Storm Desmond: How a toxic brew of cuts to flood defences and empty rhetoric made Cumbria's floods worse

The floods will come again. The waters will rise. This is going to keep happening, hard as it is to bear in Cumbria, where torrents have swept sheep and cattle from the hillsides, brought a landslide down on a village, overwhelmed homes and shops, mangled cars and killed three people over the past week.

“You can’t get through. The road is now part of the lake,” says Claire Saunders, director of the Prince’s Countryside Fund, who has come to offer help and support to farmers. She’s standing by the Pooley Bridge, which has collapsed into foaming waters at the northern end of Ullswater. “It’s incredible. The infrastructure is really challenged here. You can only get round one way.”

As in Somerset two years ago, flooding is bringing out the best in people. The Liberal Democrat leader and MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, Tim Farron, has called for the owners of second homes in Cumbria to lend them to families who have been flooded – and says at least two dozen have responded.

“It’s awful to see the destruction which the flooding has caused, particularly for those who have lost their homes. I have been overwhelmed by the positive response from people to my call and I have passed all the pledges to the council, who I hope are taking up these kind offers as soon as possible.”

One of those volunteers is Stewart Hyde, the former chief constable of Cumbria, who is offering the two-bedroom cottage near Penrith he kept when he left the force and moved to Yorkshire. “I feel very sorry for the people of Glenridding who have taken an absolute battering in the last week,” he says.

“Some people in Cumbria have been flooded three or four times in the last few years. For me to go without the house for a while will be an annoyance, but it won’t be anything more than that. I am more than happy to let somebody use it while their house gets sorted out.”

He is calling for a register of holiday-home owners willing to respond in an emergency. “I hope in the longer term the county may turn round and say, ‘Look, you’ve got the assets. Maybe if there is a disaster, could we call on you to help somebody?’”

Elsewhere, people repair, regroup and watch the skies. The Christmas market will still take place in flooded Cockermouth today, with extra free stalls for the traders who have lost their shops. The Muslim and Sikh charity volunteers who took hot water and food, blankets and hard work to the West Country are helping out again in Cumbria this weekend.

We’ve seen lots of images of shop stock piled high in the streets, sofas and fridges submerged in water and even a pensioner going swimming in his kitchen, but the plight of the farmers tends to be invisible at times like this. One pregnant cow was swept away in a torrent of water from a farm near Great Salkeld and was later found munching grass on a golf course more than 20 miles away, near Carlisle.

“We were just gobsmacked that such a miracle had happened,” said farmer Gordon Tweedie, but others have not been so fortunate. The latest estimate is that 1,000 sheep and 1,500 cattle have been lost, each one a financial hammer blow to hill farmers, who exist hand to mouth at this time of year.

“The immediate need is to clear up, and everyone is really mucking in,” says Claire Saunders, whose organisation is pumping emergency funds into helplines and charities that are already at work here. One of them matches farmers who need feed and safe, dry ground for their animals with others who can help them. “But after that we have to ask, what happens next?”

More rain is the answer. Maybe not at threatening levels in Cumbria, where more normal amounts of rain, sleet and slow are expected today, but somewhere, sometime, soon.

Extreme weather is happening more often, isn’t it? “If you mean greater variability in weather, then yes. That is becoming normal,” says Richard Ashley, professor of flood resilience at the University of Sheffield. “There is more energy in the atmosphere, so we are getting more intense rainfall. We are surpassing records we have kept for 100 years. That is becoming more common. It’s also true for drought.”

Why do these events keep hitting us so very hard? Because we are in the middle of a perfect storm, not of wind and rain but of circumstances. Extreme weather, political dishonesty, institutional chaos, slack planning, dodgy developments and a continuing refusal to accept that climate change is doing this are all working together to create a disaster – or series of disasters – when it comes to flooding, says Professor Ashley.

“Politicians don’t take it seriously. They’re pretending. They’re not doing anything that will address the change in levels of risk.” Why not? “They have a very short shelf life. They think the effects of climate change won’t happen on their watch; they’ll be gone.

“They only reacted to the floods of 2013 and 2014 because Cameron was caught out, with his trousers down. It went on too long to be ignored. Whereas this time he’s thinking, ‘Oh well, it’s just a bit inconvenient and it’s up in Cumbria anyway, so it doesn’t matter. It’s nowhere near London. I’ll turn up and show myself but actually we’re not going to do anything different from what we are doing anyway.’”

Professor Ashley accuses ministers of not believing in climate change but they’re in Paris taking part in the COP21 conference, aren’t they? “COP21 is a cop-out. Nothing is binding. It’s all just smokescreen and mirrors and who can keep their trade going longer than everybody else, without having to do anything inconvenient.”

Meanwhile, the computer models we use to predict where and when the next flood will strike are out of date, he says, as rare events happen more frequently. The mayor of Keswick, Paul Titley, said a few days ago: “The flood defences were designed for a one-in-100-year event, and as it’s only six years since we had the last one, we were sort of surprised that we got [another] one so soon.”

Professor Ashley says: “Do you keep trying to raise the walls? You saw what happened in Keswick. You’ve got glass walls to retain your view of the river, but it overtops and floods people. We’ve got to think differently, beyond the events we have been planning for until now. What happened in Keswick will be the norm in future.”

The Government says it is spending £2.3bn over the next six years to protect 300,000 homes. He compares that to the Dutch government spending €1bn a year to mitigate the effects of climate change. “They think the unthinkable. They are designing for events that happen once in 100,000 years, because they know those things might now happen and they want to be ready.”

The Government’s own expert Committee on Climate Change was very clear again this summer: “Flooding, heatwaves and periods of drought are projected to become more common. Therefore, it is critical that appropriate and cost-effective steps are taken to prepare and adapt the country to climate change.”

The report predicted the number of people at high risk of flooding will increase by 45,000 in the years up to 2050, even if there is full funding for flood defences; no more houses built on flood plains (both of which are highly unlikely) and only a moderate rise in the global temperature.

“Actually, it’s going to become very obvious what is happening by 2020,” says Professor Ashley. The report called for a new strategy, of accepting the greater risk and adapting to it. Not just trying to hold back the waters with ever higher defences, but accepting that some will be overwhelmed anyway, so putting a wider emphasis on managing floods, such as placing the onus on homeowners to build their own flood defences and getting farmers to rearrange the landscape so that rain runs off the hills more slowly in the event of an unexpected flood.

The suggestion of a change of strategy was rejected by the Government, which is led by much the same people who slashed funding for flood defences by 27 per cent when they came to power in 2010.

Those cuts meant that when drought was followed by flash flooding on hard ground in 2012, nearly 300 planned defences were not there. Then came the winter of 2013 and 2014, the wettest for 250 years. The Somerset Levels became a series of lakes; villages became islands; the Thames burst its banks right into the gardens of some very wealthy Tory voters. David Cameron said he would learn the lessons of those floods and spend whatever it took to put things right. Some new defences did save homes from flooding in Cumbria and give people more time to get out or get ready. But the words he said on Monday echoed those he said in Somerset nearly two years earlier.

“After every flood, the thing to do is sit down, look at the money you are spending, look at what you are building, look at what you are planning to do in the future and ask, ‘Is it enough?’ That’s exactly what we will do.” And that is what the Committee on Climate Change says he has not done.

Meanwhile, the Government, impatient with councils that stop new homes being built, is relaxing planning rules, which means more chance of building on flood plains. The taxpayer is helping to fund a new scheme that will have 9,000 homes built on land considered by the Environment Agency to be at risk.

“We know what we should do, but it doesn’t stop government tacitly colluding with developers to build in flood-prone areas in inappropriate ways,” says Professor Ashley. He believes there should be one clear voice on flooding rather than a chaos of voices including the Environment Agency and the Department for Food and Rural Affairs, both of which have been stripped of expertise and effectiveness by budget cuts. “We’ve got two many institutions doing too many different bits of this.”

There has to be another way, but even if money were unlimited, would it really be possible to build big enough defences to protect all of the people all of the time? “No. It is impossible to spend your way out of natural hazards like this,” says Professor Ashley. “But nonetheless, we still need a better strategy than we have got.”

It’s hard to imagine the people of Cumbria – or wherever else the waters rise next – disagreeing with that.