You can almost feel John Selwyn Gummer, Zac Goldsmith and the rest of the Conservatives’ green lobby quaking. Kemi Badenoch has incurred their wrath by proposing that the Environment Agency and Natural England be abolished. It is part of a package, which also involves the reduction in levies charged to housebuilders, which the Tories claim will reduce the cost of building a new home by £50,000.
The pendulum has swung too far towards conservation and too far away from protecting homes and property
I am not sure about that figure. House-building is also hampered by a skills shortages which will not be addressed by these measures; we will only solve that by eliminating the likes of gender studies courses at universities and by encouraging students onto bricklaying courses instead. But the Conservatives are at least half right: the Environment Agency needs to go. The only question is what replaces it. If it is an agency more focussed on flood defence, then all well and good. If it is a free-for-all, where developers are allowed to build pretty well wherever they like, it will be a disaster.
The Environment Agency was created in 1996 through a merger of the National Rivers Authority and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution. The idea was to create a holistic (to use a fashionable word of the period) approach to matters of environmental regulation, with the natural world at its heart. That all sounded very positive, except that it rapidly became clear that the new organisation seemed to be rather more interested in creating habitats for hedgehogs and wading birds than for humans. The quango has been led by a succession of people, such as Baroness Young, who came from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), and Chris Smith, a former culture minister, who suddenly found themselves in charge of a key part of the nation’s flood defences.
The results are there for everyone to see. Rivers were no longer always dredged as effectively. Some were allowed to become choked with reeds and weeds. Every autumn, a team used to come and remove the reeds from my local river. Now they only do the job partially, with the result that by mid summer the vegetation has already grown back and there is no open water at all; this in a river which drains many thousands of acres of land. When the Somerset Levels flooded badly in 2014 the Environment Agency’s reaction was to point the finger at heavy rain. Locals told a different story: they produced photographs from the 1960s, when the River Parrett was regularly dredged, and the river was markedly wider.
The same was repeated across the country. The Environment Agency retreated from what had been the central purpose of the National Rivers Authority – managing river flow – and appeared to be more concerned with nature schemes instead. The Environment Agency liked to pretend that the latter and the former were intrinsically linked: that what was good for nature was good for humans too. I finally gave up on it the day that it announced that beavers were playing a key role in reducing the impact of flooding in East Anglia. I’m no expert on those admirable animals but my guess is that they tend to construct their dams in places which suit themselves, not help protect human property.
As more homes began to flood, it was blamed on climate change. Yet time and again the real culprits were ignored: poor flood defences and poor planning which was allowing new homes to be built on flood plains. According to Aviva, one in nine new homes built between 2022 and 2024 was built in areas of medium to high flood risk. The Environment Agency, along with natural England, seems to have extremely sharp teeth when it comes to stopping homes being built out of concern for bats and newts, but no teeth at all when it comes to stopping homes being built in flood-prone areas.
What we need is a government agency which is unashamedly concerned with river flow and flood defence, and which has much greater powers to stop voracious developers building on flood plains. It should be charged with designating flood-defence areas just as we designate national parks to keep the developers at bay.
I wouldn’t want to go back to the days when we turned living rivers into concrete drainage channels devoid of life. Whatever authority is in charge of managing rivers should be obliged to take advice on how to encourage nature. But the pendulum has swung too far towards conservation and too far away from protecting homes and property. The Environment Agency is beyond saving. The Tories are quite right that it needs to go; we just need to know what will replace it.
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