Our flood risk management system is made up of over 14,000 ‘assets’, which include earth embankments, culverts, pumping stations, flood walls and surge barriers. Our strategy is risk based and requires us to look at costs over the whole life of the assets and the flood risks associated with them. This helps us reduce flood risk, justify costs and identify future investment needs. Efficient flood defence improvement works enable us to do ‘more for less’ and optimise public expenditure.
This team provides asset investment information for use by the Flood Defence committees to inform their decision-making; it also monitors the large regional budget in order to identify any required re-allocations or additional funding requirements to ensure most effective use of funds. Taking part in cross-team activities, the team seeks to influence customers and establish local partnerships to deliver common objectives.
Our Flood Risk Mapping and Data Management teams co-ordinate floodplain mapping and modelling projects and keep a close eye on all the flood data stored in the area. The work is a crucial part of Flood Risk Management and ensures that the Flood Map is kept up to date, and that the best information is available for the public and for future flood management.
The Flood Incident Management team manages our flood warning service. This includes maintaining the technical systems, managing the duty teams to issue the warnings and raising awareness about the warnings. The team maintains our flood warning database, identifies new flood warning areas and locations for new telemetry to improve the service, and works with the emergency services, local government and the armed forces to test our plans, co-ordinating our response to floods in order to minimise impact on life and property.
Our Operations Delivery Technical Support team has a varied role, with the main focus being the management of flood defence improvement projects. Other aspects of the role involve planning both maintenance and improvement work and providing a technical level of support to the field based teams within Operations Delivery. The work covers routine maintenance and one-off construction projects including both supervision and delivery activities. The team also works with internal colleagues over the planning and programming and building of future improvement schemes.
Our Operations Delivery teams are responsible for planning, organising and delivering an annual programme of work on the ground and responding to flood and pollution incidents. All this work must be carried out in an efficient, effective, safe and environmentally friendly manner. Another responsibility is to react to non-planned and emergency asset maintenance work, which must be carried out whilst keeping to the pre-planned programme.
The Regional Strategic and Development Planning team is responsible for producing long term plans for the sustainable management of flood risk in the region. Working with Regional Government Offices, Regional Development Agencies, regional planning bodies and groups, water companies and others, it provides the opportunity to influence the nature of long-term development through Regional Spatial Strategies and Development Frameworks.
Our Flood Forecasting teams provide a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week monitoring and forecasting across England and Wales to ensure flood warnings are issued in a timely and reliable manner. Working with advanced technology including weather radar, telemetry, forecasting systems and mathematical models.
Our flood risk management service relies on tens of thousands of structures and hundreds of thousands of individual assets that work together to create flood defences that protect millions of properties from flooding. We own just over half the total number of assets. The remainder are owned by third parties (e.g. private individuals, companies, utilities and local authorities). These assets come in all shapes and sizes. They vary from barriers, pumping stations, earth embankments and concrete floodwalls down to small flap valves. But to give you an idea of the value (£) of these assets, it would cost us over £20 billion (at today’s prices) if we had to replace all the assets we maintain.
