Climate change - how do we improve public-sector flood resilience?

How well do the UK’s healthcare and other public-service providers understand and plan to manage their flood risk? And how can professionals help? Paul Wyse works within government to help our hospitals, schools, courts, prisons and other public bodies to plan for climate change

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again…

Most of us know the Victorian nursery rhyme about Doctor Foster, the flood-averse medic, don’t we? This isn’t about nursery rhymes, though – it’s a story about how well doctors, nurses and their NHS Trust Estates teams understand flood risk and how it could affect our healthcare operations and other key public services.

Are you sitting comfortably? I’ll begin.

Many of England’s public-sector assets are exposed to flood risks, both direct and indirect. And because these assets and the service they provide are so critical, to have even a small area of them flood can have significant consequences.

What happens if water fills the part of the hospital that houses the X-ray unit? How can hearings continue in the magistrate’s court if the prison van’s access ramp is under water? How do we deliver free meals to eligible children when the school kitchens flood?

Understanding risk, adaptability and potential for resilience supports one of the Environment Agency’s Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management strategy’s key objectives; to make the country’s infrastructure resilient to current and future climate risks. It’s why the agency is partnering across the public sector to make assets that are critical to communities more resilient.

A two-way conversation

Partnerships must tailor the conversation to discuss what matters to the partner – in this case, to present flood risk and opportunities through a public-sector lens. It means listening, understanding, talking the other person’s language and focusing on how, by working together, we can help public-sector bodies to deliver.

The Greening Government Commitments set out what government departments must deliver on sustainability and climate change by 2025. A key element is climate adaptation. Departments must create a climate-change risk assessment and adaptation plan.

The Environment Agency’s work overlaps with all the others too, making conversations that spot linkages, connect networks and find multi-beneficial solutions the norm.

Adaptation to flood risk is a key element of climate-change risk assessments and action plans.

Unsurprisingly – because public infrastructure is near the public it serves – much of it faces direct or indirect flood risk. That affects the millions of people who need that infrastructure to be open and accessible every day, often round the clock.

We know risk is already significant. In 2021, the government’s third Climate-Change Risk Assessment presented more detail about future risks.

The Environment Agency works closely with the Cabinet Office’s Office of Government Property, which recently issued government’s Property Estates Adaptation Framework, setting out a staged approach for departments to develop and deliver their adaptation plans.

Office of Government Property programme director for sustainability and asset performance Stuart Burrows explains: “Organisations [must] understand the potential risk to their estate and operations as a result of climate change and develop action plans to mitigate those risks.

“Our recently developed adaptation framework and guidance will help public-sector organisations to approach this in a consistent manner. It’s great to see the Environment Agency taking such a proactive approach to support government departments with this important work.”

Flood impacts

When a building important to the public floods, it has impacts that go beyond immediate damage, affecting large numbers of users in the time it takes to recover.

Take schools: when one London primary school flooded in July 2021 after an intense thunderstorm, pupils were taught in temporary classrooms and ate lunch in a wedding marquee. These images show the school three months after the one-day flood. Despite extensive and expensive drying and dehumidification efforts, it was still not dry.

The final bill for repair and recovery will run into many millions. The recovery stages – drying out, repair and redecoration – are long and expensive. It would have been so much cheaper to adapt the school to flood risk.

That’s why the Environment Agency is engaging more with the public sector, to raise awareness and promote prevention over cure. Understanding an organisation is much easier from the inside. I recently spent two years on secondment to the Department for Education (DfE), establishing its water strategy and understanding the risk to the country’s 22,000 schools and nine million pupils.

Now, I spend half my week supporting Ministry of Justice and am in talks with the departments that cover health and social care, work and pensions and defence infrastructure.

What matters most is to tailor the messages so that partners can understand and spread the word about climate. Tailoring the message to a younger audience I spoke about climate and flood risk from the DfE Classroom of the Future at COP26, where I delivered a Key Stage Two presentation to schools across the country.

When I ran the presentation past my ten-year-old son, he laughed at the bit about cows farting. But more importantly, he remembered it. You can view the presentation on the DfE’s YouTube channel – and there’s an adult version too, without the farting cows.

There are many opportunities to better understand risk and to tackle it. Often, these aren’t explored or unlocked because education departments focus on the things that most concern education experts.

We need to tailor our pitches and tell better stories to highlight climate risk and how it affects keeping schools open. Most importantly, we must show departments what they can do, who can help and where they can find partnerships.

Managing constraints

The UK public estate is huge, covering an area more than four times the size of Oxford. Its 135,000-plus built assets are worth more than £157 billion. That means setting priorities. To decide who to work with first, we consider:

  • Size of estate, place and people
  • Willingness to engage
  • Awareness opportunity
  • Adaptation opportunity.

Then we look at other factors such as carbon offset and biodiversity net gain – to deliver multiple, wide opportunities and benefits through working together. One thing we’ve learned is that much of the public estate will have to adapt – it simply won’t be possible to relocate to avoid climate risks.

Put simply, poor old Doctor Foster must still go to Gloucester. That’s where his surgery or hospital is – close to the community it serves. We are helping to keep those buildings working, resilient and sustainable.

Many factors affect public estates’ ability to adapt; their specialist staff buildings and equipment, needing to operate around the clock, security requirements and dealing with vulnerable people.

Crown Court is a good example. It has a public and a secure side.

The public side is the areas that deliver justice equitably and efficiently; rooms for video evidence, for children, jury rest rooms and deliberation rooms. The secure side includes judges’ private rooms and areas that separate defendants from witnesses. Other backroom operations keep the courts running, from plant rooms to photocopiers.

So, what happens when a court floods? What if it closes, perhaps taking months to dry out? How, then, does the Ministry for Justice keep delivering access to justice, processing cases fairly, quickly and efficiently to make the courts and tribunals system stronger and smarter? Its specialist nature and requirements make it hard simply to move a court elsewhere.

It’s a similar challenge with job centres. These may seem similar to offices and retail units but they need to be on the high street. They need to be near mass public-transport hubs like bus stations. They need to be near both employers and would-be employees. We can’t just move job centres out to a business park beyond the bypass. They need to adapt.

Examples of success

Working with government departments to make them more climate-resilient takes in several stops; raising awareness of flood risk, identifying partnerships and funding streams and linking up with colleagues working on water efficiency, waste, net zero and biodiversity.

The EA partnership with DfE created a national risk assessment for all the schools in England. Where needed, DfE will create more detailed flood-risk assessments. So far, DfE has invested more than £20 million in Environment Agency and Lead Local Flood Authority schemes to protect schools and their communities.

Partnerships with water companies are creating sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) in ever more schools to manage surface-water and other flood risk, cut the volume of water entering combined sewers during storms and deliver other benefits; environmental and educational. Where DfE invests in large schemes we offer to visit and deliver presentations to schools that benefit.

I also contributed to the Education Estate’s sustainability and climate-change strategy, making flood and water efficiency central and position the estate to meet future and current risks.

Work with the MoJ has adopted a strategy-to-site approach. That means helping to update the ministry’s climate-change risk assessment, reviewing remedial action and nature-recovery plans and shaping its latest National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) pathways submission.

The Environment Agency has supported MoJ with more detailed flood-risk assessments at site level, to identify which are most at risk and to explore delivery partnerships with water companies and others.

And the agency is working with the Department for Health and Social Care and NHS to create a detailed risk map that explores cascading risks from lost utilities or access. This aims to identify overlap with schemes on the capital programme where we can work together to reduce risk and business interruptions from lost facilities or operational capacity.

The Environment Agency is proud of its work to keep the public sector open despite climate risks. It takes effort to build trust, understand public-sector operations and the climate impacts they face, and to deliver a convincing pitch and support package to help these bodies to adapt. But it’s clearly worth the effort to help deliver that climate resilient nation.

We need this approach to keep our hospitals open, minimise school closures, cut the working days lost to parents taking time off to manage childcare, avoid fire stations having to pump themselves out and keep the passport office open to process the paperwork you need to go on holiday.

It’s an approach that will help Doctor Foster and his colleagues, patients and suppliers to live resiliently ever after.

Paul Wyse leads the Environment Agency’s National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk-Management team on strategic government partnerships, working with government departments to build awareness and to help them to adapt to flood risk

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