Newsletter #1 (February 2025)

Dear all,

This is our first email for the Flooded People UK newsletter, through which we will keep you up to date on our journey. In the long run, we will work to make this a trusted source of information about flooding.

We’d love to hear back from you, and you can let us know what you think, or about anything flood-related. We intend for this to be a dialogue and for your experience to shape what we share.

Last week, the Flooded People UK team - Heather, Harry, Sanjay, Chris, Fergal, and myself - publicised the soft launch of our project, sharing Linkedin posts and frantically emailing countless dozens of contacts we’ve made over our years in flood and environmental advocacy.

‘Going public’ in this way represented the culmination of months of planning and anticipation. Now we are reaching out to as many flooded people as we can. Our two fantastic organisers, Harry and Sanjay, are starting to criss-cross the country meeting them while I send videos and emails to every group I can.

We have a plan and each of us brings different skills and experience in delivering it. So, for today’s newsletter, the first of many, I wanted to tell you about the plan and how it came together.

While I was working in an environmental NGO, I read about the catastrophic floods that killed 184 people in Germany, in 2021. The floods left me wondering why no one who was trying to tackle climate change was going out there to meet those people suffering from flooding. Two years later, in the midst of a professional transition, I decided to find funding to go and do so myself.

Somewhere along the way, I met Heather Shepherd. A natural-born organiser, Heather has spent almost 30 years helping flooded people. She was looking for new ways to do so and, over the course of many meetings, we decided to team up and build this project.

There is so much hurt and so little support. But there is capacity. It sits with the thousands of flooded people who have gone to hell and back, repaired their houses, recovered, gotten back up, formed groups, dealt with annoying officials, often got flood alleviation schemes and improvements from their risk managers, and managed to live their lives safely after the flood. We will unlock that experience and capacity and make it available to flooded people.

We know that this will only get us part of the way to the safety and care that flooded people deserve. The government needs to meet us halfway. The UK needs to deploy better strategies, improve funding and standards, and to stop making it worse by building in at-risk areas, under-investing in water infrastructure, or fuelling the climate crisis. There’s a lot to do but we have a shot at making it all happen if we work together.

We know that there could be a powerful constituency for flood safety in the UK. For flooded people, farmers, and countless businesses, it is increasingly an existential issue. For insurers, it is a direct threat to a major source of revenue. As always, the task is coming together. Flooded people are divided into hundreds of groups who are focused on local areas. Nobody is convening a large coalition, but we will.

Today we’re taking one of the first steps needed to turn things around. We are inviting flooded people to join a carefully moderated Facebook space that is action-oriented, informative, and constructive, a space to take steps towards becoming one community. We have put a lot of thought into how to achieve this.

This is where you come in.

If you know other flooded people, please invite them to our Facebook community by sharing this link.

If you know people who would be interested in receiving these emails, please share this link with them.

If you have any thoughts, questions, or reflections. Please share them with us by answering this email.

All the best,

Louis, Director & cofounder

Flooded People UK