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Monday 23rd July 2007
The government is expected later today to give its blessing to plans to build homes on flood plains.
Ahead of the publication of its green paper on the housing shortage affecting the country, housing minister Yvette Cooper said that houses would only be built in areas prone to flooding if the proper defences were in place.
Her comments come after torrential rain and freak storms left large parts of southern and central England flooded, several weeks after similar scenes were witnessed in the north of the country.
But Ms Cooper insisted there would be a "real clampdown" on housing development on land that the Environment Agency classifies as high risk for flooding.
"Our policy is around flood risk which is to be very clear that in any areas where there is a risk of flooding, you should be getting the advice from the Environment Agency," she told the Today programme.
"If the Environment Agency says this is high risk, the development should not be going ahead."
But the minister went on to say: "What we're not saying is that there should be no house building anywhere in the city of York which is on a flood plain, the Romans built it on a flood plain, or around 10 Downing Street, that's also on a flood plain.
"You've got to increase the protection for areas which are at high risk, some of the areas which have been flooded actually have never been flooded before, and so we need to look very seriously at whether some of the flood risk areas need to be redefined and need to be updated in the light of all of the things that have happened."
Responding to Ms Cooper's comments, homelessness charity Shelter said that housebuilding on flood plans should be a "last resort".
"There are real problems with building on flood plains and what tends to happen, and the floods in Hull particularly showed this, is that the houses that are built on flood plains are the houses for some of the poorest people, and they are the people who are not insured," the charity's chief executive Adam Sampson told BBC Radio Five Live's Wake up to Money.
"There is a very real problem in this respect. This is one of those places where the needs of protecting the poor and the needs of protecting the environment actually coincide absolutely."
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