Dr Sien van der Plank, of the University of Southampton, surveyed people in 143 households and interviewed 45 senior engineers, insurers, landowners and council staff in three coastal areas.
Her survey of people living within six miles of the coast in Lincolnshire found that only 8% had installed a pump, 8% bought sandbags, 2% had put in a protective barrier and 6% had built water-resistant walls.
People in only 12 of the 143 households (8%) thought they were responsible for managing flood risk, with 85% saying the Environment Agency was responsible, 64% the local council and 55% national government.
Dr van der Plank told the British Sociological Association’s online annual conference today that: “Households are increasingly expected to be part of flood risk management as part of a trend in flood management policies, but coastal householders still perceive other stakeholders to hold key responsibility for this and don’t perceive themselves to be holding flood risk management responsibilities.
“Despite the increasing message that the status quo cannot be continued defence for all the English coast where it has been thus to date, the public continues to miss out on hearing that message, and therefore unsurprisingly continues to expect a widespread ‘hold the line’ approach.”
The experts she interviewed felt the public in coastal areas of the UK generally were “largely unaware, uninvolved and not feeling responsible” for defences against flooding.
The surveyors, engineers and council staff she interviewed in two coastal areas, Cumbria and Lancashire, and Dorset and Hampshire, said they were worried about householders not taking responsibility.
“Interviewees spoke about households’ assumption that they would be protected and their assumption that they were entitled to public expenditure to protect them from flooding,” she said.
“Results suggest there is a disjuncture between these stakeholders’ perceived need for increased public debate on a longer-term, more joined-up vision for the coast, and a public, which is considered to be largely unaware, uninvolved and not feeling responsible for coastal flood risk management.”
One engineering consultant told her: “Some communities can no longer be defended – they have to recognise that they’re living on the wrong side of the defences and if they want to continue, they have to find other means of managing the flood risk, whether that be in terms of resilience or localised defences of their own.”
Dr van der Plank told the conference that while in many areas of the UK the Environment Agency funded most of the cost of flood defences, the local area had to find the remainder, and householders often need to pay for work to their own homes. Coastal areas were at an ever greater risk of flooding, with 370,000 homes having a higher than 0.5% risk of flooding each year, and the expected annual damage from coastal flooding was estimated to be £400 million.
Nationally the current amount of flood and coastal erosion risk management spending was not sufficient to maintain the number of proposed ‘hold the line’ strategy areas outlined in shoreline management policies, and it was unlikely they would all be funded.
