2 July 2007Colin Brown
As Britain tried to cope with a fresh deluge of rain yesterday, Baroness Young, the head of the embattled Environment Agency, has admitted that her £500m budget is too small to cope with the extreme flooding that has put parts of Yorkshire and the West of England under water.
She has put in a bid for at least an extra £150m but has conceded that experts say £250m is needed to bring Britain's flood defences to the level that could hold back floods that have left five people dead and thousands with deluged homes.
"There are some areas where we could ... provide very cost-effective flood defences but there is simply inadequate funding in the budget," she said. "For the future with increasing climate change, we do need substantial additional funding."
Andy Burnham, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is now under pressure to reopen the budget for flood defences fixed by his predecessor, Stephen Timms, for the Comprehensive Spending Review in the autumn. The flooding also puts a big question mark over the Government's drive for more affordable housing which may lead to an increase in building on flood plains.
The Environment Agency, which has been given charge of Britain's flood defences, was accused yesterday of floundering in the wake of the extreme weather. A leaked memorandum to Environment Agency managers revealed they are being warned by Agency executives to prepare for a real-terms cut in their running costs, unless the budget is substantially increased. Lady Young, a Labour peer and former health administrator, faced criticism over her agency's failure to do more to bring flood defences up to standard by the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, only a fortnight ago. It said the state of existing defences - many owned by local authorities - was poor and only 46 per cent of high-risk flood defensive systems, such as those protecting urban areas, had achieved their target condition.
The NAO estimated that more than two million homes and businesses were at risk of flooding each year in England, affecting 4.3 million people. It said existing research suggested it could cost up to £40,000 per household to put right the flood damage.
Lady Young was also given a roasting last week over the NAO report by the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Tory MP Edward Leigh, who said she should consider resigning her post as chief executive of the agency.
Barbara Young, who was given a peerage by Tony Blair in 1997, was a vice-chairman of the BBC, chairman of English Nature, and chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, before being put in charge of the Environment Agency in 2000. She made it clear she will not quit and hit back at her critics, saying: "It was not the Environment Agency that flooded the country. It was the weather."
Lady Young admitted in a BBC radio interview that some areas would not be protected from flooding because of the lack of funding. She said the volume of rain was so great that the additional funding could not have stopped houses being flooded.
