Newsletter #5 (June 2025)

Dear all,

With the government now consulting on major changes to its flood policy, I wanted to dedicate this newsletter to the daunting task of explaining them. 

If you are a flooded person who would like to respond to the consultation and would rather not read 70-pages of flood-Whitehallese, we are building a shared response where we’ve made it accessible, just click on this questionnaire.    

The tools are complicated, involving changes to formulas for investment and to the process for prioritising interventions. But the goals are a little clearer, and their causes too.

I’ve decided to focus on those. The changes announced will be far-reaching and will have considerable implications, so it is vital that as many people as possible understand them.

There is quite a lot of other stuff in the paper. So, for the curious, I’ve put some highlights in the end as little notes.

As always, do feel free to send me questions about this. You may have noticed how deep in I am at this point and that I actually enjoy discussing extremely niche topics in contemporary flood policy.

The policy in short:

Put simply, the government wants to pivot away from a focus on large-scale defences (usually appropriate for coastal and river protection) towards a larger number of smaller interventions (more appropriate to surface water flooding) and maintenance of existing large-scale defences.

These changes are rooted in the second national flood risk assessment, which stresses surface water risk, as well as years of very strong criticisms of the government’s approach to surface water flooding and controversy about the decayed state of defences.

As always, there will be winners and losers.

If you are a community waiting for a large-scale defence, such as our friends in the Severn Valley, or places like Abingdon, we assess that the new policy has the potential to be bad news because it shifts the focus away from the interventions you need. We will continue as you have asked us to to keep looking at this

If you are a community impacted by surface water and who has been struggling to secure funding for a smaller intervention such as sustainable drainage to stop your street from flooding, the policy will be good news if it works.

Beyond the changes to interventions, the government is exploring a shift to actually setting a target for what it wants to achieve with flood risk management, better metrics of success, as well as alternative sources of funding, and devolution to regional mayors. These are hugely important problems and we will have to see what solutions are taken on.

What to make of it:

On the face of it, many of the changes are sensible. We do need to maintain defenses. We cannot deal with surface water flooding by building flood walls. And we do need to experiment with a lot more natural flood management.  

The problem is that we need all this as well as continued development of large-scale flood alleviation schemes, not instead of it. For the smaller towns that have yet to benefit from such schemes, the changes could be devastating.

As always, the root of the problem remains too much need and not enough resource in a time of great economic difficulty. For all the research showing that failing to spend on flood defences only incurs costs later, there are arguments of this sort for many areas of public policy.

The harsh reality is that government policy pits flooding vs. everything else, like health.

Sadly, it also pits flooding vs. flooding. Surface vs. rivers. Maintenance vs. new. 

Until enough money is provided for achieving a high level of protection across the country, a key National Infrastructure Commission recommendation, the major risks (abandoning the best solutions for communities and mass uninsurability) will keep rising and we will keep seeing tragedies.

Deciding on a solution together:

One of the things I greatly appreciate about our community is its political diversity. From my conversations with flooded people, we have all sorts of political opinions represented.

Some of us vote Reform, some seem to come from the more traditional conservative right, others are clear progressive activists, some of us are sceptical of climate change, but we are united in our belief that flooded people deserve better and that things need to change.

Most flooded people we’ve talked to agree that more money is needed. But there is no great flooded people’s consensus on how much funding is needed right now and how it should be secured.  

Our organisation’s strategy involves facilitating a dialogue so that flooded communities can achieve a consensus (or as much of a consensus as possible) about principles for how much flooding should be funded and how.

Once we have consolidated these principles, we can start building coalitions behind them.

I’m very keen to hear your thoughts on these questions.

And now, the nerdy details. 

Groups will be able to bid for NFM funding

Attention natural flood management enthusiasts! In a big win for the nature lobby, the government will allow groups that are not statutory risk management authorities under the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act to bid for funding for natural flood management funding. This is likely targeted more at Rivers Trusts. But there is nothing excluding flood groups.

Policy details: a lower standard of evidence required

We try to be nuanced at Flooded People UK. While we all have strong environmental sensibilities, we also worry that natural flood management is becoming a new hype that outstrips the available evidence. So it is with caution that we welcome that the government is lowering the standard of evidence a scheme needs to provide to get funding to accommodate the fact that it is harder to prove the flood mitigation benefits of NFM. We are embarking on a great adventure here, and it will be vital to evaluate progress properly.

Policy details: it’s peddle to the metal for property-level flood measures

Controversial property-level interventions could get a big boost from the policy changes. This could help bring down their price, as industry has long complained of a chicken and egg problem/vicious circle where low demand stops them scaling production and keeps costs high. It could also mean a lot of people get measures in inappropriate settings as property-level measures are rolled out as cheap alternatives to currently unaffordable schemes. So we’ll have to keep an eye on that one.  

Policy details: wait and see on metrics and goals

In our mere five months of existence, the fact that UK flood policy doesn’t have a goal it wants to achieve has always been a central complaint of our organisation. So it’s promising to see the government acting to meet this gaping hole in its plans. It is also good to see the government acting to improve on its metric of homes better protected. On the face of it, this metric doesn’t distinguish between a home protected to a 1/100 year standard and one that’s received a non-return valve. So if done right, these changes could pave the way for a better approach to flood management. We will have to wait and see.

Whispers: why the silence on the spending review?

The more detail-oriented reader of our newsletter might wonder why we’re not saying anything about the new spending commitments. Short answer: because we’re very sceptical of them and still working on investigating them. When we know more, so will you.

In solidarity,

Louis