Flood risk, a small village,

and a big societyFranz Krause

CCRI

Deerhurst, Glos.

Big Society

“We are helping people to come together to improve their own lives. The Big Society is about putting more power in people’s hands – a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. We want to see community empowerment, the opening up public services, and people encouraged and enabled to play a more active part in society.” (http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Where_we_stand/Big_Society.aspx)

July 2007

Basically [one neighbour] who lives across the road is a big organiser of all sorts of things in the village, and Apperley, he runs the cricket club and he does things for the playing field. He’s just one of those people who’s always doing things for the community, and he basically got in touch with everybody in the village and asked everybody to meet up at the cricket club, the whole of the village, and basically have this meeting about what are we going to do. A couple of weeks after the floods.

Shortly after the flood, basically the four of us got together and made all of this happen. My good neighbour […] who was the secretary of the organisation, […] the farmer, and a young civil engineer […], and we called a meeting together of the village and I had written a letter round the village with just my analysis of the situation. The village met and I said we needed to form a proper organisation to deal with this and they elected me chairman and told me to get on with it, so that’s what we did.

We were angry. We were angry because we felt that the risk that we took in coming to actual Deerhurst could not have been expected to take into account all of the development in the flood plain, and all of the development generally, which means that the run-off of water coming off the escarpment and in the water area generally, it now runs off so quickly and gets down to the river so quickly. None of that did we foresee or could be expected to foresee when we came to live in Deerhurst, so it was a strong feeling that it was everybody’s water that flooded us, not our water. The world had to take responsibility for this so we called a meeting of various interested parties.

Basically through my contacts within the building industry again I knew that builders, developers pay good money to have spoil taken away from sites and we needed earth, we needed good clay, so I sourced some local supplies and basically did a deal with them and offered them a tip here for good clay that they paid us the benefit for.

From the outside looking in it did happen extremely quickly. From 2007 I think in about 2½ years or something we had a complete defence system in place, which is extremely quick. It’s not quick when you’re actually in there it’s agonisingly slow, and we had so many battles to get through and we had to get it funded.

He: If it hadn’t been for that organisation set up within the village, the village would not have been protected as it is now, government expenditure reduced dramatically, we would have missed out. It was a brilliant piece of organisation.

She: Early intervention. They’d got on to it straight away, and we are benefiting from that […].

He: I was actually amazed that they could pull off a scheme like that, worth about half-a-million pounds. But the legal input, the engineering input and then there’s one or two people in the village who’ve got so much energy and enthusiasm for running things, organising things, matching grants, raising money, so yes. So we owe them a debt of gratitude as well, yes, well the village does. It was brilliant. And it was self-help. It was a local community thing which has been the most interesting thing.

What triggered it off, I was Chairman of the Parish Council at that time and we had a flood and everybody thought ‘um, that’s a bit close!’ but it wasn’t that heavy really, not as bad as 2007 obviously, so one of the parish councillors and myself talked to the EA and luckily one of them, you oughtn’t to record this really! The guy from Severn Trent Authority enjoyed a pint of beer and we used to meet him at the pub and discussed how we were going to do this and one night when he’d had shall we say two pints of beer he agreed to listen

The committee

Disclaimer: depicted specimen may differ from original material.

We were a very strong little group of different skills. I have my skills as a lawyer and [our] secretary was very, very energetic, although he’s 70-years old he’s very energetic and he didn’t allow, we would have meetings with the EA at 11 o’clock in the morning and we would have drawn up the minutes by 11.45 and disseminated them all around and be asking questions. He kept them, we were a thorn in their side. We were not prepared to allow this not to happen. A very determined bunch.

He: Here we are, a population of 20-odd in a village, our lives totally devastated by the flood and as part of that rectification is putting up a new defence to protect the village, and to do those defences the authorities had to spend something like £50,000 on a new protection fence because great-crested newts are protected. And they’re almost protected more than the people in the village. […]

She: I’m the greatest animal lover ever and I wouldn’t hurt anything, but when basically they’ve got to put a £50,000 fence around the village to protect newts before they’ll even start considering protecting the people that live there, that is just an absolute joke. […]

Then it goes to archaeology and you can’t do things.

He: Because to tidy the bund in, through the churchyard we could only go down 6-inches, they wouldn’t allow us to dig any deeper than 6-inches. That’s because of archaeologists and protecting archaeological sites. It’s things like that, you think what’s more important the people and the community or these ancient archaeology?

It was all bats and newts. I think at one stage we had four architects, English Heritage has its architect and the County Council has its architect and we thought naively that they would be basically doing the same job, and they’re absolutely not doing the same job at all, and they argue. They both argue and collude, and then the EA’s got its own architect to liase with the other architects, and the church have an architect, so we had four architects and they all want to add a bit of value don’t they, it’s a nightmare. You have to keep your cool but not let them off the hook at any time. And, accuse them of holding up a very important project, and then they bristle and then they think and then they back off and off it goes again. […]

We looked them in the eye, […] the EA, the Church, English Heritage, Tewkesbury Borough Council and Gloucestershire County Council. And by and large, this was in the aftermath of a flood so it would have been politically incorrect for them to be other than sympathetic.

And I always had it very strongly in mind, we did it quite quickly because we had to do it quickly. We were working with the tide because the tide at the time was ‘help these people because they’ve just been flooded’, etc, etc, but the financial crash hadn’t quite yet happened. There was money still available. We wouldn’t be able to do it now, if it happened now we wouldn’t get the funds, and so that’s why we had to move very quickly.

I think where there is no imminent threat of a flood or no flood that’s just happened with the aftermath in front of you, then people do not agree on things.

The EA want to take over the responsibility and we resisted that very vigorously really because we know when they want closing, and the EA don’t; and in 2007, after the 2007 flood peaked, the EA rang up and said ‘are the gates shut?’ But no way are we going to worry about getting them shut, if we’ve got our own [keys] you know. And also the EA, once the floods do come they are so busy upstream getting various gates and things shut that I think it wouldn’t be a very reliable situation, so we’ve made it plain that we want responsibility to shut it.

I mean that was very difficult, and then we had certain members of the village who didn’t want the flood banks raised. […] No they really didn’t want it raised, they didn’t want their view impacted on. […]

And the other problem was that 3 houses were outside the defence and we basically have utilised the route of the previous defence as the easiest way of dealing with it. If we had tried to get the EA to go right round them as well we’d never have got there.

Hurt. A little bit hurt. It was particularly difficult because they’d made promises to us that they didn’t keep. The community, the committee. They made promises to us. They promised that phase one would be to sort the village out, and phase two would be to sort out [us.] We would invest our own money again, but we were expecting to get some help with that, which we didn’t get. I think we were a bit hurt by that.

Deerhurst and Big Society?

• Formal government agencies necessary to realise small community’s project (e.g. redistribution).

• Specific spatiality and temporality of project: small and fast.

• Particularly situated actors, rather than ‘the community’.