Northampton after the RAIN – protecting people and places from floods

A Northampton pilot project is looking at non-engineered solutions to help catchments, communities and properties to cope with more frequent floods. Karen Thomas reports

“When it comes to engineered flood defences, this catchment already has pretty much everything it can have,” says Alastair Windler. “So when it comes to defending it against future floods, that leaves natural flood management (NFM), plus community- and property-level protection. It’s all we have left.”

Windler is the Environment Agency’s FCERM team leader in Northampton. He and his Kettering-based colleague Rhiannon Flowers have spent the day in a community centre in East Hunsbury, talking to local people about their flood risk.

Local-authority flood teams, the Rivers Trust and Flood Re are here too. Flood-resilience campaigner Mary Long-Dhonau – Flood Mary – is outside in the carpark. Leaflets, posters and local news reports have invited people to ask the experts how to adapt their homes, to visit Long-Dhonau’s Flood Mobile to see how property flood-resilience (PFR) measures might work for them.

The open day invites at-risk communities to meet the Resilience and Innovation Northants (RAIN) Project team. RAIN is one of 25 government-funded pilot schemes under the five-year Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation fund. The pilot schemes will share their findings – what doesn’t work, what does – to scale up the latter nationwide.

West and North Northamptonshire councils lead the RAIN Project. It aims to make local people and communities more resilient as climate change makes Northampton even more vulnerable to flood risk. RAIN partners are working with farmers and landowners to use nature to hold water upstream in two catchments; Harpers and Wootton brooks.

Downstream, teams work with communities and owners of homes and businesses to explain flood risk and solutions at local, street and building level to encourage people to fit PFR measures. And being a pilot scheme, the RAIN Project is covering those costs.

Flood history

Northampton knows about flood risk. Although named in the Domesday Book, much of the town is new, 16,000 new homes added in 1970-1985. Residents remember devastating floods over Easter 1998, when the River Nene burst its banks after a month’s worth of rain fell in a day. Two people died and 2,500 properties flooded.

The two councils expect more surface-water flooding from more frequent, heavier rainstorms. Windler shows a photo of the six-foot wall that protects a local retail park from Wootton Brook. In these cash-strapped, climate-vulnerable times, the Environment Agency says these traditional, engineered flood defences are no longer cost-effective.

Instead, the RAIN Project will tackle flood risk upstream, using natural processes to hold and slow water across the Harpers Brook and Wootton Brook catchments. Since 2012, the two councils have logged 350 floods linked to these two waterbodies. The project seeks to calculate and manage flood risk to 20,000 households.

RAIN will trial landscape enterprise networks (LENs), a new system to buy and sell nature-based solutions that project partner 3Keel launched last year with Nestle. The Rivers Trust’s Tristan Baxter-Smith is talking to local businesses – mostly farmers and landowners – about how the LENs trading community can fund flood-risk solutions.

HR Wallingford carried out a hydraulic survey of the catchments, to work out which properties will flood and where natural flood-management (NFM) schemes might help. Some places suit NFM schemes; in others, protecting individual properties is the last defence. Modelling suggests 100 homes need PFR to get through future floods.

East Hunsbury will have both. Leaky dams and bunds will slow and contain Wootton Brook. “Flood-risk management is a jigsaw of many pieces,” Long-Dhonau says. “And we really have the whole jigsaw puzzle lined up in Northampton.”

Smarter modelling will help the two councils’ emergency-planning teams to work at community level, to identify and train flood champions.

“This supports a wider picture of resilience,” explains West Northamptonshire Council flood-risk programme manager Alan Ryan. “When we find and engage individuals as flood wardens, they are also more likely to report other issues – fires, high winds and snow. We plan to design that wider resilience work into this project.”

People and places

RAIN’s partners credit the councils – Ryan and his North Northamptonshire counterparts – for instigating the project. At property level, project teams will identify which are most at risk, who is most worried about flooding. That means modelling, knocking on doors and inviting people to new open days.

Surface-water flooding is particularly hard to tackle, Ryan says. When heavy rain overwhelms drainage systems, it may flood one home but leave the neighbours untouched. And when Northampton updated its flood mapping, several properties previously considered low-risk moved from zone one into zone two.

“In both catchments, a small brook gets overwhelmed during severe rainfall,” Ryan explains. “When we updated our mapping, people were concerned to find [their designation had] changed. We need to help people to understand their risk so that they can own and control that situation.”

It’s hard to get people to think about risk, he says. Most people who visited today’s road show have lived through at least one flood before.

“And we want to help them, but the worst flood is always the first one; you won’t be prepared for it. Being pro-active – not reactive – is key. That’s why it’s so important to work with communities. Someone who’s already been flooded can share their story with other local people. It’s hearing those stories – not talking to councillors or the Environment Agency – that builds trust.”

Funded with £6.2 million through March 2027, the RAIN Project will fit homes within the pilot catchments with PFR. The priority is properties that have flooded several times, then those who’ve flooded once, then those most at risk, Ryan says.

Project partner JBA will survey the properties identified as high-risk. “That determines whether the property would benefit from PFR, what kind of PFR and how much it will cost,” Ryan says. “We’ll survey a lot more homes than we’ll install – around 250 altogether – to be sure we don’t miss anyone. But it’s hard to convince people to take these measures, even when we’re paying for them.”

It’s understandable. People can understand climate risk in an abstract way. It’s a leap to consider what it means for you. Those most at risk are often least informed, least likely to have flood insurance. Add to that the cost-of-living crisis, people’s suspicions about officials and door-knockers – not to mention how few people know what PFR is.

Which is why RAIN Project partners say the roadshows and door knocking matter every bit as much as risk modelling and flood surveys. That, and sharing stories with survivors of floods working to manage their risk.

“It’s the knowledge piece that’s missing,” Ryan concludes. “Success will be to leave more properties and people more resilient to flooding. And that’s everything from educating people about flood risk, to installing NFM measures 20 miles away that protect them, to showing them how to fit and maintain PFR in their own homes.”