Local councils passed 90 planning developments for over 500 homes on flood plains…and Environment Agency strenuously opposed them.

Dutch offers of help turned down

Evidence is emerging that the Tories’ £3.5m donation from Britain’s construction industry is a further contributory factor in the arse-to-elbow axis of corrupt confusion that is our country’s environment/housing/immigration policy. And to avoid looking as if they’d lost control, Westminster last weekend turned down useful flood-defence hardware from the Netherlands government.

It transpires that a 2012 report by the Government’s official climate change adviser – the Climate Change Committee (CCC) – concluded that the planning policy “approval process is not sufficiently transparent or accountable”. It found that 13% of all new developments were on flood plains. While many flood zone developments are well protected, one in five was in an area “of significant risk under today’s climate”. It noted that much of Britain is now so densely populated that developments on flood plains are growing much faster than those outside.

Figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal that last year local councils allowed at least 87 planning developments involving 560 homes to proceed in England and Wales in areas at high risk of flooding…and the EA formally opposed them. The biggest development of this kind is the 149-home Goresbrook Village Estate in Dagenham, Essex.

But in new, improved business-friendly Britain, the EA doesn’t have the final say.

In turn, Channel Four has a story about the Government turning down Dutch help a week ago.

“We told the British government that we would help in any way we could,” said Ursula Meering, spokeswoman at the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment. “We told the British government that we had pumps, emergency dykes and sand bag-filling machines available, but they said there was no need for any of this help at present. They said they only needed expertise, so we have sent a team of four dyke experts to the UK.”

Right then, we’ll secretly take the expertise and pretend it was us knowing WTF we’re at; but we don’t want your equipment because that’ll make it look as if we’ve lost control. The people we work for will die or lose their homes, but it’s essential for national security that nobody catches on to just how truly spineless and incompetent we are.

Not content with the truth being out (about the successive failure of Westminster to stand up to mad eco-freak Brussels directives since 2003, and the failure of any MEP anywhere to register a protest) David Cameron continues to deflect blame towards the Environment quangos and Defra, by constantly answering questions he hasn’t been asked about firing people. ‘PM David Cameron, who is touring flood-hit south-west England, said it was not the time to change personnel amid criticism of the Environment Agency.’ Thanks Cammers, but is it the time to borrow some flood barriers and portable dykes from the Dutch?

Cracker of the day for obfuscated claptrap was George Osborne’s, “people do understand that the rain is not the fault of any one person”. Well Chancellor, the rain isn’t anyone’s fault petal, I think we can buy into that one. It is, however, slightly more a question of the floods that followed the rain, and why once the rain-which-was-nobody’s-fault had fallen, as it were, Snafu was inevitable. Now that, my little pudding and pie, appears to have been the fault of every last man-jack of the political and bureaucrat class tasked with maintaining Britain’s weather defences.

Ed Miliband encouraged the EC bollocks when he was Environment Minister, most Tory MEPs voted against a switch back from flood management to defence, Nigel Farage didn’t turn up for the vote, George Osborne cut the rescue infrastructure budget…..and nobody from Strasbourg to Somerset gave a second’s thought to the hundreds of jobs and thousands of houses not likely to benefit from returning The Levels to its natural state.

Bill Oddie says wildlife preservation is important – and it is: Somerset Levels is home to a diverse range of wildlife including wading birds, curlews, bitterns, otters, dragonflies and an abundance of wildflowers. In winter over 80,000 water birds gather across the area and often flocks of thousands of starlings can be seen swirling in the skies at dusk. But it is also home to Axbridge, an important market town of 2,057 people. It has endless thriving businesses and five restaurants. Nearby, in the picturesque village of East Lyng, properties and businesses are flooded up to nearly their roof lines. Agricultural contractor Lesley Webber, 52, lives in a 120-year-old property in East Lyng which has never flooded before. The place looks like a cross between Waterworld and a ghost town.

Failure to maintain weather defences is the product of EC idiocy, budget cuts over time, and paying lip-service to eco-drivel. But this shower expect us to take the nature reserve argument seriously when all across England, the Government is both repaying its construction industry bribe-lobbyists by building on long-established Green Belt and Flood Plains and facing in the opposite direction with Brussels.

I’d love to think that this latest act of hypocritical disloyalty to British citizens will finally wake up the middle Englanders. But the Daily Mail is working hard to blaming their usual whipping boys; so somehow, I doubt it.