Philip Parkin

To my huge surprise the two hour presentation/debate on flood management that I sat through at this week’s Regeneration Committee meeting, turned out to be really interesting. And given the ongoing problems with flooding in Birmingham, how we deal with this issue is becoming increasingly relevant.

Last year’s Pitt Review – set up in response to the problems caused by the widespread flooding of 2007 - contained 92 recommendations for improvements in Flood Risk Management (FRM). The review led to the Draft Flood Risk Management Bill which was put out for consulation in April ’08, and proposed/concluded the following:

• high intensity localised storms (thought to be as a result of climate change) are causing increasing problems with flooding
• it is now acknowledged that not all properties in flood risk areas can be defended
• the Bill will create clearer structures and responsibilities for managing risks, and enable better planning/prediction and warning of floods

The wrong kind of soil

As Birmingham doesn’t have any large rivers, we don’t (usually, and 2007 aside) get the kind of dramatic headline grabbing incidents of flooding common to some parts of the country. However, probably uniquely in Europe, the city is part of a large conurbation at the top of a river catchment. It’s much more common for cities to have developed on the coast or near large rivers. We also appear to have the wrong kind of soil – there’s a geographical fault line under the city with impermeable clay to the south east/permeable sand stone to the north west. So we get our very own, special kind of flooding taking place simultaneously at several locations across the city (Aston/Witton/Handsworth etc). This makes it extremely difficult to offer effective flood warnings. (Though setting up ‘local flood action groups’ in these areas is seen as an attempt to tackle this).

The wrong kind of rain

Also, our location on top of a catchment of rivers makes flood warnings much less reliable than elsewhere in the country. It also means the city is much more affected by less predictable local weather patterns – we get different types of flooding in different parts of the city, depending on the intensity and duration of the rainfall.

So, the Pitt Review/Draft Bill is going to mean that Birmingham (for no extra cash) will have to:

• lead in the management of local flood risk
• establish ownership and legal responsibility of e.g. flood defence assets (embankments/gates/pumps etc)
• collate and map the main flood risk management and drainage assets

As a lot of this is going on in Birmingham, anyway, it seems as though the real benefit of the bill – aside from making it clearer to everyone what they’re meant to be doing – will be in ensuring that neighbouring authorities operate to similar standards and under the same guidelines as we do.