News Focus - Plain lunacy: building that flooded a county
WORKERS, DEC 2007 ISSUE
Photo: Workers As you entered the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury during July to September by the old A38 route you would have seen a banner draped on the front of an old house saying "Don't let the town drown Mr Brown".
The floods of this year – both flash and the typical type – have again raised the questions regarding the logic of building on areas within designated flood plain. Recently Tewkesbury Borough Council approved the continuance of building within the M5 corridor at Junction 9, which many locals argue is having serious affects on the nature of flood water management, whether the new buildings are placed in the designated flood plain areas or not. This decision was taken following a referral from a previous meeting at which local residents marched on Tewkesbury Borough Council's offices protesting about building on flood plain.
At a council meeting in mid-October one councillor proposed a ban on any further development in the Tewkesbury area until after a full inquiry into July's floods. But feeling the pressure of the government's house building programme and the possible penalties imposed by building firms, councillors referred this to the executive committee. The local plan has called for the provision in the Cheltenham and Gloucester urban areas of a total of 17,906 dwellings between 2001 and 2016 – almost half the 37,931 dwellings to be provided in Gloucestershire as a whole.
Many say that building up the low-lying land by creating man-made embankments to protect new houses within the flood plain or outside it causes the flood water to displace to other areas which would not normally see high levels of surface water. One local councillor recently challenged the council by showing the latest Environment Survey of suspected flood plain and described the situation of the July floods where houses previously never regarded as liable to flooding (even flash flooding) were deluged with three feet of water, and linked this to the building of new houses not far away.
The council also called on the government to substantially increase spending on flood defences, in line with the requirements of the Association of British Insurers. Without this some properties in the town would be uninsurable and therefore unsaleable – destabilising the future of the town.