Balfour Beatty joins call for increased flood defence funding

Image: Dreamstime/Steve Mann

Balfour Beatty has added its voice to calls for increase investment in flood defence funding, after it emerged that investment in flood infrastructure has increased by just £3m in ten years.

Public sector procurement specialist Scape Group found that while total expenditure has increased in real terms from £802m in 2009/10 to £870m in 2018/19, the majority of the £64m increase has been in capital spending, while revenue spending, which goes towards staff and office costs, as well as the maintenance of existing assets, has fluctuated from a low of £272m in 2013/14 to a high of £344m in 2017/18.

Even funding for capital projects, which has increased to £453m in 2018/19, equates to only a £34m annual real terms increase in central government funding since 2009/10, it added.

Source: Scape Group

Scape Group claimed that the research showed there was an “urgent” need to increase funding over the next ten years in England, and recommended a 45% increase to allow sufficient prevention and protection and address the rising threat from flooding and coastal erosion.

Dean Banks, chief executive officer of Balfour Beatty said: “Recent years have seen increasingly frequent and devastating floods across the country. The construction and infrastructure industry mitigate flood risk by building defences and implementing resilience measures. And when extreme weather hits, we are a critical part of the response: getting the roads, buildings, bridges and other affected infrastructure back to work to ensure that communities can recover as quickly as possible.

“But there is more to do. Engaging the construction and infrastructure industry earlier and proactively before flooding happens can help reduce the risk and make the clean-up run more smoothly. We also need more partnership working between local authorities, and a more strategic, longer-term funding approach for flood and coastal risk management. The price of flooding to local communities – and to the wider economy – far outstrips the cost of building and maintaining effective flood defences and resilience measures.”

Mark Robinson, Scape Group chief executive, said: “The data shows a limited real term increase over the last decade and we urgently need the amount of funding for flood protection to increase. We also need to be thinking critically about how we work together more effectively. Harnessing the knowledge and expertise of our experts and collaborating to operate across boundaries to deliver essential infrastructure needs to be a priority.

“It is especially concerning to see that revenue expenditure has barely risen over the last ten years, with real term growth of just £3m. A lot of our water infrastructure is from the Victorian era, it is hundreds of years old and desperately needs to be maintained and upgraded, but we are in the difficult, almost impossible situation of having competing pressures on the limited resources we have at our disposal.”

The full Scape Group report, A Climate Emergency: Flood Defences for the Future, can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/ScapeFloodReport