How Osborne and Cameron turned a crisis into a disaster

Would it be a wild, politically motivated jibe to call these the Osborne/Cameron floods? Of course it is nonsense to suggest that there would have been no floods over the last five years under a different government, but it is equally nonsense to deny that Osborne/Cameron policies have significantly increased the damage and human misery caused by these floods. Consider the following:

1. We have known since at least the Pitt review of 2007 that climate change was going to greatly increase the incidence of record breaking bursts of rainfall in the UK. Government ministers can carry on claiming they are unprecedented, but they are not unexpected.
   
   
2. The Labour government responded by greatly increasing their spending on flood defences, in the spending review which ended in 2010/11. In contrast Osborne demanded and obtained sharp cuts in 2011/12 and beyond. Only the arrival of floods dragged those numbers up in later years. Ministers can play around with dates as much as they like to try and tell a different story, but the evidence for those cuts is there in the data (see this post). Every news report that allows ministers to claim they did not cut spending on flood defences is complicit in deception.
   
   
3. The number of specific schemes cut or downsized in areas that were subsequently flooded becomes longer with every new event, as it was bound to do: Damian Carrington in the Guardian notes a £58 million scheme in Leeds cut, extra flood defences in recently flooded Kendal repeatedly postponed, schemes cut in the Somerset Levels and Yalding in Kent before the floods of 2013/14, before that Dawlish and the Thames Valley.
   
   
4. And for what purpose. The argument that spending had to be tight is utter nonsense. There is absolutely no evidence that if flood defence spending had been increased rather than cut by 27% in 2011/12 (as it should have been), and that higher spending maintained, the market would have stopped buying UK government debt. The UK recently sold oversubscribed 50 year debt at only 2.5% interest: with a 2% inflation target that is a real cost of only 0.5% a year. By contrast the National Audit Office in 2014 reported that the Environment Agency estimated current schemes had a benefit cost ratio of over 9:1! You have to be slightly mad to cut schemes like that when they would cost you so little to finance.
   
   
5. David (‘greenest government ever’) Cameron in 2013 appointed Owen Paterson, a climate sceptic, to be minister in charge of DEFRA, the ministry responsible for the environment and flood defences. He cut the number of officials working on a climate change adaptation programme from 38 to six. A rather sinister aspect to this whole affair is the influence of widespread climate denial on the right might have had on all these bad and costly decisions.
   
   
6. As it became clear how many farming practices can worsen flooding, the Labour government introduced regulations on land use with the specific aim of reducing flood damage. The coalition government scrapped these regulations.
   
   
7. In November this year, as part of Osborne’s spending review, local authority spending on flood defences was cut by a third. The Environment Agency has to cut staff as fast as the flood risk increases, and then through gritted teeth deny this matters. This report says the Environment Agency had 800 fewer flood risk management staff in March 2014 than in September 2010.
8. The independent, government established Committee on Climate Change has issued repeated warnings to government that spending needed to be increased, not decreased. They have all been ignored.
   
   

As Carrington says, Cameron and Osborne have ignored red flag after red flag. Cuts that make no sense in economic terms have been made with costs that probably now run in the order of a billion and counting, with plenty of human misery attached. Cameron has calculated that an appearance in wellies at each flood sight will be enough to assuage public concern. As Steve Richards notes, after each crisis when no cost is too great, Osborne goes back to playing the responsible one as he cuts regardless.

After the 2013/14 floods I wondered if this would be Cameron’s and Osborne’s Katrina. That was a mistake. For all its faults, and Fox News, the US has a more open media than the UK, particularly when the BBC is cowed by government threats. The Guardian, Independent and Mirror will complain (and the Morning Star will channel my blog!), but the large majority that never read these papers will remain ignorant of what has gone on. A chaotic Labour Party will be unable to coordinate any attack, and fail to effectively voice justifiable rage, and that will give the BBC an excuse to ignore them.

But forget austerity and partisan politics. This is fundamentally about incompetence: about ignoring repeated warnings for no good reason and causing huge costs and heartache as a result. Is no one on the right prepared to call the government to account for its failures on this issue? Will no one at the BBC confront politicians with what they have done? If they do not, I fear all we will get are fine words, one-off emergency cash, and the existing policy of effectively ignoring the threat will continue once again.          

Are the UK floods Cameron’s Katrina?

There are three reasons why the government should be very worried about the political fallout from the unprecedented level of UK flooding.

1) When they came into office, they cut back substantially on funding flood prevention, when there was a clear need to increase spending. That is a simple fact, which no amount of playing with averages can avoid. The Guardian reported in June 2012 that “300 flood defence schemes across England have been left unbuilt due to government budget cuts.” (HT teekblog)

2) The reason why there was a need to increase spending on flood prevention was climate change. This was well understood by the relevant government agencies and departments, so it is no surprise that the Met Office should confirm the link. Yet the government is vulnerable on this because so many of its MPs are active or closet climate sceptics, including the minister in charge of the relevant department.

3) The government’s philosophy towards the public sector is to roll back or privatise. No doubt there are some areas where this makes sense, but in others it is undoubtedly causing distress and hardship. Yet those affected typically have little political voice, and so are not too visible. In addition, many in the government have encouraged the idea that recipients of the welfare state are either undeserving, or victims of a dependency culture. In contrast, flood victims are very visible, and a strategy of blaming the victims will not work politically.

So far the government’s attempts to avoid criticism have been remarkably successful. The strategy was clear - target the environment agency. Not those working on the ground, who were obviously working their socks off, but senior management at the agency, and in particular its chairman Chris Smith. The story was that the agency had been giving the government the wrong advice.

That strategy has been remarkably successful largely because the BBC has played along exactly as planned. At first it appeared, as Simon Jenkins says, to allow “the Somerset branch of the NFU to write its newscasts.” When it comes to the cuts, it is either ‘views on shape of the earth differ’ stuff, or just not talked about. Driving home today I listened to Radio 4’s 5pm news program which led with 20 minutes on the political ramifications of the floods, and the government’s spending cuts were not mentioned once! However as the rain keeps coming and the floods spread, that diversionary strategy will lose its power as the facts become more widely known. The Financial Times reports today that “The Environment Agency has had to endure “massive” cuts to its budget since the Cameron government came to power despite warning this would affect its ability to defend the country against flooding, the agency’s chairman said on Monday.” A month ago the Daily Telegraph reported “Officials working on flood risk management will be sacked as Environment Agency sheds about 15 per cent of its workforce to save money, potentially placing ability to cope with floods at risk”. Cuts on this scale are difficult to pass off as ‘efficiency savings’ when villages and regions are isolated by the floods.

As Alex Andreou notes, preventing flood damage and responding to emergencies “requires a well co-ordinated, firm, top-down response, and the spending of tax revenue to alleviate misery, on the strict basis of need rather than worthiness. At the same time, every ideological fibre in a neoliberal's soul must rebel.” Yet, as Rick points out, much of the danger from flooding comes from overwhelmed drains and sewers, and these are the responsibility of private water companies. These monopolies have received their fair share of criticism for not doing enough as they continue to make large profits.

Cuts in flood prevention are a small part of austerity, but there are close parallels with the macroeconomic case. Just as ministers might have hoped that benign weather would not reveal the folly of cutting back on flood prevention, they also hoped that the economic recovery that began in 2010 would continue, and not be derailed by events like the Euro crisis. In both cases they were not lucky. Just as some in government never believed in all this climate change stuff, others thought that this Keynesian idea that austerity might be a bad idea at the zero lower bound was fanciful. (Some, like George Osborne, appear to have thought both.) When these mistakes became evident it was, with the floods, the Environment Agency’s fault, and also the last government, while with the recession it was all down to those Goddamn Europeans, and of course the last government. Yet whereas the links between austerity and prolonged recessions may appear mysterious to many, the links between lack of flood prevention and flooding are all too obvious. And the real danger for the government is that perhaps others may begin to see these parallels.