I have regular review meetings on our resilience against flood waters, as we live in a low lying area with plenty now built on flood plain. I meet the Environment Agency and keep i n touch with the two local Councils who have the lead responsibility.
Last week I attended a meeting with the Secretary of State for the Environment on this topic. I pressed for two improvements. The first is I would like the Agency to do more to improve the capacity of the Loddon and Emm to carry water away, and to undertake more regular maintenance of their water courses. The second is I want them to insist on better water handling when they are consulted on major new housing development schemes. We cannot keep adding concrete and tarmac to the area without putting in mechanisms to handle the faster run off of water this causes, and to replace the lost water meadows which used to handle the excess.
I wil follow up as the Minister promised to pursue it for me.
December 5, 2016
Thank you for your efforts, let us hope the Environment Agency take some notice, so far it seems they talk a lot, but we see little real action to resolve these issues into the future, because the excuse always seems to be, they lack sufficient money.
Meanwhile Wokingham Council continue to grant Planning permission for more and more houses on unsuitable land/flood plain.
December 5, 2016
Good morning.
Good luck to our kind host with this. The reason why I say this is, that dredging of rivers is now prohibitively expensive thanks to various EU directives making the sludge and silt from rivers being now classed as toxic waste which requires special disposal.
Let us all pray for less rain and no snow this year. It might just be a bit more help than the Environment Agency.
December 6, 2016
Agree with this – Thanks to brainless EU initiatives we have suffered extensive flooding in many parts of the country. Perhaps Paris will flood again, or Frankfurt. But the EU will not change their tune, so it seems we must wait until we left the EU beofre we can manage our rivers properly.
December 5, 2016
Nothing will change until the senior management of the EA is given a serious shake up. Around here the “new improved flood defences” that were built in response to the 2009 flood failed spectacularly, even though amount of water involved was a fraction last year to what is was six years earlier. There is too much consideration for the homes of furry animals than those of human beings.
December 6, 2016
Agreed – The EA was staffed with labour luvvies who neither knew nor cared about water management – they were happy to be told what to do from our EU masters.
Good God, When we do leave the EU it will mean they will have to think for themselves, NOW that will come as a shock to them!
December 5, 2016
Indeed you need water holding areas & flood planes or you need wide deep and very clear rivers that can take vast amount of water flow over a very short time when needed. The former is usually easier but they keep building on these flood plains.
Either that or you need houses designed to cope with occasional flooding or houses that float.
December 5, 2016
Today at 8.30am electricity demand was 47gw or about 95%. Wind is contributing 2.7% or1.29gw.
The interconnecter to France is minus 1.02gw.
Power cuts look imminent.
What is Parliament doing John after wilfully destroying our network.
December 5, 2016
Is there indeed a realistic prospect that the Environment Agency, engineer of the Somerset flooding amongst other negligent, self-created disasters, becomes fit for purpose? Are Ministers really getting a grip on its activities and forcing it to serve the people rather than pursue its own mischievous whims to the damage of us all?
December 5, 2016
I think it’s time to accept that central and local govt policy and mass immigration has turned Wokingham into a small city ; call it Brackham or Wokingnell .
Little needs to be decided other than which church should be designated the cathedral and where to allocate land for the 50,000 capacity ground for the new professional football stadium .
December 5, 2016
I suspect we will eventually all be joined together as “Greater Reading.”
The three councils are already running joint services and Reading’s council leader stated tonight on our local ITV news that they are looking at more integration of services.
It strikes me that, many of the services they speak off, were already combined prior to the abolition of Berks County Council and now we are going full circle back towards what was abolished.
December 5, 2016
I think this article should have been posted under the local issues tab.
December 5, 2016
There was an article in the Express yesterday that Italy is getting proportionally more from the EU relief funds than we are.
We are still paid up members of the EU, are we not ?