London's Surface Water Strategy

The Strategic Group have commissioned the consultants WSP, to develop a London level strategy. The strategy will identify the surface water flood risk priorities for London and develop an action plan to address these. The scope for the strategy was developed in consultation with the key partners including the London Drainage Engineers Group. The strategy should be published in Spring 2024.

A strategic group has been created to drive forward the delivery of London’s first Surface Water Strategy and is ambitious in bringing together authorities responsible for flooding to improve how the long terms challenge of flash flooding is addressed. Members are:

• London Boroughs – maximum of six representatives drawn from Chair and vice chairs of London Councils’ Transport and Environment Committee and/or Thames RFCC Strategic Partnership Leads
• Mayor of London – Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy
• Environment Agency – London Area Director
• Transport for London – Chief Health, Safety and Environment Officer
• Thames Water – Strategic Resource and London Operations Director
• London Fire Brigade – Assistant Commissioner
• Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee – Independent Member

The group first met on 8 December 2022 and has met twice quarterly since. The minutes can be read below.

Meetings to date have covered:

• Terms of Reference
• resourcing to support the strategic group
• the scope of a London vision, strategy and associated plans (it was noted that work needs to continue on priority actions that can be delivered whilst the Plan is being developed)
• approval of the Annual Monitoring Report.

Now that the Surface Water Strategic Group has been set up Governance is no longer a separate work stream.

Meeting minutes

• February 2024 
• December 2023
• October 2023
• June 2023
• April 2023
• December 2022

The Funding working group is focusing on funding the development and delivery of SuDS. This will include reviewing how to align and simplify existing funding streams and identifying how to secure further funding.

The Thames RFCC, Environment Agency, Thames Water, GLA and local authorities are working on a project called PROSPER. The project is trying to make it easier to apply for funding from DEFRA to deliver SuDS. £1million of funding has been allocated to explore the best ways to do this.

Following the review of all of the recommendations since the 2021 flooding, the Evidence working group will focus on the following actions:

• Collecting information during and after a flood event and data sharing between organisations
• The GLA are exploring SuDS delivery options through the use of their work on the Infrastructure Mapping Application and Pan-London Data Sharing Agreements Project - LOTI.
• Increasing the opportunity identification for SuDs across London. There is piecemeal approach to the availability of SuDS opportunity mapping across London, with those local authorities that were part of the early phases of the London Strategic SuDS Pilot Study having access to much more information than those that weren’t. A project has commenced to extend this opportunity mapping across London part funded by TfL, Thames Water and the RFCC.

Information and good examples of the work that is being done to deliver Sustainable Drainage across London in the public realm can be found using the SuDS Retrofit Map produced by the GLA.

There are two main groups of stakeholder identified – professional partners and the wider London community.

For professional partners, there has been work to ensure that all key parties are involved in the developing of the strategy. Some key milestones of this work are:

• Surface Water Flooding in London report  by the GLA (March 2022)
• the Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) support of the creation of a transition group (Feb 2022)
• a workshop was held to improve collaboration in an incident for Lead Local Flood Authorities, highways and emergency planners (Feb 2022)
• London Drainage Engineers (LoDEG) met to update on the draft Thames Water Independent London Review and provide feedback to the Independent Expert Group (June 2022)
• workshop for representatives from all Local Authorities on the vision and strategy for London (June 2022)
• Thames Water independent Review published (July 2022)
• The London Climate Change Partnership  ran a surface water flooding in London event (Dec 2022)
• The London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP) invited the surface water group to come and update them on their work, one year on from the previous event. The slides are available on the LCCP website (Dec 2023).

For the wider London Community, a continuing workstream includes raising awareness of surface water flooding. Some key milestones of this work are:

• the GLA led a public awareness raising campaign in 2022 to inform people in 45,000 basement properties that are more vulnerable to flooding and provide advice on flood preparation and actions during an emergency. A further public awareness campaign has been delivered in 2023 with 48,000 leaflets being delivered to basements and at other local community events to target the most vulnerable
• the Mayor continues to lead London Flood Awareness Week (LFAW)
• on 1 June 2023, a Community Flood Resilience Workshop was run by the GLA Resilience Team in partnership with the Environment Agency and British Red Cross
• consistent information on flood risks on all parties websites, continues to be pursued. In addition, an officer funded by the Thames RFCC is developing tools and supporting information for Local Authorities to improve their work with communities.

A debrief of the emergency response to the 2021 flooding was undertaken by the London Resilience Partnership. The debrief identified 30 recommendations, the majority of which were implemented in advance of the summer of 2022. These included the revision of the Partnership Flood and Severe Weather Response Frameworks to ensure a more proactive response to potential severe weather incidents and the development of a specific multi-agency communications plan for flooding response.