Contribution
I beg to move,
That this House has considered sustainable drainage systems.
It is a pleasure to serve under you today, Mrs Barker.
Flooding is a topical issue. In Devon, it feels like it has been raining for about a year; in fact, it probably has been since the beginning of the year. Every day we see more and more floods, and more and more problems with water. Most people will probably never have heard of sustainable drainage systems, or SuDS; when I began my career in local government, I had no idea what people who mentioned them were talking about. They first came to my attention when I was knocking on doors on a new estate in Newton Abbot called Hele Park. A chap said, “They’ve spent all this money building these fantastic flood prevention channels; there’s a nice set of attenuation ponds with steps down and all the rest. But it’s falling apart—trees are growing through it, as nobody’s doing the maintenance. Nobody’s looking after it. It falls into the grounds maintenance contracts so they send somebody out with a lawnmower to look after a complicated, engineered set of flood prevention measures.”
That does not happen only on that one estate of Hele Park; it is common across many estates. In my home town of Dawlish, in the Redrow estate the swale is currently filling up with trees. That issue is particularly important because the estate is in a critical drainage area, designated by the Environment Agency. All the water coming from the hills comes down into a single stream, which at high tide is tide-locked so there is nowhere for it to go. Consequently, it is really important that in this place the attenuation ponds do their job, which is to reduce the rate of water flowing off what used to be green fields.
Planning permission is always granted on the basis that water does not come off the hard surfaces any faster than it would off green fields, but it is not actually stated where that water has to go or what has to be done with it. For years, planners have highlighted the need for drainage systems, which take the form of bungs, ditches or all sorts of other things such as swales and attenuation ponds. Those have been put into planning applications for developers, who then spend a lot of time and money creating drainage systems.
In another development in my area, the developer is objecting because part of its site is being used to build the SuDS for an adjoining site. Normally, that would not be a problem but the original site is finished and maintenance fees are being paid for it, whereas the adjoining site is not yet finished and is building SuDS in a space that the original developer is paying to have maintained. The original developer is up in arms. But even then, the maintenance contract would not actually look after the SuDS; it would just involve cutting the grass on a bank used to access the SuDS.
The problem is: who maintains SuDS? I asked Redrow staff, “How are these SuDS going to be maintained on your site in Dawlish?” They said, “Ah, there’s a maintenance plan for all these.” They are right—there probably is, for the pumps, the tanks and the hard engineering. SuDS might be maintained by the maintenance company, but they might not be. Residents are often unaware of the need for the maintenance of SuDS and of what maintenance companies do. Again, I can see that this whole set-up could very quickly fall into disrepair. Who will be there to pick up the pieces? The developer will have gone a long time before then. The residents have already paid for maintenance, because its cost is absorbed into the cost of building the site and of buying their homes in the first place: they will be double-paying for the maintenance of the site. Then, when things go wrong, they will be the ones footing the bill to put things right again.