67 Integrated wastewater and flood planning framework

Background

I have written before (Episode 48 ) about being underwhelmed by the UK Government’s Plan for Water.? But as I said, there are parts of it that I wholeheartedly endorse.? One of these is the ambition to:

“better integrate water and flood planning by reforming River Basin Management Plans and flood risk management planning – ensuring integration with water company plans”.

A recent presentation by one of the Defra team set out some of the questions that needed to be answered.

• How do we ensure we have a clear and common outcome, at all levels, and a path to get everyone there.
• How do we encourage behaviour change to deliver multiple benefits on flooding, water and the environment.
• How do we work together to ensure the opportunities for collaboration and partnerships deliver the maximum outputs and delivery whilst minimising the obstacles.
• How do we ‘pool’ the resources we have, the people, skills, knowledge and funding, to continue delivering.

I outlined in very vague terms some ideas of what this might involve in Episode 56 , but here are some further thoughts about what this would look like and how to achieve it.

What is not said

There are a few things not included in that quote from the Plan for Water.?

• It seems to imply that water company plans are OK and that everyone else needs to change to integrate with them.? That may be optimistic.
• There is no mention of planning horizon.? There should be the words “long-term” and a definition that this means at least 25 years.
• It doesn’t say what sort of guidance or compulsion is needed to achieve this.

So let us try and refine that wording to give a way forward.? How about:

“We will champion the development of a framework for long-term (25 year) planning for urban drainage and its impact on people, the environment and the economy.? Existing planning procedures will need to be adapted to fit under this umbrella.”

The procedures to be adapted will include, but are not limited to, plans for:

• Drainage and Wastewater Management
• River Basin Management
• Surface Water Management
• Urban Pollution Management
• Sewerage Risk Management
• Highways Asset Management
• Agriculture

Other stakeholder plans including; transport, agriculture, business and householders will also need to take account of the framework and the plans developed under it.

So the way to achieve change is to produce a high level framework that does not set out the detail for how to produce all of these plans but is rather an umbrella of what they need to cover and how they should interact.? I believe that it should be possible to produce this in no more than a year and that it needs to be driven by the main planning stakeholders and then endorsed and implemented by government.

Benefits

There would be many benefits of an integrated framework to coordinate all urban drainage planning activities.

• It would ensure that there were no gaps where problems were ignored because they might be the responsibility of another organisation.? Surface water flooding is a particular issue for this as it has many sources and many impacts each with different responsibilities.? It would be better if organisations at least considered problems that were not their responsibility to identify any interactions.? We might then get away from the “not our problem” attitude shown in one local authority flood risk plan that stated, “records of foul water flooding have been removed from the historic flood risk records”.
• It would allow the organisation with the best understanding of each part of the drainage system to carry out modelling and assessment of that part.? For example; local authorities are better placed than water companies to assess the overland flow of runoff, environment regulators are better placed to model and assess pollutant impact on watercourses, water companies may be better placed to model highway drainage.
• It would allow development of solutions that cut across organisational boundaries so that they organisation best placed to implement and own the solution can do so, with responsibility for funding treated as a separate issue.

Next steps.

What do we need to do to reach this urban drainage planning nirvana?? The government has set out the ambition and I believe that it is up to the stakeholders collectively to take on the challenge and make it happen.

To do this the stakeholders need to get together to agree the objective, the principles and the main requirements of an integrated planning framework.? There are a lot of stakeholders with different concerns.? I think that it will be best to bring together sub-groups with common concerns to agree a common approach and then bring those sub-groups to agree an overall framework.? An obvious divide is between urban catchments where key stakeholders are local authorities and water companies and rural catchments where key stakeholders include agriculture.

I would start with the urban catchments and suggest that the CIWEM Urban Drainage Group is an appropriate organisation to coordinate a workshop to bring stakeholders together.