Councils will have to cut key services to pay for the “soul-destroying” damage caused by three unprecedented storms across the UK, local leaders have said.
Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin brought hurricane-force winds and heavy rain to large parts of the UK in the past week, leaving more than 1m homes without power and hundreds under water.
Local authorities said they faced multimillion-pound bills to clean up and repair damage to roads, bridges and other infrastructure, at a time when many are making swingeing cuts to essential services due to a 37% drop in their government funding since 2010.
Lezley Picton, the Conservative leader of Shropshire council, said: “We need some emergency funding. A million pounds is what it costs to clean up – after that it is significantly more if you take into account the long-term damage it does to our highways.”
She added: “It has to come out of council coffers and we’re not very well funded; 84% of our budget goes on social care. It means cutting our cloth accordingly and it probably means not doing something that we were going to do.”
Figures provided to the Guardian show at least 650 homes and businesses were flooded in Shropshire, Worcestershire, York, Wales and the Yorkshire village of Tadcaster, although the true number of properties affected is acknowledged to be far higher.
The Environment Agency said the “unpreceded weather” had caused river levels to near historic highs in some areas, causing flood barriers to be breached. However, it said about 40,000 properties had been protected.
Council leaders about a lack of a long-term strategy from government about containing heavy rainfall upstream. They said flood prevention strategies focused too often on relatively small areas instead of region-wide or cross-boundary mitigations.
Picton said: “The 2000 floods were said to be a once-in-30-year flood and since then we’ve probably had seven or 10. Now it seems to be one every year and we can’t continue like this. For some people this is the third [flood] in three years. It’s soul-destroying.”
In York, about 60 properties were flooded when the river Ouse neared its highest ever recorded level on Tuesday.
Paula Widdowson, a Lib Dem councillor and executive member for the environment on City of York council, urged the government to establish a £200-300m pot of emergency funding that areas could easily access during damaging storms.
Local authorities can apply retrospectively for funding from the government’s bellwin schemealthough that only covers costs incurred in the immediate response to weather events and does not fund the repairs or long-term recovery.
Widdowson said York was having to find more than £1m to fix the flood-damaged Lendal Bridge, a 159-year-old iron bridge connecting the historic city, plus thousands more to clean up.
She said: “It’s the local governments who are going to have to fund this out of their council tax or from somewhere, whether it’s not filling the potholes in the road, whether it’s not looking after the children properly, whether it’s closing the library.
“We’re not going to take it from children and we’re not going to take it from libraries, so it’s where can we take it from? We’ve all got very, very, very low budgets.”
The historic site of Ironbridge, in Shropshire, a world heritage site, was inundated for the third time in as many years and dozens of home were evacuated as the River Severn almost overtopped flood barriers this week.
Shaun Davies, the leader of Telford & Wrekin council, said there needed to be “a more permanent solution” to protect the site from repeatedly severe weather. He said: “We need to see changes to the local government funding formula to support both our role as Lead Local Flood Agencies and allow us to support investment in flood defenses to recognize rural need, heritage, history and tourism.”
In South Yorkshire, where low-lying villages were devastated by storms in 2019, Storms Eunice and Franklin caused huge disruption to major travel networks as Rotherham rail station was flooded and the major Snake Pass road, connecting Sheffield to Manchester, has been closed for several weeks due to landslips.
Dan Jarvis, the Sheffield city region mayor, said there was a £118m funding gap from government that meant it could not start 27 “priority” flood defense projects, including nine that could begin later this year with the right support.