The floods that really matter are composed of migrant labour

England’s habitually well-mannered and inoffensive chalk streams have been uncharacteristically full of themselves this last week or so — as you may have gathered from your television evening news programmes or, if you’re unlucky, your kitchen.

Pangbourne

England’s habitually well-mannered and inoffensive chalk streams have been uncharacteristically full of themselves this last week or so — as you may have gathered from your television evening news programmes or, if you’re unlucky, your kitchen.The Pang in West Berkshire, for example, rarely bothers anybody. Scarcely 15 miles in length, its job is simply to adorn the Thames in agreeable manner, as if purchased from a sort of riparian Accessorize. Not this week, though. It has puffed its chest out and pretended to be one of those hectic, rough, uncouth northern rivers — the Tees, say — all swirling brown water and ill-concealed anger. It is possibly in your front room right now, making itself at home. The same is true of those other gently bourgeois downland streams; the Windrush, bored of the Cotswolds, engulfing the village of Standlake. The Ock pelting down from the White Horse hills, spilling its load hither and thither, the Lambourn doing its best to drown all those expensive horses. What has got into them all of a sudden? Not just rain, surely?

July is usually a dry month, one of the driest of the year. August, paradoxically, is almost always one of the wettest in central England, where, to put it broadly, most of our flooding — both in Yorkshire a month back and more recently in the Thames and Severn valleys — has originated. The River Don — which starts out pretty and ends a filthy sewer of industrial waste — was the villain of those floods in Rotherham, Sheffield and Doncaster. It rises in the Peak District, in what anyone but a Yorkshireman would call the Midlands. The Severn rises in eastern Wales, but still safely in that central belt which experiences high summer rainfall. The downlands which feed the Thames are a shade south of the Midlands, but not by much. My point here is that high rainfall in midsummer is hardly unknown in central England, away from the coast. It’s been quite a bit more than usual this time around, sure — and a little earlier too. But such consuming dampness is not unheard of. When the TV news crews tell you that records have been broken, it is records about flooding, rather than rainfall. These days when the rainfall arrives in the Peak District and the Welsh mountains and the soft pale green rise of hills separating the Midlands from the south, it doesn’t know what to do with itself; so it behaves like inner-city youths deprived of distraction — it causes trouble. The natural infrastructure cannot cope. Leave aside global warming for a moment; something else has changed.

The answer, according to almost everybody, is the building of new homes. We are building too many too quickly and in the wrong places. A study for Norwich Union back in February this year quoted 85 per cent of ‘construction professionals’ as believing that urban flooding will be a major problem in the future. Some three quarters of new build homes, those shoved up in the last

ten years, with their tiny square of lawn and acres of concrete and tarmac, will not be able to withstand flooding. But even though everybody knows this, the government has announced that it intends to press ahead with plans to pave most of southern England. This is, you see, the ‘common-sense’ approach; the floods are bad and we must help those who have been stricken to rebuild their lives and their homes, but we need new houses and floods don’t happen that often, do they?Well, they’re happening much, much, more often. Three fairly calamitous floods in the last seven years, for example (2007, 2004 and 2000), the latest seriously affecting a vast swath of the population, something like five million people in all. And the cost is already estimated at more than £3 billion. Meanwhile insurance premiums are likely to rise between 15 and 20 per cent as a result, according to the Association of British Insurers. And against this tide of misery the government insists that there is no great problem, provided that the correct regulations are in place.

So, 120,000 new homes are to be built in the ‘Thames Gateway’ (which is a poncey name for the ‘Thames Flood Plain’). Some 95 per cent of these new homes will be at risk of flooding — and the threat is exponential, because building those homes vastly increases the risk to other homes already built. I wonder if we will see a court case one day in which a homeowner sues developers, or the local council, or the government for having built houses nearby which have either increased his insurance premiums or left his living room a foot deep in noxious water.

The natural population of England is pretty static and has been for some years. We need new homes only to house those people who move to live here from abroad. We are told we need these people for our economy, to do the jobs which we ‘do not want to do’. But the only reason British people don’t want to work in bars, hotels or building sites is that the wages are too low. And our reluctance to pay them more money is an almost perfect example of the most ruinous short-termism. Nobody has factored in the cost that accepting migrant labour — a workforce characterised by low skills, low aspirations and of a necessarily temporary nature — will incur. But we might hazard a pretty good guess. A higher crime rate occasioned by the entirely understandable sense of injustice experienced by a poorly paid immigrant labour force; a concomitant constant drain on our health and education and social services, resulting in higher and higher council tax. And the provision of cheap, ugly housing which, remarkably, manages to square the circle of increasing the likelihood of both flooding and chronic drought. More cars, roads, shopping malls, petrol stations, leisure centres. Whole cities of pale faux-brick starter homes, the rainwater deprived of an opportunity to sink down into the earth.

By the time the flood waters have receded, of course, this argument will count for nothing. And the new Prime Minister will be praised for having resisted the temptation to respond in a knee-jerk manner to what was, after all, merely a natural calamity about which we can do nothing. So carry on building. And the cost, when Ebbsfleet or Gravesend floods once all those new houses have been built, will be borne, in the end, by you and me. But the financial cost, which will be enormous, is not remotely the worst of it.