A cop-out – Business Money editor berates Environment Agency’s chairman
Robert Lefroy, who lives in the flooded village of Thorney, lashed out at Lord Smith’s statement made today inferring that town or country could be defended from flooding but not both, as it could not be afforded.
Lefroy commented: “It is all about ideology not economics. The Somerset levels have been reclaimed over a period of 1,000 years but the process stopped in 1990 when the Environment Agency took over responsibility for its management. The first thing it did was to scrap the machinery that dredged the rivers which were then allowed to silt up and become choked with weed and reed. You do not have to be particularly bright to work out that a deeper, cleaner river will shift water to the sea a great deal faster.
Lord Smith’s claim, that the old-established and well proven way can no longer be afforded, fails on to two glaring counts. First, the Environment Agency spent £31m creating a bird sanctuary in Somerset and insisted that adjacent farms did not clear their ditches so that the water levels could be maintained for wading birds. That money would have dredged the rivers on the levels for at least eight years. Second, the cost of flooding to communities, businesses, communications and the cost of the public services now required to support them must be huge.
In a bitter piece of irony the so-called natural and bio-diverse policies of the Environment Agency have resulted in the slaughter by drowning of badgers, hedgehogs, ground-nesting birds, rabbits, foxes – you name it, it is probably dead now. Just where human beings stand in the agency’s list of priorities I can only speculate but they are suffering too.
The Norfolk Broad’s authorities fought a long and bitter battle 20 years ago to keep their management out of the hands of the Environment Agency. They succeeded and despite record rainfall the Broads have not flooded.
The UK is seeing a population explosion and needs every inch of land it can find for new homes and growing the food to feed the occupants. To turn back the clock 1,000 years to return the Somerset Levels to a swamp is the kind of woolly headed, misguided thinking of local MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger’s, townie do-gooders and twitchers who have exercised far too much influence in the affairs of the Environment Agency over the last 25 years.
Lord Smith is right to stand up for his workforce that has laboured heroically over the last month but much of the effort would not have been necessary had the agency done its job properly. In wasting taxpayers’ money and resources, in slaughtering swathes of wildlife by drowning and in comparison with the Norfolk Broads it has failed on every reasonable count by which it must be assessed.
I utterly reject Lord Smith’s statement today: it smacks of the old politician trying to justify a quarter of a century of willful negligence towards its duties through a pitiful adherence to what is a now, unquestionably established, disastrous ideology.