Nice to see Boris the Braindead up to his neck in this particular example of Tory do-nothing-until-it's-too-late neglect
More arrant nonsense. This problem has been building for decades.
Flooding, and managing it, cost the UK around £2.2 billion each year: we currently spend around £800 million per annum on flood and coastal defences; and, even with the present flood defences, we experience an average of £1,400 million of damage. :According to the Guardian yesterday: government has ramped up spending on flood defences in England since 2010. Perhaps the commentator above is braindead for sprinting to the keyboard without even a soupçon of fact checking.
The Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC is an EU directive which commits European Union member states to achieve good qualitative and quantitative status of all water bodies by 2015.
Total river basin management in terms of achieving good ecological status runs counter to anthropogenic pressures. Increased dredging is not always the answer. Land use needs to change. Reclamation of uplands reduces their capacity to absorb rainwater. Urban infrastructure, especially drains is victorian in many places and barely adequate coping with normal loads, let alone abnormally high rainfall events.
The London water main carries an additional 300 million litres per day into London, I wonder if the sewerage system had a commensurate upgrade? As water courses have been regularised infrastructure has been allowed to encroach onto former floodplains, having taken no account of extreme events. Probably areas of farmland will have to be relinquished, especially saltmarsh, in order to offer more protection upstream. Pointing a finger at the government of the day for dereliction of duty shows a basic lack of awareness of the complexity of the problem. I get the impression that only recently have the hard questions been asked as to the way forward. Knee jerk reactions merely accentuate the problem.The watershed needs to be considered in it's entirety in order to devise the most effective solutions. Some properties may simply have to be abandoned.


https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/300332/04-947-flooding-summary.p