weather forecasting and coastal communities, are there particular challenges there? Any different aspects we need to consider?

Yes, I covered some of this in an earlier answer. Many places in the UK experience multiple types of flooding. We need to get away from any notion that a place tends to be vulnerable to either the sea or rivers or flash flooding. Many places are experiencing them all at once. Our coastal communities obviously are also dealing with high tides and storm surges. On the weather forecasting, my colleagues have answered many of the questions about what needs to change. The one thing I would flag is about weather communication. We need to think about how we convey what is often very technical information to our communities. The idea that people on the ground can respond to something that says a one in 100-year flood is going to happen is asking an awful lot in terms of science understanding of our communities. We need to think about whether we are communicating to people that this is likely to be the worst flood since so and so. How can we use histories of particular places to inform how we communicate? We need to get sensible and intelligible information to our communities so they can make the best possible decisions. Before that even happens, we need flood preparedness actions. We need people to know what to do in an emergency. That might be keeping a flood box upstairs so that they have the materials they need. In the case of a flood, it might be having airbrick covers, it might be having a range of other property resilience measures. The ways of communicating that probably are not or certainly do not rely solely on science communication. We need arts and humanities to help convey to people how we do those things. The UK Climate Resilience Programme had a number of arts and humanities projects, including Risky Cities, which was one that I was involved in. That showed very clearly that drawing on histories of particular places, histories of living with water and flooding, allowed people to connect with and understand their risk in place, weather in place, and understand what needed to happen in the future much better than if we had gone in there and said, “Hey, we are going to run a workshop about climate change”, which I am pretty certain we would have had nobody in the room for. We need to use a range of methods, which includes Met Office communications, some of which is excellent, but a range of other measures alongside that, and we need to be funding that as well.

Professor Hall, you said that broadly our weather forecasting is good and that the science is improving all the time. It may be that public expectations are unrealistic. When it comes to the milkman, what I expect of him is to deliver my milk every day. When it comes to our weather forecasters, what I want is to know exactly what people seem to want, is to know exactly how much rain we will have and exactly what the impact of that will be. Do you think that public expectations of the quality of information they will be able to rely on are possibly unrealistic? Can you be clear whether in the UK our weather forecasting broadly is what we should expect in terms of where the science has got to right now or is there something that we are doing less well than people in other nations?

Helping the public to understand the uncertainty that is inevitable in a weather forecast, it will never be precisely right, and particularly as you go out more days into the future. How you get across that inevitable degree of uncertainty and yet some weather systems happen where one can be really very confident that something bad will happen. We have it this week. The Met Office has already said that on Friday there will be a terribly strong storm hitting the west coast of Ireland. This is quite a tricky communication exercise, saying some of the time we are uncertain, other times we are certain, and people have to do something about that. That is the piece will always be working on it, to be honest.

Basically, in the UK, our science is broadly as good as science is?

In terms of the weather forecasting science, I would say basically, yes. It is worth recalling that the UK not only has the Met Office but also based in Reading is the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, which is a really important European facility. The thing to keep an eye on, as I have said already, is the role of AI in this. We can see the science moving on pretty rapidly in the coming years.

During Storm Babet, I remember famously that we were told we were not as good at forecasting that because the weather came from the east, it normally comes from the west, and we do not know about the weather when it comes from the east. This makes people lose confidence in the quality of what we have. Do you think that, basically, public expectations may be unrealistic?

There was more to it than that, in terms of the east and the west. We are a nation that talks about the weather a lot so that will not change either.

Even this Committee is talking about it a lot.

I want to start by thanking Dr Sayers for your comments earlier about that context—the multiple factors around what causes flooding. You talked about if the groundwater is already quite high because of previous rainfall then that obviously plays into your risk of flood. We heard from the previous panel about the fragmentation of different agencies and what I am hearing from you is how if we could join together those different alerts, weather alerts and factors and context, actually the residents would be much better informed about what that risk is. If we have known for two weeks that the groundwater is pretty soggy we know when a storm comes that we are more likely to be flooded than if that had not been the case. What helps us as a Committee is any really very pithy, specific recommendations. Would you suggest that there is something there around joining together different sources of information that help us understand that risk from different factors?

I would, yes, and I would couch that as impact-based forecasting. If you look at the impact of the weather forecast and how it all responds, and you look at that end goal of the impact, that automatically brings together those different issues of antecedent conditions, that saturation, or even when Dawlish railway line collapsed, there was that series events that brought down the beach. If you move to an impact-based forecast model, and there is a more global move towards impact-based forecasting, that really makes you look at how the system is responding and it may impact a person, a property, a piece of infrastructure. It moves away from just that weather forecasting to think of how it is responding.

Thank you. That is very helpful. Professor Naylor, did you have a comment?

Yes, it is important, particularly around storm events and how we signpost those, but also Paul mentioned these high-magnitude, lower-frequency events that are actually becoming more frequent. We need to be especially ready for those. The naming of storms has helped enormously, people talk about them in their day-to-day and that is really positive. We need to look at what are the impacts of those extreme events, and how do we differentiate those lesser events from these extreme events, so that the named storms do not become something we just talk about rather than something we act on. It is the impacts of those extreme storms that we are not understanding well enough. How far inland will it go? Thinking back to monitoring at the coast, we do not monitor waves as well as we could. Wave run-up and wave overtopping and that is coming in Scottish flood risk maps because we typically think about the water as a bathtub rather than how far inland it is pushing. You think about sea level rise, every centimetre will push the height of that storm surge even higher and farther inland and predicting and forecasting and explaining that to people really needs to be much better.

That is really helpful for coastal and then for inland river—like my constituency of Shrewsbury that you referred to—what about combining the fluvial and the pluvial? Combining that rainwater with what is happening already in the river. Is there a use in joining that together?

Absolutely. Yes, 100%.

Would you say that should be a key recommendation of this committee?

Paul Sayers mentioned earlier the multi-hazards, these multiple things, and it is not just the pluvial flooding, it is the fact that—again I will refer back to my part of Canada, Vancouver has historically been very rainy—is how drains get cleaned here. In Canada, it is a civic responsibility, but also the street cleaners say, “You cannot park here on this side of the road on this day of the week”. It is much more co-ordinated. It is joining up the maintenance as much as the rain.

Excellent. That is a perfect segue into the question I am about to ask you, which is looking at the grey infrastructure and those grey assets. You talked about my constituency in Shrewsbury. We are a historic river town. We have Victorian infrastructure that was not built for the volume of houses that we have. We are regularly flooded both by river and also of course by storms like everybody else. Let us talk about grey infrastructure, and if I could start with yourself, Dr Sayers, how effectively does England deploy grey flooding infrastructure and how well maintained is it?

Above ground grey infrastructure, things like embankments and tidal barriers, I would say that we know it reasonably well for Environment Agency-owned assets. We are much less knowledgeable about privately owned assets, and we are less knowledgeable about things like their condition and how well they might perform when loaded. When a severe load comes on that grey infrastructure, how likely is it to continue to perform as you want it to, or may it fail? We are not really very sure about that. We have lots of assets that we do not really understand how they have been built or what is within them and how they perform. There is definitely an element of unknown in that. Underground infrastructure, all of those pipe network drainage infrastructure, we are really unsighted on, particularly where they are, just the basics of where they are, what size they are and how they perform under intense rainfall loads. We are really unsighted on that at a national scale. At a local scale we can establish it, but at a national scale we are really unsighted on that. That connection between above ground and below ground infrastructure is not that well known. Things like toe levels of what the toe level of our coastal defences are, which is critical in terms of determining overtopping rates is poorly known. There are lots of gaps in our data knowledge. There are really good moves towards that the Environment Agency has made really good moves to try to marshal that information but there are significant gaps.

Thank you, it is very helpful. The same to yourself, Professor Hall.

Yes, if I might just add on the on the flood defence grey assets, you may have seen the National Audit Office’s report that indicates that the number of assets in condition has reduced from 98% to 93.5%. This whole thing about asset management is absolutely central to how we go forwards in the future. Getting the balance right between the revenue spend on maintenance and asset management versus the new capital spend on new stuff. On the underground assets, so the drainage assets, we are in one of these situations where there are many different organisations with responsibility for that. The water companies are responsible for draining houses, then you have local authorities, highways authorities who do the drains that drain the roads, the Environment Agency has a hand in some of this as well. Three years ago, if I am not mistaken, the National Infrastructure Commission published its report on surface water flooding and really pointed to the split responsibilities that means that we are not being purposeful enough in addressing surface water flooding issues.

What do you think we should do? How could we enforce these private owners?

What NIC recommended is, to start with, what we need to do is to stop making matters worse. If we are talking about surface water flooding, this is around paving over urban areas, which used to be permeable. If you are going to make a recommendation on this Committee, please recommend that schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 is implemented in the way that the Government have said it would be.

Do we have a unanimous panel on recommending schedule 3? Thank you.

Good. Where we went next was looking at as many opportunities as possible for sustainable drainage, so dealing with water on the surface, ponds, swales, permeable areas, and then coming through with joint plans, bringing all of these organisations together to come up with strategic plans for how they will manage flood risk down to a manageable level and that will involve some investment.

Sorry to rush you; we are just running out of time. Do you mean a shared strategic plan or that they align their separate ones?

Yes, a shared strategic plan. Where the funding will come from, the Commission recognises that some of this money will come from the from the water companies. It recommended that the Environment Agency part of the money should be devolved to the relevant local authorities. For now, they are applying for lots of different schemes whereas if they had a more settled devolved budget, they would be able to work in a more strategic way with the water companies to address surface water planning issues.

Excellent. I am sorry to rush but we are running out of time. Could I ask you, Professor McDonagh, do you feel that grey flooding infrastructure is used effectively and maintained specifically coastal areas?

We have covered quite a lot of that in this session and the previous session. We have talked about progress being made but there being a shortfall in maintenance funding and delays due to inflation, Brexit, lack of partnership funding, all of which is well documented in the report that Jim just mentioned, as is the end-of-life context of some coastal sea defences. The recommendation for me is about thinking strategically about where we can use nature-based solutions to augment that, and that might be as an alternative to grey infrastructure, but there is also lots of green-grey infrastructure. If we think about the kinds of projects Larissa has already mentioned about how we can drill holes in groynes to allow mussels to colonise, how we can green sea banks and SuDS, of course, is also grey green infrastructure. That needs to happen alongside education and engagement.

Excellent. We will come on to both SuDS and green in just a second. We will come back to yourself, Professor Hall, and you have somewhat answered it with your schedule 3 plea, but is there anything else you would like to say about whether grey flooding resilience is fully integrated into the planning system in terms of new builds and the infrastructure that supports them?

No, I do not think I have anything more to say on that.

Yourself, Dr Sayers, anything further about new builds and the grey infrastructure whether it is suitable?

No, I think Jim has covered it.

Excellent. We are catching up with ourselves.

I just want to make the point about things that we might get a unanimous decision around the panel on is that the Coastal Protection Act of 1949—yes, 1949—has not been updated and it separates the responsibility for coastal erosion from coastal flooding. The local authorities have to manage coastal erosion. That creates major challenges for grey infrastructure assets. I remember Bill Parker being in Southwold, and he literally was walking along the beach, and he said, “That is the Environment Agency, that is the local authority, which is the Environment Agency, which is the local authority”. Changing that piece of legislation, and rearranging that so that they are combined, because erosion and flooding, you cannot separate them at the coast, you also cannot separate them in rivers. But at the coast, there is an artificial divide from very longstanding.

Very helpful. We have a final question, but we will write to you to ask whether you have any examples from other countries that we could learn from in terms of the grey infrastructure. Thank you for your responses.

I represent a coastal community in south-east Cornwall, and it has been really wonderful to hear lots of recommendations around nature-based solutions. There is a lot of work to do there about talking to communities about what we mean by nature-based solutions, and I would really welcome you writing to us with further examples if you would care to do so. To Professor Naylor, are planning policy or resourcing changes required in order to enhance or repurpose land for flood resilience?

Absolutely, and you can start with making shoreline management plans statutory. You need to strengthen and streamline Government’s arrangements. In Cornwall in the 2013 and 2014 storms, we need elected members, we need the Prime Minister to be on-message with local decisions. That did not happen with David Cameron in the 2013 and 2014 storms. A road was rebuilt in the same place where it was already agreed it would realign. What we need is the governance system to have agreed where that road is going, to have had those conversations, to have bought that land and to have planned for that land so that when the storm hits we can move it. It might cause more disruption in the short term, but we are not wasting money. Cornwall county council paid for that. We need many more powers to be looked at. We created a windows of opportunity framework because a lot of land based policies are not salty and they are also not wet. This happened in Suffolk and Norfolk where a farmer had lost half their land since the 1930s. They wanted to build holiday cottages, they built them, they can literally demount them; all the services are above ground, and you can move them back as the cliff rotates, but it was the area of outstanding natural beauty policy that was a blockage. It was a closed window. We have to look root and branch across every land based policy to help align it. It is this social land based challenge of responding to the hazard. I think an overarching framework legislation, like a resilient future generations bill—and I can see one was tabled in 2022—can this Parliament bring that forward and include this. Redressing the Coastal Protection Act as well is important.

Thank you very much. Dr Sayers, do you have anything to add?

This is a very key question. In flooding responses rarely stand on their own; it is the planning system that is key, how we plan the whole system, which could be the catchment, the coastal cell, the shoreline management area. That planning has to be much stronger and not reactive to developments but a much more proactive process of planning our response. Flooding is part of that, so where will we maintain our functional floodplains? What are those functional floodplains within the catchment that impact and reduce downstream flood levels? Identify those in the planning process to keep those in place. Where are the salt marshes that provide our protection to our coastal defences that we keep in place? We are also looking at places where agricultural yields might be changing in the future—so perhaps we can use different parts of the landscape for flood management because those are changing—where it links with biodiversity. Planning has to be much more proactive in setting out the vision for the catchment for the coast that obviously reflects the shoreline management plans and other flood plans, but it is planning that has to bring those into alignment. Quite often flood issues do not have that ability to align all of those issues. That is the strategic; one more on the tactical. I quite often hear from local authorities that it is very hard to get small schemes through, the tens of thousands schemes. It might make a difference locally to get through because the business case requires the same scale as major investments. I think something along the lines of having streamlined tactical investments for planning and building regulations.

Thank you, that is helpful, especially to hear that joined up thinking goes in lots of different directions, including from the Prime Minister and Cornwall; I would very much agree and align myself with that comment. A further question to the whole of the panel: to what extent do grey and green flood resilient asset approach complement each other, and how do we improve this? I do not know who would like to go first, perhaps Professor Hall?

In many instances we are seeing grey and green being combined together and in some senses distinguishing between them is not all that constructive. For example, if we look at the Pickering scheme in North Yorkshire, very celebrated as a nature-based solution scheme but a lot of the heavy lifting there in terms of flood protection is done by an embankment upstream of the town, which creates a big storage area. It is very nicely landscaped so you probably would not notice it if you went there, but that is the thing that during the big floods catches all of the water. Some of it has been attenuated up in the catchment but some of it has been done by what I suppose is classified as being a bit of grey infrastructure, though it does not look like it because it is literally green. That is the way we need to think about these very integrated solutions in catchments in towns and cities in terms of integrating SUDS into urban areas and on the coast.

I was similarly going to call on Pickering. The one thing I would say is we get lots of grey and green infrastructure increasingly so and it is a good thing. Just being aware that grey interventions in one place can contribute to loss of green interventions in another, perhaps especially in a coastal context. Of course, a sea wall in one place will limit sediment flow in the east coast, primarily southwards, and that then affects nature-based solutions we have put in place, so always looking at taking us back to thinking in that whole systems approach. Place based is hugely important in understanding context specific, but that always needs to be within that wider context and thinking about how what we do in one place will impact on what happens in another.

Thank you. Professor Naylor?

I can follow up in writing, but I just make the point that it is about the nature itself, and it naturally dynamically adjusts. We need to make provision in coastal change management areas for the sand dune to roll landwards, to continue to afford the protection it is already provided is not just about nature-based solutions that are based no nature; it is about how can we bolster nature. In Scotland, £14.5 billion of assets are protected by nature; only £5 billion by hard infrastructure, as an example. I think we need to look at that and I propose setting river change management areas for where the river wants to move physically. But all the other comments I will substantiate and provide and writing.

I would like to pick up both that last comment and the comment about planning and the systems approach. The planning system is through local plans, and there might even be wider areas. Even if we are going to the combined authorities, the strategic unitary authorities, there will be wider regional but there is nothing national except for the Land Use Framework. As I understand it, the Government are working right now on the Land Use Framework, which is about across the country what are all the existing and competing values and uses of land. I understand the Government are working on it; it will be coming forwards. The question is: do you think this is the critical and perhaps only strategic level framework that we can look at that could say how do we allow the space for nature to adapt itself, for the sand dunes to come in, to give the land away, or to allow those rivers, or to allow nature to play this role to protect our assets. Is the Land Use Framework in your view something that is critical to this? If it is published before we include this are we missing a chance?

This Government have a number of things on the go in spatial planning. There is work around housing, there is work that we are doing on the National Infrastructure Commission in terms of advising on a national infrastructure spatial framework. I would say, however, that having that national picture is important and in particular for some of these big strategic questions, for example around biodiversity or environmental net gain and nature recovery, so we can get how this all adds up to achieving our targets with respect to biodiversity and caron sequestration across the whole country. A similar thing could be said about housing: does it add up across the whole country? However, if we are looking at flooding there is a limit to how far you can go with a national map. I would argue—as others on the panel have done—for a stronger approach to shoreline management planning on the scale of coastal cells and a much stronger approach to catchment: analysing catchments, looking at the options across the whole river basin and working out how they can be added up to achieve a range of different goals.

I have a question to follow on from that: catchment planning at the moment has no material weight in planning terms?

This country has a very weak approach to catchment planning and it is not at all joined up. What happens in water resource management plans, local flood risk management plans and so on in relation also to nutrients and sewage discharges. The quality of water is not joined up in the way it should be.

Can I ask the other panellists as well? We have the Land Use Framework, we have also got local nature recovery strategies, which are then sort of from the bottom up, again without a material weight in planning but they do look at how nature could play a role in terms of adaptation.

I think all of those things need to be strengthened and joined up, and also to look again for where there are these potential conflicts. How do we minimise conflicts? How do we make sure there are enough open windows so that enough policies align with each other, that the process by which we can build resilience and adapt where we need to relocate communities and assets most smoothly. That requires us to almost have some test cases. One of the challenges with the adaptation pathways approach is that it is linear, and it pushes those decisions down the road. We have to safeguard land now. We talked about land banking earlier, and to do that we have to understand what we will need that land for. There is a good example in Edinburgh where they are not replacing light industry with houses, they are building a coastal park. That is excellent as a buffer, but then it is too expensive to move some of the utilities. They have not put an easement in that plan. We know that those utilities will probably have to move in one hundred years. Are we building a climate resilient place for now, for one hundred years, or for two hundred years? If it is one hundred years-plus, we need to be putting easements in to say, “We know we will need to move these later”.

Do you think that the Land Use Framework is something that enables you to look at those conflicts and to start planning?

I would need to look in that particular framework. I am more familiar with NFP4, so I am happy to follow up in writing, but I think there needs to be some overarching framework. Also reimagine things like new towns, can we imagine climate resilient new towns so that the retreat becomes less negative and hopeful, and that we are making sure that those are in those climate resilient places, from landslides, from heat, from wildfire as well as everything we have been talking about in water and erosion. Can you champion something like that and how might that help bring the community on board? Likewise in urban areas. We have not talked about coastal salt marshes and things as green infrastructure. They have been separate from green infrastructure policy and thinking. We need to see this much more as a continuum. There are many places, but I think a strong framework that almost thinks, “Where is the water going to go fast?”

Dr Sayers?

A couple of points on that discussion. I would say we definitely need that honest debate, as we have said before, around those places at the coast that might be difficult to protect. That can be part of a land use identification process so you can understand that, and you can start having a real, honest debate about that. As part of a project that we have just started with the Tyndall Centre on open land, that is thinking about national land use scenarios that identify places that conservation objectives might be higher, restoration objectives might be higher, agricultural yields might be changing and where might be most effective from a green flood management response, but, as Jim said, I do not think that is an actual plan. That is just some information because depending on the climate future you are thinking about, depending on the socioeconomic pathways you are thinking about, those pictures changes. From an understanding of where are those trade-offs, where are the best places for conservation and agriculture yield and flood benefits; that is a useful piece of information. That catchment planning framework is weak in the UK in the moment and it could be much better through an alignment process. Just to draw an analogy to shoreline management plans, where there are coastal groups, where local authorities get together and think about that shoreline management planning process so they can talk with each other and come up with that shoreline management plan, you can think the same from the catchment perspective. It does not have to be one large unitary authority, but it can be an aligned set of local authority groups, a catchment group.

Would a recommendation here be that there be strengthening of catchment planning?

And support for collaboration between areas, so co-ordination and collaboration.

Not having one impact the other, which is what you have been talking about, particularly on the coastal area.

Exactly. Everybody having the opportunity to speak each other, and that being funded in a realistic way that allows that to happen. We have seen that in some places, there are great exemplars, things like the Living With Water Partnership in Hull and the East Riding, which is the two local authorities, the Environment Agency, Yorkshire Water and the university. That has an excellent model drawing on examples from the Netherlands, which we have mentioned a number of times, as to how management can be achieved in that catchment scale in that instance. But we need more of that so it is probably not a single act that we can call on, but exactly that.

Strengthening of catchment perhaps in general in terms of planning but also between those different areas, whether the coastal or the catchment that is needed. Finally, Chair, if you do not mind, I am hearing that social capital that you have been talking about and a recommendation there is that we are involving different departments as well as organisations throughout the country in this and, therefore, this needs to be part of our adaptation plan, which I think you are saying it is happening in small areas. But would that be a recommendation to this—

Absolutely. We cannot talk about this purely in the context of DEFRA, there are a range of other Departments that are crucial to this because this is about people’s lives, housing and employment.

I was working in Columbia when they had the massive flooding at the estuary there and four years later the communities were still living in refugee camps. When they took the research that they did on families that survived as family units after those four years it was because of their social networks before that. They were the ones who had not completely fallen into illness and into crime to survive. These ones that had found jobs and had kept together was because of the things that you are mentioning, which is about that connection and connectivity to place before this happened.

It takes us back to the idea of planning now for the future. How do we build these communities, these connections, this sense of cohesion now in the face of this rather than waiting until too late when it happens.

If I might underline the catchment planning perspective—and this is not just planning it is catchment operation is where we are going—is to emphasise that this needs to be all of the functions of water, so not just flooding, which is what we are talking about today, but water resources, droughts and water quality. An integral part of that will be the instruments we have for managing the land, so elms in particular.

I will bring Martin Rhodes in and then you will get an opportunity to finish off.

Thank you, Chair. I will try to be quite quick in terms of the question and if you can keep your answers fairly short as well, so I do not fall out with the Chair for dragging the meeting on any longer than need be.

I am very patient.

A question around resources is: do we have enough resources at the moment in terms of resilience measures, and if the answer is no, where are the pinch points, where are the problems in terms of funding? If there was one thing you would pick out that needs extra resources what would it be? I will put that to all of you and start with Dr Sayers.

Do you mean resources into physical things or into organisational function?

I mean primarily financially in terms of if we are not putting enough money in at the moment where would you say the priorities are for extra money?

The priority for extra money is around that strategic planning element, in two places. There are lots of quick wins that we know we could do and there has been a report out on those: improved maintenance of our existing infrastructure—that is where our flood risks are managed at the moment so making sure those are properly funded—and also our ability to strategically plan, which we have been talking about. Those catchment-based groups will require some funding element to allow that alignment to happen, to allow good plans to come forward, because they are likely to be more cost effective and more bang for the buck. I would certainly focus on that strategic planning element, to get that well-embedded, and then to focus more on those maintenance actions.

Thank you. Professor Naylor?

In terms of the previous question, it is making space within the local authorities and the environment risk management authorities and all the other bodies to have time to talk to each other, to have risk recovery teams come in and say, “Is this housing development sensible?” There is not enough time; we need to resource them better. In terms of the resourcing challenges, I think adaptation planning now. We can either plan ahead now so we can keep calm and engage in conversations, or we can just sleepwalk into the next disaster we know that is coming and we will have mental health problems, big economic problems, ecological crises including the ticking timebomb of historic coastal landfills that are falling into the sea. But I also think we need to fund innovation. I like the article or policy 186, the one saying in coastal change management areas we will have short-term development. We are not building bricks and mortar that will last forever. We could innovate. Can we design modular, flexible, agile communities and can we figure out a way to have those communities be coherent? Can we look to the Indigenous nations that have done that? We will have to do that with wildfire elsewhere in the world, so could the UK be a leader in this? Examples of these are cropping in small scale but can we make them bigger? Can we coalesce them similarly to what we have done with nature-based solutions? In Cleethorpes they are trying to get—and it has been rejected several times—a building called EBB & FLO, and it is using shipping containers. Not all of them could be shipping containers, it could be far more innovative, but that could deliver jobs, it could deliver net zero, low carbon, and also it helps seed the idea that not every community is fixed, and we will have to move them.

Professor McDonagh?

Brief answer: no, there is not enough money, yes, we need more resourcing. For me, like the rest of it, it is about centring adaptation, so making sure this system we have been talking about all day is a flood resilient system, making it as resilient as possible. I am not sure it ever can be resilient, but we can build resilience into it, plan for adaptation. That is above and beyond infrastructure. That is important, but it is about people and how we support education, awareness, and use nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions are brilliant on all sorts of levels we have outlined today, but they also build communities. Lots of them are maintained by people who engage in planning them, who are out there weekend on weekend doing stuff to support them, and that kind of community building will be crucially important, so more of that.

Thank you. Professor Hall?

I would say three things. First, on the capital budget, the fact that this was settled for the time period 2021 to 2027 was a big achievement to get that timeframe. A £5.2 billion commitment, now £5.6 billion according to the NAO, but obviously 2027 is not very far off. That is roughly the level of budget the National Infrastructure Commission said was about right in terms of flood defence expenditure, but we recommend that is pushed forward to give confidence of roughly the same level of expenditure but on a much longer timeframe. Second, as we have heard, is maintenance. Getting enough current budget into maintenance by all of those organisations with responsibility for maintenance. The third is around capacity and local authorities. The weakest link in a lot of this, be it planning or design or maintenance of emergency response and recovery and helping people to get back into their homes is around capacity in the local authorities.

My next question is moving on from the finances to the governance. One of the things that was mentioned in the discussion with the previous panel was the idea of bringing together agencies in terms of having an agency that was dealing with a whole range of issues around flooding resilience in terms of monitoring, forecasting and so on, right the way through. What would you see as the advantages or the disadvantages of that approach? I will go back the other way and ask Professor Hall to start.

I must say—and this is a personal view; the National Infrastructure Commission does not have a position on this—I do not see a great deal of merit in moving all the furniture around in a big machinery of Government thing here. What I do think, which is quite a major reform, is this point around the catchment operator, having a much more joined up view of all of the things going on in catchments and having that done in a much mor co-ordinated way.

We currently have a highly fragmented system; we have all flagged that today. We have also flagged some good examples of collaboration and co-operation, but I think this is too wicked a problem, too big, too complex, too many departments, too many services for there ever to be an effective super body. Like Jim, I do not think we should be rearranging the deck chairs at this point. I think there is some merit in thinking about this regionally, and we have the beginnings of that through regional flood forums and the like, but we are talking about an organisation that needed to have housing, needed to have emergency response, needed to have schools, needed to have community groups. We need to build in third sector charity organisations into this and I do not think that is a good use of resource.

Before I move on, so you would see more merit in the idea of greater co-ordination maybe at a regional level in terms of co-ordinating the different bodies rather than creating a super body, as you put it?

That is my personal view, yes.

Thanks. Professor Naylor?

I think I would tally them and that would be my personal view as well. You can look to things like in Glasgow you have the Metropolitan Strategic Drainage Partnership, and that deals with the water coming off but not the water coming in because it is not all about drainage, but that body is important. It brings together the risk management players, but we need to then bring in everybody that is on land that is affected into that and do that in some kind of coherent way. As I said earlier, I think that there is space for creating more capacity with those people so that there is more resource because they need to work together, and they need to have time. That takes time to build trust and to build relationships, not just across those different bodies but also with all the communities. If you could have one contact for communities that might make a lot of sense but having people who have good human geography skills and maybe mental health and first aid skills. They are doing that in Nova Scotia in Canada because of the flood maps coming out. There is somebody they can phone and process the emotional effect of what these flood maps and erosion maps will do next week. We need to be very careful about how we would structure that but absolutely moving the deck chairs is not a good idea but strengthening policies to enable them and aligning them to identify blockages, so we do not do maladaptive decisions is crucial. We need a legal piece alongside the governance piece and recognise that to move the rain line railway in places we will need multilevel, multisector, multiscale decision making across multiple local authorities. Could we have some exemplars? Could the Government fund some test cases of how we might do that in real places?

Thank you. Dr Sayers?

I largely agree with what has been said. I think flooding influences too many things and there are too many things going on to think of a single organisation master planning that process, some super organisation. But I would highlight the role of the agency of strategic oversight as an important role, and that could be very much strengthened to be a much more strategic alignment process. That alignment in the planning process and having real teeth and ability to think about that strategic alignment is needed. An organisation with total master planning responsibilities is not needed.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed to Dr Sayers and Professors Naylor, McDonagh and Hall for their evidence, an excellent and very long session. We were not paying them by the hour were we? We are not paying them at all, but very grateful for you coming and for the evidence you have heard. It has been tremendously helpful, thank you very much.