There is something rather odd about discussing flooding after of one of the driest summers on record. With baked lawns, hosepipe bans and sunshine becoming suspiciously routine, flood risk felt a distant concern. Yet if the British weather teaches us anything, it is not to become too comfortable with a dry spell.
Against a backdrop of increasing flood risk, driven by wetter and warmer winters and more intense storms, effective and co-ordinated reviews of flood events have never been more important. Without these, we may fail to make the communities in which we live and work as resilient to flooding as they ought to be in a rapidly changing world.
One key way in which floods in England and Wales are responded to is under section 19 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. A section 19 report is an informal description of a report prepared under the provisions of the Act. Section 19 of the Act requires that:
(1) On becoming aware of a flood in its area, a lead local flood authority must, to the extent that it considers it necessary or appropriate, investigate—
(a) which risk management authorities have relevant flood risk management functions, and
(b) whether each of those risk management authorities has exercised, or is proposing to exercise, those functions in response to the flood.
(2) Where an authority carries out an investigation under subsection (1) it must—
(a) publish the results of its investigation, and
(b) notify any relevant risk management authorities.
A flood “includes any case where land not normally covered by water becomes covered by water” but excludes water mains and sewers unless, in the latter case, the result was “wholly or partly caused by an increase in the volume of rainwater”. A lead local flood authority (LLFA) is defined as the unitary or county council for the area. With responsibility divided among around 150 LLFAs in England and Wales, section 19 reporting is inherently fragmented. This stands in marked contrast to the Environment Agency’s statutory responsibilities in relation to main river and coastal flood risks.
Neither the purpose of a section 19 investigation nor when an LLFA must investigate (beyond it being considered “necessary or appropriate”) are specified in the Act. Further, the Act provides no timescales for any investigation or specific reporting requirements following that investigation.
LLFAs thus have significant latitude to decide whether a section 19 report should be prepared and, if so, both when it is published and its contents. In practice, LLFAs produce reports when self-defined criteria are met, such as five or more properties being internally flooded in a single incident. Thus, section 19 reports are inconsistent between LLFAs, in terms of both when they are prepared and their content. Inconsistency may be driven by LLFA budgets limiting the availability and depth of in-house expertise. There are no national standards and reports can vary from as little as a row on a spreadsheet up to in excess of 100 pages in length.
As many LLFAs note, the duty to perform an investigation is not accompanied by any additional enforcement powers. A section 19 report is a statement of the circumstances of a flood and the parties, known as risk management authorities (RMAs), that had a role in managing that flood’s risks. Reports are often said not to be technical studies of flood risk or mechanisms, even though they may comment on them. For example, hydraulic modelling is rare and commonly explicitly excluded, despite criticism of this omission being a significant constraint on properly identifying the cause of a flood. Risk‑reduction options are also sometimes described as outside of scope, even where reports include recommendations for RMAs.
Despite their relatively limited scope, section 19 reports often take a year or more to be published. This delay can lead to a loss of data or other evidence with the attendant risk that the report will not properly identify the cause of flooding, perhaps by mistaking it with a source of the flooding. Where a cause is clearly identified, delay may still have a knock-on effect on the implementation of solutions, whether ‘easy wins’ or more significant investments in large-scale flood prevention schemes. Property owners may also face prolonged uncertainty, hindering their ability to make well-informed decisions about improving their property’s flood resilience, as well as the emotional cost of coping with an unresolved risk of recurrence. It can thus be argued that section 19 reporting does not place the people and businesses the LLFAs serve at their heart.
The inconsistencies in LLFA reporting also limits section 19 reports’ usefulness for property insurers. At present, flood risk data sets on which pricing and underwriting decisions are based cannot easily use section 19 reports’ data without an impractical amount of manual extraction and standardisation. Nor can these reports be used to identify the comparative risk or severity of flooding in different areas, providing no value to underwriters beyond a very local level. At that local level, a section 19 report may or may not exist and, where a report does exist, there is a risk in reliance on it where the flooding mechanism might be absent or insufficiently identified. Without this clarity, uncertainty may also undermine insurers’ efforts to promote flood‑resilience schemes to property owners.
DEFRA has recognised the importance of section 19 reports, stating that it is the cumulative body of evidence of the causes of flooding that is of real value. That this value was obtained following a commissioned report and manual review of 100 section 19 reports highlights the problem of extracting value from these reports. DEFRA also indicated that section 19 reports can also provide a valuable archive of information on flood risk across the area and any actions that resulted, though it is hard to see how, when reports may be difficult to locate, inconsistent in format, and not readily amenable to comparative analysis.
A national standard that harmonised the minimum thresholds triggering LLFA reporting – determined by the type or number of properties affected, whether they were flooded internally or externally and/or the rainfall intensity – would ensure that all significant events are captured. Similarly, standardised data capture and reporting formats across LLFAs would improve data quality and enable more effective aggregation and analysis of that data. This could include:
More detailed reports already contain at least some of these things, sometimes alongside catchment and flood route mapping, hydraulic modelling, drainage system assessments and clear investigation findings. The most comprehensive reports also evaluate the return period of any surface water runoff, distinct from the rainfall event’s return period. They also consider the impact of a drainage system failure at any point in the system, rather than assume the system will operate in future as intended, which is particularly helpful for anticipating developing risks.
As is apparent from the foregoing, these matters demand a certain level of technical expertise that could also be codified. Together, all these measures would help harmonise section 19 reports’ contents and maximise the returns on the time invested in them.
The introduction of deadlines for publishing reports could lead to more timely reporting, enabling all reported flooding incidents to be considered and, where feasible, measures identified to reduce the risk of future occurrences. It could also promote prompt early post-flood investigations, particularly where the value of field investigations may diminish with the passage of time.
Although far from straightforward, were these proposals enacted through legislation this could also incorporate:
While funding is limited, these measures could help to ensure that all significant flood risks are identified and there is an appropriate allocation of resources in response. This would sit well alongside a consolidated needs-based flood risk funding settlement for LLFAs from central government, informed by standardised section 19 reporting where appropriate. Access to that funding could be made conditional upon the production of compliant section 19 reports of the kind outlined above.
Section 19 reports are capable of playing a far more significant role in flood risk management than they do at present. While any reforms would need to be balanced against the resources available to LLFAs, doing nothing is unlikely to be a satisfactory long-term answer. Continuing with an inconsistent approach to LLFA-led flood investigations is increasingly difficult to justify, particularly in a system where there are questions about whether an investigation occurs, when it is published and what it contains. Such inconsistencies create a real risk that opportunities to learn lessons and reduce future harm will be missed.
If section 19 reporting is to fulfil its potential, there is a strong case for it to be repurposed into a consistent framework for understanding flooding and learning from it. This is likely to help communities, businesses, public authorities and their insurers make informed decisions and improve their resilience to flooding.
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