If you cut funding for flood defences you shouldn't be surprised when those defences fail.
The Environment Agency was set up under John Major. Under Osborne's spending review its budget was slashed. People warned that would damage its ability to predict and managed river flooding and so it has.
// Environment secretary Owen Paterson insisted that cuts to 550 flood prevention, warning and recovery jobs at the Environment Agency (EA) – splashed on by the Telegraph last week, though Eye readers read about them last year – are somehow being made “with the intention of protecting frontline services concerned with floods”. “This government is spending more than all preceding governments on flood defences,” he added. It should be but it isn’t.
Things were already bad under Labour. In 2007, official figures showed the EA missed its target of keeping just 63 percent of England’s existing flood defences up to scratch (Eye 1187); and the National Audit Office said it would take an extra £150m a year just to reach the target. But since the coalition came to power in 2010, far from tackling the flood defence backlog it has actually spent even less on flood defences.
A briefing paper last year found a 6 percent overall fall in central government funding for flood and coastal defence during the 2011-15 spending review period. Even the extra £120m announced in November 2012 – after it was revealed that 294 flood defence schemes across England were on hold after never receiving funding they’d been promised – didn’t bring spending back up to even 2010 levels. //
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