Morpeth will have to wait for floodworks

FUNDING of up to £15m is in place for better Morpeth flood protection, but the work is unlikely to be completed for another four years.

Environment Agency Chairman Lord Smith broke the news during a visit to the town on Thursday.

While he pledged that all would be done to speed up the process, he said extensive consultation, planning and design work for new defences and upstream water storage schemes needs to be carried out, while the construction phase would take two years.

"We have already managed to shorten the process by quite a few months because we have done several different parts of the process together, rather than sequentially, but we do have to have the consultation process," he said.

"We have to have the working through that follows that, the preparation of the detailed plans of any specific work that then has to be done, going out to tender and then actually doing the construction work.

"We can't simply wish it into being overnight, but provided everything goes to plan, we are hopeful that we will be able to start the actual building work on the new defences in the early part of 2011."

Lord Smith said the work could be done more quickly if the Environment Agency decided not to consult residents, but he rejected the idea.

"We very much appreciate the concerns and on the current timetables we have already been able to bring the final date forward from the original date of the end of 2013, or possibly early 2014, to the early part of 2013," he said.

"I recognise the concerns that people have when a community has had 1,000 properties severely affected by flooding. It is obviously going to be a real worry to them, but at the same time I want to make sure we are doing the right thing for the local community.

"We could shorten the time-scale further by simply imposing a scheme, but we don't want to do that. We want to make sure that people are happy with the choices that they together will have made."

There was better news on the funding front as the official said money was in place to progress the work.

A scoring system was used to identify priorities, taking account of issues such as the number of properties that would benefit from schemes, economic benefits and the degree of hardship faced by flood victims, with Morpeth scoring highly.

"Funding for the medium term programme is very firmly in place," said Lord Smith.

"If the Government came to us in six months' time and said it was cutting the flood defences budget in half, so instead of £600m to spend on defence work we had £300m, we would have to take another look at all the various schemes and priorities.

"I can never give a 100 percent absolute guarantee, but as things stand I would be astonished if this work didn't go ahead as currently envisaged."

Lord Smith said the final bill for flood prevention work in Morpeth will be £10m to £15m.