Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

It is just being realistic and about value for money. There has to be that calculation. How would it be if there was just one farm and it cost say £100m to save it? That would be easy to decide. It wouldn't happen. So at what point do you save a handful of farms? Do you spend £1m, £10m, £50m or £100m? This is then compounded by the possibility that there is a worsening weather pattern so that the price might rise and the end result might be failure. Someone has to make that decision based on the cost and the longterm viability.

ok, on that basis, you can get rid of Scotlands hill farms as well.


Just try it and see what happens.

Blimey, I must be getting soft in my old age - okay, just let them drown then. Let's just go ahead and spend £50billion on HS2 and by the time that's finished the whole country may be completely under water.

Scottish and even Welsh hill farms are not in danger of being flooded or other physical problems. They are just unprofitable. They can be sustained at a reasonable cost. If it was not so, they would have already gone. Many traditions die out and that is just the way of things. Do we want to preserve farming with horse drawn ploughs on all farms.

Are you serious?

Abandon huge areas of the southern UK cos you cant be bothered to protect the land?


Import even more fruit and vegetables cos it's cheaper in the short term?


Find the money to blow on a train set that cuts the travelling time by 20 minutes from London to mancland

Are you mad, have you lost all reason?

It isn't a huge area and doesn't produce much. The area will just return to salt marshes and be a bird sanctuary. It is doomed as farm land.

re: #36291


One of the reasons that the tory party are doomed, quite simply, is the leaders are mad, and have lost all touch with the people...Noo Labour are going the same way, the loony libs are beyond belief!


Whats left?

UKIP seem to be right.
(when they rewrite their manifesto)

They would need policies first.

Camoron blaming labour YET AGAIN.

Hasnt he yet realised hes been in power for 4 years.

Its a disgrace a total disgrace, them poor people in that Somerset area.

And YOU Hays are wrong, its not a case of looking at costs, were talking of peoples lives here.......human beings.

How would you like to be tossed out of your home and relocated somewhere else.

Get real.

a few of non-political questions .....
for how long has the Environment Agency been in existence?
for how long has the present head of the agency been in place?
what has been the agency's policy on say dredging for say the last 7/10 years?
has there been any fundamental changes in policy over that period?

then of course there are other aspects, especially with regard to building on known flood plain ..... the Environment Agency has little or no say in the granting of such approvals

They stopped dredging in the late 1990s.

To be fair the environment agency can help, but only up to a certain extent depending on quite a few things : first of all : is there money in the kitty ?...is it possible to keep the Somerset levels free of flooding ?....how long would it take to organise a plan ?.....how fast can emergency repairs be put into place....not easy questions to be answered in a few minutes....!..
Seas are rising....icecaps are melting.....in fact I remember glaciers in the Alps as a child being much larger,.. longer,.. bigger than they are today....this melting and flooding and extreme weather is a global trend : the South of france is having record levels of rainfall with terrible flooding !....they are not prepared either...
I don't agree with just giving up land to the seas or retreating as they call it.. if it can be saved within reason...but a plan needs to be put in place for the next hundred years on what can or shall be done because the costs are astronomical !..
Reclaiming land from the wash in East Anglia is a big possibility and at the same time would protect the fens from total flooding and destruction....the bird sanctuaries would be saved ...the seal colonies as well ..and could be recreated on the other side of the dam as well as a massive new floodfree area created with new towns...farmland...thouands of new square miles recaptured from the sea....probably creating half a million new jobs..perhaps more....big project over several decades....the Dutch do and have protected their shoreline with huge infrastructure building projects like this...why don't we do the same ?...

to remain above water, the dutch have had zero option for centuries as the land itself has always been intrinsically below sea level ......
this is not the case in somerset (i think) and the drainage of the fens was done centuries ago and, i believe, not without considerable downside though not sure what

the dutch have had plenty of their own disasters too, no doubt with more to follow in the decades ahead if they are unlucky

They are experts in protecting land from flooding....you have to say...this flooding is not going to go away...it's going to get worse...

required field - good post apart from the, "is there money in the kitty?" bit.There seemed to be £billions available when this country got involved in the Iraq debacle. I wonder how much was spent on bombing Bagdad to rubble and then trying to rebuild.

There's always money for wars!

I wonder if there is any money in the kitty for the insurance claims? Cos the insurance industry will be looking to blame someone for their losses.

What about the knock on problems of people with in effect uninsurable, and therefor unsellable/unmortgageable property?

And just wait till the legal eagles get involved.


it's going to make the 3-4 million £'s cost of dredging the waterways look cheap.

was this flooding foreseeable?
not really, i would venture, and thus effective pre-emptive work was not really a feasibility - it would have had to have been proposed, discussed and put in place at least a decade ago
as an analogy, for how long has HS2 or building new runways been under discussion?

on the other hand, Lord Whatnot's pathetic reaction to the situation is despicable at best

"David Cameron overrules Environment Secretary Owen Paterson to order urgent dredging in Somerset to combat the flooding"