Tory MP Says River Severn Flooding Requires Government to ‘Think Like the Victorians’

After heavy rainfall the river Severn floods the centre of Worcester, England on Jan. 4, 2024. (PA)

A Conservative MP has called on the government to “think like the Victorians” and back his £500 million plan to “tame” the Severn and prevent the flooding which regularly devastates towns and villages across a large swathe of the English Midlands.

Daniel Kawczynski, the MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, told The Epoch Times he and a group of other parliamentarians with constituencies in the Severn valley had come up with a “very innovative concept” to “manage the river holistically” and remove the perennial threat of flooding.

Last week heavy rainfall during Storm Henk caused widespread flooding in Shrewsbury, Worcester and several other towns and communities along the Severn, which is Britain’s longest river and runs from the mountains of north Wales down to the Severn estuary, near Bristol.

There were major floods in Feb. 2022 and before that there was serious inundation in 2012, 2014 and 2020.

Siobhan Connor, a public relations consultant whose home in Shrewsbury was flooded with contaminated water and “raw sewage” after the Severn burst its banks.

‘We Can’t Continue Like This’

She told the PA news agency last week: “There’s a lot of people in this situation and it’s making us ill, the physical and mental stress, the loss of work. We can’t continue like this.”

Ms. Connor said it was the 20th flood they had suffered since moving into the property in 1997, with three floods in 2023/2024 alone.

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The Severn has always flooded, but it has got worse in recent years and Mr. Kawczynski said, “Climate change is certainly changing and we’re getting far more deluges of the kind that we’ve just seen last week with massive amounts of rainfall, and I suspect the situation will only get worse.”

He urged the government to think long-term and back his proposal.

“What I want us to do is to think like the Victorians, build things not just for ourselves but for future generations,” Mr. Kawczynski told The Epoch Times.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kawczynski—who chairs a caucus of 36 MPs whose constituencies the river runs through—asked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak about the issue at prime minister’s question time.

He said, “We have submitted a business case to the chancellor for £500 million to finally tame the River Severn, and I know that his officials are currently looking at those proposals.”

“To tame the River Severn would lead to a gross value-added uplift in the West Midlands of over £150 billion,” he claimed.

Mr. Kawczynski said flooding had caused, “horrendous damage and misery” in his constituency and many other parts of the Severn valley and he added, “We really need to see in the spring Budget further assistance for communities such as mine finally to deal with these annual floods.”

Sunak Promises Environment Agency Will Explore Plan

Mr. Sunak said, “Action is already being undertaken under our six-year £5.2 billion investment programme to better protect land across the River Severn catchment area.”

But he went on to say he knew the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, had started reviewing the plan put forward by Mr. Kawczynski and he said, “I assure my honourable friend that the Environment Agency is working closely with other partners to explore his plans in more detail.”

Siobhan Connor (R) stands outside her flooded home (L) in Shrewsbury, England on Jan. 4, 2024. (PA)

The £5.2 billion figure, which was announced in 2022, is for the whole of England and Mr. Kawczynski said he understood much of it had been spent, or earmarked for schemes protecting the London area.

Mr. Kawczynski said he welcomed the spending on flood defences but he said the £500 million project he had been working on would draw off large amounts of water upstream, thus preventing the flooding in the first place.

He said the plan would include offering financial incentives to farmers and other landowners in north Wales, Shropshire and elsewhere, to offer up land which could be used to “hold water.”

MP Says Brexit Presents Opportunity

Mr. Kawczynski, “Now that we are out of the European Union we no longer need to comply with the Common Agricultural Policy which was devised in Brussels for the benefit of French farmers and was totally unconducive with the priorities and dynamics of British agriculture.”

“Now that we’re out of the European Union, we don’t need to follow guidelines and instructions. So for the first time, we can pay and incentivise landowners to hold on to water, we can pay them financially to a degree which will incentivise them to actually be part of the solution,” he said.

A view of Worcestershire Cricket Ground-flooded by the river Severn following heavy rainfall in Worcester, England. (PA)

Mr. Kawczynski said, “We need to identify land which can be turned into wet washlands—lakes in the winter and marshy bogs in the summer—which attract wildlife and other vegetation.”

He said building flood defences often protects a small number of houses but pushes the problem further downstream, exacerbating flooding in more populated areas such as Shrewsbury, Worcester and Gloucester.

Of the 40 constituencies the Severn runs through, 36 are Conservative but many of those are marginal and Mr. Kawczynski said he was facing up to the possibility of a Labour victory at the general election later this year.

He said: “If the Labour Party wins the next election they will need to have won a lot of those marginal seats, so they will be responsible for them, and they will have the same pressure on them, as a government, to find a solution as we have had.”

PA Media contributed to this report.