Government must rethink reckless decision to remove funding for main rivers maintenance

Recently, I brought a debate to the House of Commons on the Government’s response to Storm Chandra.

Although this was a welcome opportunity to draw attention in Parliament to the scale of the crisis once again afflicting people across Somerset, I am deeply frustrated that the toll on my constituents’ mental health, the ongoing impacts to local businesses, and the astronomical financial impact on livelihoods and homes could all have been mitigated in advance. My thoughts are with everyone affected.

When the storm hit the South West at the end of January, my Somerset constituency – Glastonbury and Somerton – was battered by 50mm of intense rain which fell on already-saturated ground and flooded homes, roads, and agricultural land. The speed with which the floodwater level rose was described by the Environment Agency as ‘unprecedented,’ with the Currymoor Flood Storage filling in four days instead of ten, and floodwater reaching depths of over six feet in some areas of the Levels and Moors.

Somerset floods, and it is far from the first time that communities across Somerset have been devastated by extreme weather events. After the disastrous floods of 2013-2014 – which saw over 600 houses and 17,000 acres of farmland across the Somerset Levels plunged underwater – the Conservative then-Prime Minister David Cameron famously promised that money was ‘no object’ when it came to preventing similar disasters in future.

But the promised funding to make Somerset’s communities more flood-resilient never came into our coffers. This – alongside additional real term cuts to flooding budgets, the Environment Agency, and local authorities – means that we are still just as vulnerable to extreme flooding as we were over a decade ago, if not more.

I have campaigned tirelessly since my election, and most recently in my role as Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Rural Affairs, for the Government to stop sidelining the South West and to take flooding seriously. To best support communities in Somerset, we need a collaborative approach between government agencies and local authorities. Alongside hard engineering flood defences, there needs to be proper investment in nature-based solutions and strategic catchment-based protection plans, and better sustainable drainage systems must be built into national planning processes. These interventions will save the Exchequer millions of pounds in repairing flood damage – but crucially, will provide protection and relief for Somerset residents, whose anxiety heightens whenever clouds gather on the horizon.

To achieve this, politicians must understand the human impact of this crisis. Investment in flood defences is debated miles from Somerset in the heart of London, which hasn’t faced significant flooding in nearly a century – but for my constituents, winter floods and flash flooding are a terrifying reality. To understand the magnitude of the crisis, I knew it was crucial that the Under-Secretary for Water and Flooding put her boots on to visit my part of Somerset and view the situation on the ground herself.

After my multiple requests in Parliament that she bring forward her promised visit in Spring, the Minister joined me in Glastonbury and Somerton at the beginning of February. I was pleased that she finally agreed to visit in order to witness the reach of the floodwater on the ground. We also met with representatives from Somerset Council, Somerset Rivers Authority and the Environment Agency in Langport and spoke to local business-owners whose properties are at risk of flooding. Local farmer Michael Curtis, kindly arranged to take us out on his tractor and trailer to survey his flooded farmland in Muchelney, highlighting the challenges faced by farmers who give up their land to floodwater for months on end to protect communities further down the catchment from flood damage.

Later, we had a productive meeting with the EA and the Somerset Drainage Board Consortium, who reiterated my calls for the Government to rethink their reckless decision to remove funding for main rivers maintenance. Putting this responsibility on ill-equipped individual riparian owners will only serve to increase the frequency and severity of extreme flooding events, exacerbating the very real impact of climate change in Somerset.

Throughout her visit, I was able to push the Minister about the need for increased funding for maintenance and permanent flood-defence assets in Somerset. I hope that her visit made clear the devastating real-time impacts for flood-hit residents, and the need for urgent action to protect communities from further devastation and I was pleased that she reiterated that further investment will be put into our county’s flood defences. I will continue to hold the Government to account to ensure the Minister’s words translate into a firm commitment for this vital funding for Somerset, as I did in the Chamber this week.

This visit could be a turning point in the fight against flooding in Somerset, and I will keep pushing to ensure momentum is not lost. In future, I hope to reach a point where there is no need for Parliamentary debate over the impact of flooding in Somerset – but this will only be possible with joined-up thinking between properly-funded government agencies, thorough local flood mitigation strategies, and investment in nature-based solutions, permanent assets, and a whole-catchment system approach to flood resilience.

Together, these interventions will reduce the unnecessarily devastating impacts from flooding for people across the Glastonbury and Somerton constituency, Somerset, or the wider South West as climate change accelerates.