Concrete buys time. It does not buy a plan for what comes after.
Next month the Assembly will vote on a £140 million package to extend the flood defences along the Ardle, raising the walls through the town centre by up to 1.2 metres and adding new embankments downstream at Millbeck. I expect it to pass comfortably, and I think it should. But I also think we need to stop describing it as a climate policy, because it is not one, and pretending otherwise lets everyone avoid the harder conversation.
A flood wall is an engineering answer to a specific risk at a specific place. It is designed against a particular height of water, calculated from past floods and projected rainfall. When it works, it protects homes and businesses behind it. That is valuable, and nobody who has helped a neighbour drag a ruined sofa onto the pavement would argue otherwise. But a wall does nothing about why the water is rising, and it does nothing about what happens when the next projection is higher than the one it was built for.
What concrete cannot do
Consider what the Ardle scheme leaves out. It protects about 1,900 properties in the town centre. It does not protect the farms upstream, where water will now be held for longer on the fields. It does not protect the villages downstream, where faster flows through a narrower channel could increase risk unless the embankments at Millbeck are built at the same time – and the Millbeck section is in the second phase, which has not been funded. Nor does it address the housing estate on the floodplain at Riverside Meadows, approved eleven years ago over the objections of the environment agency.
Walls also have a habit of creating their own demand. Once a stretch of riverbank is defended, it becomes easier to argue for building behind it. Developers point to the wall; planners point to the developers; and in twenty years, when the design standard is exceeded, there is far more to lose. We have seen this pattern on the coast at Port Selwyn, where the sea wall built in the 1980s encouraged a generation of seafront flats that now need a second, taller wall.
“Every pound we spend on hard defences buys us time. The danger is that we spend the time admiring the wall rather than deciding where people should live in fifty years.”
That warning came from Dr Rhiannon Achterberg, a flood-risk engineer who advised the Assembly’s environment committee during the scheme’s design, and it is the heart of the matter. A climate policy would ask where people should live, how land upstream should be managed to slow water down, and how communities should be helped to move when defending them no longer makes sense.
The case for the wall, and its limits
The strongest argument against my position is that people need protection now, and long-term planning does nothing for a family whose kitchen floods next winter. I accept that completely. Natural flood management – planting trees, restoring wetlands, blocking drainage ditches on the moors – takes years to show results, and no one should be asked to wait for a beaver dam to save their home. The wall is necessary.
But necessary is not the same as sufficient. The same Assembly that will vote for £140 million of concrete has allocated just £3 million over five years to upstream land management, and nothing at all to a scheme that would help homeowners in the most exposed streets relocate. The planning code still allows new homes in areas the environment agency classes as high risk, provided they include raised floors. These choices are the real climate policy, and at the moment they point in the wrong direction.
What a plan would look like
We should build the wall. Alongside it, we should commit to funding the Millbeck embankment in the same budget, ban new homes on functional floodplain without exceptions, and set aside a fraction of the defence budget – say ten per cent – for upstream schemes that slow the water before it reaches the town. And we should begin, carefully and honestly, a discussion with the residents of Riverside Meadows about what their long-term options are, before the next flood forces that discussion upon them.
Concrete is a promise that we will be safe for a while. A climate policy is a promise about what we will do with that while. At present, we have made only the first.
