Central Bedfordshire Council has asked the Parish Council to share the following item.
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The council will be pushing for rural areas to receive government funding for better flood defence, a multi-agency summit heard last month.
On behalf of all the various organisations involved in flood prevention in Central Bedfordshire, the council will stress the need for funding criteria to be reviewed to improve eligibility for less densely populated areas that face repeated flooding. This will enable the investment needed for some of the measures identified at the second flood summit called by the council this year, held on Thursday 28 November.
Since the first flood summit held this summer, September saw the most significant and prolonged flooding in living memory for Central Bedfordshire. Drainage systems and watercourses struggled to cope with overwhelming amounts of rain, with Flitwick receiving 2.5 times the average monthly rainfall in just one day.
The latest flood summit drew on the experiences and learning from the latest floods to look at a number of actions, now either already underway or agreed, including:
strengthening the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) network, with support to complete flood action plans and access flood toolkits to help with local flood defence
the Environment Agency (EA) will be holding events in early 2025 to engage with affected residents across Central Bedfordshire, gathering more impact data from the floods. The EA is validating and implementing improvements to triggers for Flood Alerts and Flood Warnings, and considering improvements to river monitoring. Schemes piloting similar work are already underway, in partnership with the council, as part of the ResilienTogether project at Pix Brook
work carried out by National Highways to remove the flood water and proposals for improvements to the pumping station next to the A421, which suffered from unprecedented flooding leading to its closure
a full report by the council, under Section 19 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, for the flooding occurring as a result of Storm Henk in January 2021, and the more recent floods. The report will look at what happened, what actions were taken, and possible future recommendations. The EA is undertaking an initial overview and understanding of the economic viability of progressing a scheme in Leighton Buzzard
ongoing investigations by the council and partners to look at the drainage network and determine additional contributing factors and suitable mitigation measures to action (e.g. at Cranfield and Flitwick)
a full debrief with Local Resilience Forum partners in the coming weeks, to identify lessons learnt from the latest flooding that will help further enhance the council and its partners’ coordination of activities in an emergency
a range of actions identified at a local level, reflecting the fact that flooding has a variety of causes depending on the respective drainage systems, sewer networks, pumping systems and other factors, and with various agencies involved
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