The tragedy of Sir Philip Dilley’s short reign as chairman of the Environment Agency, which ended when he resigned today, is that until he chose to stay in Barbados rather than travel back to Britain to take control of the response to the floods, he was unusually well-qualified for the job.
With his appointment in September 2014 we finally had an engineer in charge of the nation’s flood defences. Prior to that the quango had been led by a long line of chairmen and chief executives who seemed to have little grounding in water management or any kind of construction. Baroness Young of Old Scone, chief executive between 2000 and 2008, had come to the job from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. No wonder then that during her leadership the focus of the agency seemed to slip away from protecting people and property and rather more towards providing habitats for wading birds. Lord Smith of Finsbury, chairman between 2008 and 2014, prepared for the job by studying Coleridge and Wordsworth, and being secretary of state for culture, media and sport. You can imagine the outcry were a civil engineer to be put in charge of the Royal Opera House.
Sir Philip Dilley at least understood about dams, drainage channels and everything else under his remit: he has a first class degree in civil engineering from Imperial College and led the consulting engineers Ove Arup. Had he stayed he might have saved us from the absurd spectacle of new flood defences which fail the first time they are put to the test. But that was not enough to save him given his seemingly faulty knowledge of Caribbean geography, not to mention the requirements of holding public office. As he now knows, you can’t get away with telling the world you are spending your holidays in Barbados because it is where your wife comes from, when in fact she comes from Jamaica, 1200 miles away.
Neither, when you are raking in £100,000 for a three-day week of a flood defence agency, can you expect to go AWOL when there are serious floods. In an interview with the Independent soon after his appointment he seemed to understand this, saying: ‘I chair the board of the agency and I agree there is a sort of figurehead position that is crucial for perception.’ It is an object lesson in how quickly a plum public sector job can lead to complacency.
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