15 February, 2002

John Sheard discusses the lamentable past of Yorkshire's anti-flood defences and asks: what can the Government do to prevent worse in the future?

I ONCE walked into an office car park in central Manchester and saw a colleague scratching his head in dismay as he peered into a huge hole in the ground.

He had reason to be a little cross: his car was at the bottom of that hole some 15 feet down, being washed by the waters of a Victorian sewer which, 100 years previously, had been a magnificent piece of civil engineering. But no one had spent a penny on its upkeep for a century and so it had finally given up the ghost.

Such neglect, sadly, was the norm for most of the 20th Century. Successive governments and local authorities put off basic maintenance work on such vital bits of infrastructure - including flood defences.

So once again this weekend, hundreds of Yorkshire families and businesses are involved in the heartbreaking task of cleaning out the filth left behind by floods, some of them in Wharfedale for the third time in five years.

Many of these poor folk are facing the likelihood that they will never again get insurance on their homes or business premises - which will knock thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, off their value.

There are aesthetic reasons for this as well as the obvious practical ones. River valleys are one of the jewels of the British countryside - for leisure, for wildlife, for the simple pleasure their beauty affords us all.

Imagine the Aire Valley between Skipton and Keighley - the last "green lung" before you hit the grime of the old West Riding - covered in houses. Yet Bradford City Council is already planning to build there.

Imagine, similarly, the views across the Ribble Valley from the A65, one of the most popular tourist routes in the UK. To build there would be a national disgrace as well as being suicidally daft.

The Government will no doubt argue that there is a huge demand for new housing and it must go somewhere. Well, take a look at Victoria Mill in Skipton, converted into luxury apartments with such good taste that a few years ago it won the national civic society's highest architectural award.

No one needs to be told that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of near-derelict mills in Bradford, Leeds, Keighley and a dozen more old textile towns in West Yorkshire. There are also tens of thousands of "brown-field" former industrial sites which need cleaning up anyway - an ideal spot for housing with all the main services like sewerage already on hand.

Instead of wasting millions on building defences in areas which have been prone to flooding since the last Ice Age, lets clean up our industrial wastelands and give people homes close to their workplaces, shops and other amenities.

Government ministers claim to put the environment high on their list of priorities. Time they put their money where their mouths are!