Unruly rivers

The floods that really matter are composed of migrant labour

28 July 2007

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.

So, 120,000 new homes are to be built in the ‘Thames Gateway’ (which is a poncey name for the ‘Thames Flood Plain’). Some 95 per cent of these new homes will be at risk of flooding — and the threat is exponential, because building those homes vastly increases the risk to other homes already built. I wonder if we will see a court case one day in which a homeowner sues developers, or the local council, or the government for having built houses nearby which have either increased his insurance premiums or left his living room a foot deep in noxious water.
The natural population of England is pretty static and has been for some years. We need new homes only to house those people who move to live here from abroad. We are told we need these people for our economy, to do the jobs which we ‘do not want to do’. But the only reason British people don’t want to work in bars, hotels or building sites is that the wages are too low. And our reluctance to pay them more money is an almost perfect example of the most ruinous short-termism. Nobody has factored in the cost that accepting migrant labour — a workforce characterised by low skills, low aspirations and of a necessarily temporary nature — will incur. But we might hazard a pretty good guess. A higher crime rate occasioned by the entirely understandable sense of injustice experienced by a poorly paid immigrant labour force; a concomitant constant drain on our health and education and social services, resulting in higher and higher council tax. And the provision of cheap, ugly housing which, remarkably, manages to square the circle of increasing the likelihood of both flooding and chronic drought. More cars, roads, shopping malls, petrol stations, leisure centres. Whole cities of pale faux-brick starter homes, the rainwater deprived of an opportunity to sink down into the earth.

By the time the flood waters have receded, of course, this argument will count for nothing. And the new Prime Minister will be praised for having resisted the temptation to respond in a knee-jerk manner to what was, after all, merely a natural calamity about which we can do nothing. So carry on building. And the cost, when Ebbsfleet or Gravesend floods once all those new houses have been built, will be borne, in the end, by you and me. But the financial cost, which will be enormous, is not remotely the worst of it.