Our clueless establishment needs to pay the price for floods crisis
WHEN a private company messes up, it rightly gets pilloried. But when the public sector commits a blunder, even an enormous one, it all too often gets away with it. Blame is deflected; few people, if any, lose their jobs; knighthoods are retained; and the flawed dominant ideology is allowed to retain its grip on the system, regardless of how many times it is proved to be nonsensical. The hypocrisy and double standards are extraordinary and epitomised by the reaction to the flooding crisis, which is now engulfing parts of London and swathes of its commuter belt.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m delighted companies are held to account when they make a mistake. It’s just that it would be great were the public sector to face the same degree of accountability and scrutiny – when it comes to mismanaged floods, unnecessary deaths in hospitals, failing schools that ruin kids’ lives or even monetary policy that creates bubbles, crashes, unemployment and misery. Why are we so indulgent towards those who work in the state or not for profit sectors when they mess up, but so tough on those who work in the for profit private sector?
Yet the very same people who routinely demand retribution for recessions – assuming, laughably, that these can be pinned on a few bankers or business folk, rather than vast, impersonal forces – are now claiming that nobody should be fired for the floods because they are caused by unstoppable natural forces and the weather.
Sure, the rain has been horrendous – and of course people have been building on flood plains. Yet it is also clear that a number of avoidable mistakes have been made by officials, and that the consequences of the heavy precipitations could have been much less bad. An analysis by Colin Clark in Water Power magazine of the worst periods for consecutive three monthly rainfall since 1766 shows that this is the fifth highest on record; there is a huge amount of rain, but it’s a one in 50 years occurrence, not one in a 1,000.
I’m not blaming Owen Paterson, the secretary of state, or recent budgetary cuts, but instead 10-15 years of incorrect policies and institutional incompetence, starting under Labour but for which all parties and the EU share responsibility. This is an establishment crisis, a failure of a particular way of doing things. Rivers should have been dredged properly; people should have been put before natural habitats; flood defences made secure; and the mad policy, outlined by the previous government in 2008, to allow parts of the country to flood more for “environmental” reasons should never have been adopted. Would this have prevented all, or even most, of this crisis? Perhaps not – but the damage would not have been as great.
The establishment has been clueless. Caroline Spelman, the previous environment secretary, argued in 2012 that climate change could mean droughts are “the new normal”. The Met Office warned on 21st November 2013, that “confidence in the forecast for precipitation across the UK over the next three months is relatively low.” But it went on to predict that the probability that precipitation for December-January-February would fall into the driest of its five categories was 25 per cent; the probability that it would fall into the wettest category was just 15 per cent.
Imagine if the Environment Agency had been contracted out to a for-profit outsourcing company: there would be calls for renationalisation, for senior staff to lose their pensions and titles, for a new regulator, super-taxes and pay caps and action at the EU level. The Archbishop of Canterbury would be calling for a thorough and urgent inquiry into the practices and culture of the people in charge of preventing floods. It’s all madness: a scandal is a scandal, regardless of whether it takes place in the private or the public sector. Individuals should always take full responsibility for their errors. It’s time for a little more balance.
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