Agenda item

(1)       Professor Alastair Driver gave a presentation. The slides are contained within the electronic agenda papers on the KCC website.

(2)       Professor Driver introduced himself. He said he had been the first conservationist in the Water Industry during the 1980s, working in the Thames catchment for 20 years.   For 15 years until September 2016 he had been the Head of Conservation for the Environment Agency.  Since retiring, he was working as the Director of England and Wales Rewilding Britain.  This was a very small organisation with only three paid personnel in the UK (a Director in England/Wales and in Scotland as well as an overall Co-ordinator).

(3)       Professor Driver said that the thrust of Rewilding Britain’s work was to bring about and enhance healthy, functioning catchments.  It worked on the understanding that everyone who was involved in environmental management and restoration had a role to play in rewilding.  This meant that at the most basic level, the pond at the bottom of a garden was important whilst at the top end of the scale there were very large areas (10k hectares in England and Wales and over 100k hectares in Scotland) where the landscape and its hydrology should be allowed to function naturally.  This would bring both environmental and social benefits (such as flood management) whilst continuing to enable people inhabiting these areas to make a living.  The best example of a large scale rewilding area in England was Ennerdale in the Lake District, Cumbria.

(4)        Professor Driver then said that the first people he had approached since becoming Director had been the NFU, followed by the CLA. Their members had asked what a rewilded area would look like. His reply had been that it would vary on every occasion according to its environment and the time that needed to be spent to bring it to its optimal condition.   A slide taken of a Welsh Mountainside after thirty years demonstrated the very great length of time that it took to revert an exposed, infertile landscape back to woodland. 

(5)       Professor Driver then gave some actual examples of natural flood management which could be undertaken “from source to sea.”  At Exmoor, the simple acts of blocking ditches had dramatically reduced peak flows from the ecologically restored areas and increased storm flow lag times in the space of a year.  Rewilding Britain was able to evidence that peak flows reduced by some 30% whenever Uplands such as Exmoor were ecologically restored.

(6)       Professor Driver moved on to consider the challenges and possibilities in Kent.   He used the phrase “little and often” to describe the approach.  Flood Management often consisted of doing a number of things on a relatively small scale.  At Belford Burn in Northumberland, volunteers had built bunds out of timber, creating a number of ponds which collectively held a great deal of water back more economically than would have been the case through the creation of a very large reservoir.   He added that the slow release of water that had been achieved would also have the effect of mitigating the impacts of a drought by recharging groundwater.  

(7)       Professor Driver said that tree planting and natural regeneration of woodland was a well proven method of flood attenuation.  Its success was due to the amount of water retained below the soil.  At Pont Bren in the Welsh Borders, the amount of water retained in tree planting areas was 60 times greater than in those parts which were intensively grazed by livestock and where a great deal of soil compaction had taken place as a consequence.  The break-up of soil and water retention derived from tree planting occurred within two or three years of the planting, well before the trees matured.  

(8)       Professor Driver then said that a number of experts had questioned whether these solutions would work when the land was saturated.  His response was that in most cases, the land was not saturated.   An example of this had occurred in Somerset where there had been high levels of surface water but the earth had been bone dry six inches down. 

(9)       Woody debris dams were becoming more popular. The best example was the River Stroud Enhancement Project in Gloucestershire where one Stroud DC employee with a budget of @ £150k (including his own salary) worked with local contractors to build woody debris dams to reduce flows into the Stour River.   To date, some 40 structures had been built, covering some 21% of the entire drainage catchment in the area.  This project was a blueprint that had been followed by other authorities such as Hebdren Bridge in Yorkshire who were now able to provide a cost effective solution to a problem which would never qualify for major Government funding.   Professor Driver showed a graph which evidenced the results of a major flooding event in 2012 compared with a similar event in 2015 after the woody debris dams had been constructed.   Although this graph did not paint the entire picture, the difference between the two events was so great that there had to be a connection.

(10)     Professor Driver said that in the right place and with the right control mechanisms, the benefits of bringing European beavers back into England after a 500 year absence after they had been hunted to extinction, significantly outweighed the dis-benefits. Studies in Devon demonstrated that they were significantly slowing the river flows by about 30% and increasing the lag time by an hour. This was because they were creating ponds and acting as sponges on the ground. They were also contributing significantly to water quality improvement by reducing downstream levels of nitrates, phosphates and suspended solids.  In addition, they were creating wildlife habitats that Wildlife Trusts would otherwise have needed to spend large amounts of money to emulate. 

(11)     Professor Driver moved on to discuss the benefits of river restoration.  Although it was difficult to gather measured evidence, one study had proved that the creation of woody debris dams coupled with river re-meandering did generate flood reduction downstream.  The restoration of the Hammer Stream in Kent had increased capacity by pulling the banks back and creating additional floodplain.

(12)     Floodplain reconnection involved the reconnection of the river with the floodplain by de-culverting the river or by “daylighting” rivers which had previously run underground as a result of development.  This had happened at the River Quaggy in South London, where the project had brought community benefits in tandem with flood attenuation gains.  Floodplain reconnections were excellent candidates for Section 106 Agreements and Local Plan policies.

(13)     Professor Driver briefly said that SuDS greatly reduced run off and should be compulsory within new development. Targeting Schools for SuDS projects was an excellent way of providing significant benefits whilst increasing young people’s knowledge and understanding of the issues involved. 

(14)     Professor Driver said that he had been involved in many coastal alignment schemes. Although they were resource-hungry, these schemes were able to deliver very significant benefits. There were numerous opportunities for small-scale projects in Kent which he encouraged support for.  

(15)     Professor Driver summarised by saying that each of the schemes he had described could be undertaken successfully on their own and would contribute to the reduction of flood risk.   Nevertheless, it was when these projects were undertaken together that a real difference was made. At Pickering Beck in East Yorkshire, the combination of Upland grip-blocking, high level timber dams, and a flood storage area had been able to significantly reduce flooding in downstream urban areas. At Holnicote Estate in Somerset, £160k of rewilding works had reduced the flood peak by 10% and had prevented housing worth £30m from flooding during a 1 in 50 year flooding event.  This was important as it demonstrated that rewilding work could have a significant impact on ameliorating major as well as low level flooding events.

(16)     Professor Driver described soils as “the elephant in the room”.  Soil condition and quality had to be treated as a natural flood management tool.  The compaction of soils through over-grazing and tillage was causing huge problems in some parts of the country.  It was essential to persuade all farmers and land managers of the necessity of taking the necessary steps to reduce muddy floods.  In his view this was the most important problem that needed to be tackled in terms of environmental management.   Currently, huge amounts of topsoil were simply washed away into the sea.

(17)     Professor Driver concluded his presentation by delivering the key messages.  It had to be accepted that natural flood management needed to be delivered in close alliance with traditional civil engineering. Nevertheless, there was great potential for natural flood management which had not yet been realised. It was important to keep doing small things as often as possible.  If this was achieved, rewilding would bring enormous benefits for all.

(18)     Professor Driver replied to a question from Mr Hills by saying that everything had to be seen in the context of the growing number of extreme weather events.   The effect of rewilding was to create greater landscape resilience to cope with climate change.

(19)     Professor Driver replied to a question from Mrs Brown by saying that Kent had many small communities who lived in valleys at the bottom end of slopes where water was flowing faster than it would do naturally.  Such communities rarely received funding for major projects, but it was possible for individual schemes funded partly out of the local levy or Section 106 Agreement to make a significant difference.   The best way forward would be to identify the most promising area catchment for such work and then adopt the practice set by the River Stroud Enhancement Project in Gloucestershire.  The effect was likely to be that more projects would be instigated once the first project had been successfully established and proved itself.

(20)     Mr Tant confirmed that rewilding work was already being actively considered in Kent and that some small projects had already been undertaken at locations such as the Hammer Stream.  A further scheme was being developed at Mill Farm in Marden.  KCC was working in partnership with the EA and the South East Rivers Trust who had been awarded a £300k grant out of DEFRA’s new £15m Natural Flood Management Fund.  The Medway was recognised as a priority catchment area by DEFRA. 

(21)     Dr Eddy said that some landscapes had changed their character as a result of human interference in ancient times. He asked whether this meant that natural flood management aimed to return the land to its pre-human interference condition.   Professor Driver replied that the goal was usually to return the land to the condition it had been in a couple of centuries earlier.   At this point the focus was on remote Upland areas.   It was unlikely that the aim would ever be to go back further.

(22)     Professor Driver replied to a question from Mrs Doyle by saying that there was no climate-related reasons why European beavers could not inhabit most of lowland Britain. They were naturally shy creatures who would rather not build dams in main rivers because they could build their lodges without needing to do so. Their greatest value in this respect was in their activity in smaller side streams.  There was a five year project taking place on the River Otter and, if the benefits outweighed the dis-benefits, it was very likely that the Government would approve more releases in other parts of the country.  

(23)     RESOLVED that Professor Driver be thanked for his informative and thought-provoking presentation.