pay for what has been described as “soul-destroying” damage caused the extreme weather events.
Multimillion-pound clean up and repair bills are in order, after the three unprecedented storms destroyed roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure, while more than 1 million homes were without power and hundreds submerged in floodwater. Therefore, councils have been forced to make swingeing cuts to essential services owing to a 37 per cent drop in their government funding over the past decade.
“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,” Lezley Picton, the leader of Shropshire council, said. “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.”
According to experts, the “unprecedented weather” was caused after river levels reached near historic highs in certain areas causing flood barriers to be breached. Local authorities are complaining over the lack of a long-term strategy from government to tackle heavy rainfall upstream. Paula Widdowson, councillor and executive member for the environment on City of York council, said that York was having to find over £1 million in order to repair the 159-year-oldLendal Bridge, and thousands more to clean up.
“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,” she said. “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.”
