Dr Elizabeth Rapoport, Chair Flood Ready London and Managing Director Polygon Place Strategy reflects on the capital’s first-ever strategy to tackle surface water flooding.

The Flood Ready London partnership has just launched the capital’s first-ever strategy to tackle surface water flooding. I wanted to share a personal reflection on why this matters to me and to other Londoners.

After my home and neighbourhood were flooded in July 2021, I wanted to stop it happening again. The solution was actually pretty easy. All I had to do was lay some sandbags and send the water downstream. For me as an individual, that’s a perfectly reasonable and effective solution. But for me as part of a community, it’s not.

This reflects one of the problems with the existing system and set of solutions we have to work with to address surface water flooding. They are often focused on individual things: homes, properties, train stations and of course individual lives. Funding is directed towards protecting properties that flood but does not robustly address the source of the problem further upstream. Insurance is tied to individual properties, with few incentives for insurers to address the source of the flooding.

The new London Surface Water Strategy produced by Flood Ready London is a step towards a paradigm shift in the way we think of and tackle surface water flooding: through the lens of places and communities. It is not just homes that are increasingly at risk, but also the shops, schools, hospitals and roads we all rely on. Surface water flooding threatens the infrastructure of daily life. And that makes it everyone’s problem.

The new strategy moves us towards a more place-based approach to managing surface water flooding. Ten Surface Water Catchment Partnerships are being trialled over the next two years to cover the whole of Greater London, with the first two covering Central London and Lee Valley. These partnerships will bid for funding to implement practical, cost-effective initiatives to manage surface water, such as replacing hard landscaping with rain gardens and making allowances for surface water overflows in new developments. 

  

The development and delivery of the Strategy is led by the Flood Ready London partnership made up of Environment Agency, London Councils, London Fire Brigade, Mayor of London, Thames Water and Transport for London, supported by Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee.  We have created a new fund that will be ring-fenced for strategic sustainable drainage system (SuDS) projects developed through the catchment partnerships with initial contributions from the Mayor of London, Transport for London and Thames Water. In the coming months, Flood Ready London will be engaging widely to find partners willing to support us to fund and deliver on our new strategy. 

This Strategy is our call to think bigger to protect our communities through building on the work already done by the partners individually to create a network of interconnected solutions. Some of these may be small scale, some may be larger, but together our efforts can add up to much more than the sum of their parts. This requires us all to step-up and play our part in getting London flood ready. 

Find out more about the Strategy and how you can get involved by joining our FREE webinar at 2pm Wednesday 25th June. 

Register your interest here: 

Read it here: London Surface Water Strategy