Army to do lightning inspection of flood defences
The Royal Engineers will carry out a high-speed assessment of the state of the UK’s flood defence infrastructure, as ministers admit they should have sent in the military earlier.
The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, said the government had agreed with the Environment Agency to use experts from the corps to do “a very rapid inspection” of damage caused by weeks of flooding.
He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “We’re going to try and do in five weeks what would be about a two-year programme of inspection, just to assess the level of damage.
“This series of weather events over the past two months has caused some quite serious damage to our flood defences.”
Mr Hammond said more than 3,000 troops were currently deployed to help and 5,000 more were available if needed.
He said the government was likely to use troops earlier in future crises, saying: “We’re dealing with an extraordinary set of weather events. It’s taken some time to mobilise the resources that are necessary to respond.
“We offered troops quite a long while ago to civil authorities who wanted them. What we’ve done over the last 10 days is push them a bit more aggressively at those civil authorities.
“Putting military liaison officers into the gold commands so that they are embedded in the system has been a major step forward and I think probably we will want to make sure in future that we do that at a very early stage in any emerging problem.”
And he indicated that ministers were planning to spend more on flood defences over the next spending period than over the current one.
“We’re spending more in this four-year period than we did in the previous four-year period. We’ll spend more again in the next four-year period,” he said.
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“But of course there has to be a proper balance of costs and benefits drawn.
“Further targeted investment will mean that we become more and more resilient as events like this unfortunately probably will become more and more common.”
The Environment Agency said more than 1.3 million properties have been protected since the start of December thanks to EA defences and the Thames Barrier, which was closed for a record 16th consecutive time yesterday.