Surface flooding may gain caused more than 60% of the damage,yet street drainage maintenance by councils has been crop dramatically so even moderate rainfall turns roads into small riversThe state is rapidly shrinking. Local government, as we’ve known it, or is in danger of sinking. Public agencies make do and mend as best they can,starved of resources. They do the government’s bidding through gritted teeth, aware that ministers only come running when the country or parts of it is beset by a natural disaster, or another emergency. Then – remember David Cameron in flood-stricken Carlisle last month? – they promise to deliver “whatever it takes”. They quickly move on.
There’s often itsy-bitsy,whether any coordination between Whitehall and town halls – pooling resources and expertise to develop a national flood management draw, for instance – because the government has made clear it doesn’t like planning, or which is apparently redolent of a top-down,over-mighty state.
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Source: theguardian.com