Dear all,

Welcome to the second edition of Flooded People UK’s newsletter. As always, please feel free to answer these emails with feedback or thoughts. Your suggestions were most helpful last time, and hopefully, thanks to comments by David Webb, the deliverability issues are now fixed!

A couple of weeks back, our cofounder and organiser extraordinaire Heather invited me to tag along with her to an event in London. As always, the idea was to have flooded people or their advocates present in spaces that are normally solely the preserve of companies or government officials patting each other on the back. But then we got surprised by something.

Sipping coffee in a room packed with insurance industry executives, we met someone who was concerned that one of the government’s cuts might be to flood defences. With the chancellor’s spring statement due on the 26th of March, we heard, there was a major concern that flood-defence spending would be cut.

I’m sure you can imagine this sent a bit of a chill down our campaigner spines.

But, watching the Spring Statement on YouTube last Wednesday, and having prepared contingency plans in the form of an aggressive policy briefing and strongly-worded press release calling any cuts a “fiscal own goal”, I breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing the following words come out of Mrs Reeves’ mouth.

Today, I am instead increasing capital spending.

The absence of bad news is still good news. I am delighted to report to you, our emerging network of flooded people, flood action groups, and concerned people, that the coming year may still be spent playing offence, not defence. So, today, I want to take this chance to reiterate some of our points about the case for flood defences.

Flood-defence spending remains the main way that governments manage flood risk, whether by building new defences or maintaining existing ones. An information request I sent to the Environment Agency shows that 400,000 homes are still waiting for £8.6bn worth of schemes to be built, despite them being ‘prioritised’. This includes schemes that are desperately needed by groups we are in touch with, like the Severn Valley Water Management Scheme.

Failure to properly pay for flood defences now only leads to more costs later in infrastructure repairs, lost work hours, diminished investment, and home prices (hence the ‘fiscal own goal’). New research by Public First shows that flooding causes £2.4 billion in direct damage to property and infrastructure every year, as well as £290m in lost output from missed work.

In the absence of defences, people suffer. Research confirms what we already know about the devastating psychological impacts of flooding on people, with extremely high rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Other briefings suggest that repeatedly flooded communities with no hope of securing defences risk going into self-reinforcing spirals of decline, as businesses close and people struggle to cope.

Finally, defences are what keep countless homes insurable. The Flood Re scheme relies on continued investment in flood safety by the government. Without this scheme, many properties could not be insured, resulting in massively depreciated values and catastrophic economic pain for those affected.

Britain is, among other things, an island where it rains a lot, with countless towns sitting on top of a water table and increasingly warm and stormy seas around it. Managing all this water is a no-brainer. In the coming years, Flooded People UK will be siding with common sense, making the case for implementing statutory standards of safety that everyone ought to benefit from.

Community notes

I want to take the opportunity to salute the exceptional discussions by flooded people in our emerging online moderated community. Our intention has always been to host a space that is informative, constructive, and action-oriented. With PTSD and suffering so frequent among flooded people, our advisers felt that it was vital to have a space where they could meet one another and share their stories. This has been happening with heartening warmth and solidarity, and I want to thank those of you who have shared your experiences so generously there.

If you know any flooded people who aren’t in the group yet but should be, invite them to join our private Facebook community.

What the Flooded People team is up to

Our community organisers Harry and Sanjay have done over a dozen site visits with affected people. These mean a lot to us, as we can hear from flooded people and document the issues they are facing. We’re hearing good things about these meetings from flooded people — that they are a great first step to building trust. Our fully remote team is meeting soon to think through next steps, so do watch this space.

If you’re a flooded person and want a visit, email our community team and we’ll set it up.

We’ve also been meeting stakeholders extensively, like at that meeting in London. This is important, as there are many powerful lobbies whose interests align with those of flooded people. Where there is alignment, coordinating with these makes us much more likely to secure the policies we need. I have a report on this coming out soon, for those interested.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to express gratitude to the exceptional team. Cheesiness notwithstanding, I think we can all appreciate the massive difference that having solid colleagues makes.

In solidarity,

Louis