Unruly rivers
The floods that really matter are composed of migrant labour
England’s habitually well-mannered and inoffensive chalk streams have been uncharacteristically full of themselves this last week or so — as you may have gathered from your television evening news programmes or, if you’re unlucky, your kitchen.
July is usually a dry month, one of the driest of the year. August, paradoxically, is almost always one of the wettest in central England, where, to put it broadly, most of our flooding — both in Yorkshire a month back and more recently in the Thames and Severn valleys — has originated. The River Don — which starts out pretty and ends a filthy sewer of industrial waste — was the villain of those floods in Rotherham, Sheffield and Doncaster. It rises in the Peak District, in what anyone but a Yorkshireman would call the Midlands. The Severn rises in eastern Wales, but still safely in that central belt which experiences high summer rainfall. The downlands which feed the Thames are a shade south of the Midlands, but not by much. My point here is that high rainfall in midsummer is hardly unknown in central England, away from the coast. It’s been quite a bit more than usual this time around, sure — and a little earlier too. But such consuming dampness is not unheard of. When the TV news crews tell you that records have been broken, it is records about flooding, rather than rainfall. These days when the rainfall arrives in the Peak District and the Welsh mountains and the soft pale green rise of hills separating the Midlands from the south, it doesn’t know what to do with itself; so it behaves like inner-city youths deprived of distraction — it causes trouble. The natural infrastructure cannot cope. Leave aside global warming for a moment; something else has changed.
The answer, according to almost everybody, is the building of new homes. We are building too many too quickly and in the wrong places. A study for Norwich Union back in February this year quoted 85 per cent of ‘construction professionals’ as believing that urban flooding will be a major problem in the future. Some three quarters of new build homes, those shoved up in the last
ten years, with their tiny square of lawn and acres of concrete and tarmac, will not be
able to withstand flooding. But even though everybody knows this, the government has announced that it intends to press ahead with plans to pave most of southern England. This is, you see, the ‘common-sense’ approach; the floods are bad and we must help those who have been stricken to rebuild their lives and their homes, but we need new houses and floods don’t happen that often, do they?
Well, they’re happening much, much, more often. Three fairly calamitous floods in the last seven years, for example (2007, 2004 and 2000), the latest seriously affecting a vast swath of the population, something like five million people in all. And the cost is already estimated at more than £3 billion. Meanwhile insurance premiums are likely to rise between 15 and 20 per cent as a result, according to the Association of British Insurers. And against this tide of misery the government insists that there is no great problem, provided that the correct regulations are in place.
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