Flooding in Warwickshire

While much focus is often placed on maintaining watercourses and clearing drains, there are communities for which this will not prevent flooding.  

As part of our duties as Lead Local Flood Authority, WCC has produced its Surface Water Management Plan (SWMP). This takes an evidenced based approach and blends both predicted flood risk against known events and reports, to produce a risk ranking of our most vulnerable communities. This has allowed us to prioritise locations for capital schemes, where typically DEFRA funding is bid for to deliver flood mitigation measured at a community level. 

This funding is however highly competitive, and to access these funds, a detailed business case and design are required. It goes without saying that climate change must be considered in any design.  Predictions for climate over the next century are that rainfall will increase. It is important that any flood schemes are designed with this change in mind, so that they remain effective throughout their life and do not become compromised or risk failure.  

Depending on the design of a scheme, it is not uncommon for a structure to have an intended lifespan of many decades, if not longer. The vast number of Victorian culverts across the county highlight that major engineering projects are rarely a short-term endeavour. 

All this work sits alongside Warwickshire’s investigations of reported flooding. From autumn to summer 2019/20 the Flood Risk Team received 480 separate reports of flooding, many of which related to internal property flooding. As a team, when we investigate, we aim to understand the causes and mechanisms of flooding, so that steps can be put in place to prevent or reduce the chances of it occurring again.  

As a small team facing the pressures of receiving such volumes of reports, unfortunately we cannot investigate all reports as full as we would like to. We adopt a proportionate and risk-based approach, prioritising internal flooding to properties or flooding that creates a risk to life.   

Often these investigations will centre around the maintenance of existing drainage assets. Where a landowner is felt to not be fulfilling their maintenance duty, the authority will step in with advice and guidance, or in the most serious cases, enforcement action. WCC can ask that drainage assets are maintained but cannot require landowners to undertake works to solve an existing problem. As such these reports are used to update our Surface Water Management Plan (SWMP) and where new and emerging areas of risk are identified, consideration will be given to the practicalities of delivering a wider flood mitigation scheme. Any such scheme should not be considered as a short-term solution, or a quick fix and most schemes delivered by Warwickshire have been developed over a number of years. All schemes that go forward to be delivered will need to be supported by a detailed and robust economic case and need to show that they are cost beneficial over the life of the scheme.