- Bishop Hill blog

The torrent of claim and counterclaim about the floods continues apace. Last night Twitter was abuzz with environmentalists trying to defend Lord Smith, the head of the Environment Agency, while those of a more sceptical bent (myself included) were furiously pointing out some of the flaws in the argument.

Some have been making the claim that dredging would not have prevented the floods on the Levels, but as David Rose pointed out in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, not all of the area is a dredging-free zone.

Dramatic confirmation can be seen just a few miles away, in the northern part of the Levels.

At the Gold Corner pumping station, three giant pumps are still lifting the waters from the rivers Axe and Brue up seven feet into the Huntspill Drain – an artificial watercourse about 100ft wide which runs straight to the sea.

But unlike the southern Levels rivers, the Huntspill is not silted up. The land for miles around is just as low-lying as the drowned villages and fields near the Parrett, but the flooding is far less severe.

This seems to me to be strong evidence that the Environment Agency has made things considerably worse than they needed to be.

The argument that these floods can be pinned to climate change is also looking increasingly thin, particularly after the reminder that just a couple of years ago DEFRA was warning us that drought was the "new normal". The focus of the EA's defence therefore seems to have shifted somewhat to its finances (or the alleged lack of them).

It looks as if the argument is going to come down to whether allegations that the EA has splurged money on water voles, corruption and general wastefulness win out over claims that it is underfunded. That being the case, it will be interesting to see if someone can get hold of documentary support for Richard North's story about the absurd costs claimed by the EA for dredging. Given all the stories swirling around at Inside the Environment Agency, I have little doubt that it is true.

So who should carry the can? Chris Smith, as EA chairman, is probably just a grossly overpaid public relations man. It's hard to believe that he was privy to any of the day-to-day decisions that took place inside the agency. But then again he is placed in the EA to represent the public interest. The fact that he is an enthusiastic environmentalist as well, and would therefore have presumably been happy to see water voles given preference over taxpayers, only adds spice to the story. And besides, there were floods in the Levels last year and Smith was out in public trying to put them down to the "wrong kind of rain".

There was perhaps an echo of this last month when Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, incautiously blamed recent flooding on “increasing instances” of “convective rain, which sits in one place and just dumps itself in a deluge over a long period of time.” Not only did this sound to annoyed flood victims and their MPs as an excuse; it drew a sharp rebuke from the veteran weather forecaster Bill Giles, who said “There is nothing new about convective rain. Perhaps next time he should get a meteorologist to check his answers.”

It's all getting very interesting.