OFA steering group member Simon Collings spoke on the Sophie Law show this morning (20 November 2024) during a discussion on flooding. The County Council yesterday discussed a series of measures designed to deal with flooding across the county. These include retrofitting sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDs) into council owned properties and roads, helping communities develop flood plans, and getting tougher with Thames Water.

Cllr Pete Sudbury said that the impacts of climate change appear to be accelerating and the authorities need to up their response. We’re seeing more flash flooding and the proposal to retrofit SuDs was part of a response to that. But this comes against a backdrop of a decade of austerity with funding cuts for local authorities and the Environment Agency. We face ‘a perfect storm’ he said. ‘No pun intended’.

Simon spoke about two recommendations in particular, the possibility of complaining to OFWAT about Thames Water’s failure to provide reports after floods (which they have a legal obligation to do), and the potential role that local flood groups could play.

OFA has called in the past for more pressure to be applied to Thames Water to ensure investment in sewage infrastructure is happening. We have also called for improvements in the way the company responds to incidents of sewage flooding. We need national bodies to be engaged with this.

We also believe local flood groups and residents have a role to play in identifying problem hot spots, checking of the condition of gullies, culverts and other flood assets, and raising awareness locally of what people can do to protect against floods and reduce the impacts. We believe the authorities could be engaging more effectively with local flood groups.

There a meeting on 29 November to discuss ways to improve flood resilience in Oxfordshire. This will bring together a wide range of interested parties. OFA will be at the meeting.