Environmental Graffiti

Severe flooding has affected four counties, four hundred thousand are without water, thousands have had to abandon their homes, and the cost will no doubt run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

Yet the housing minister, Yvette Cooper, doesn’t see a problem with building thousands of new homes on flood planes. Announcing a massive house building programme, she warned critics not to “play politics” with the flooding and attack building on flood planes. She told Radio 4’s Today Program that development had always taken place on flood planes, and the key was proper planning.

This comes the day after scientists admitted that heavy rains were a product of global warming and warned that extreme weather such as that seen over the last month will become increasingly frequent. Gordon Brown has acknowledged this, and increased the budget for flood protection accordingly. However, there seems to be a remarkable lack of joined up thinking by the government if it is planning to build several hundred thousand new homes that are then going to cost billions to keep dry.