Mayor's fury over Doncaster flood funding snub

Mayor Jones said the borough has been hit by’ two 250-year storm events in the last 12 years’.

The floods of November 2019 saw over 4,000 homes evacuated, 716 residential properties, over 142 businesses hit and thousands of hectares of farmland flooded which also resulted in over £4 million worth of damage to the borough’s highways.

Works were announced in the Upper Don Valley in Sheffield of around £15 million but this fell short of a Sheffield City Region submission to Government which outlined the region needs around £271 million for schemes to prevent another disaster.

Mayor Jones, in a letter to the PM and the ministers, said previous works done in Sheffield, upstream of Doncaster, are ‘popularly seen to have hastened the flow downstream’ and ‘potentially increased the likelihood’ of flooding experienced in November.

Immediately following the floods in November 2019, the Environment Agency installed a temporary bank in Fishlake to help address the risk of flooding in the short term.

The temporary bank is still in place eight months later which is ‘exacerbated by the high probability’ that the flooding impact was avoidable if the insufficient level of Fishlake’s Far Bank flood barrier had been addressed previously.

Mayor Jones added that work on the barrier banks ‘now needs to be prioritised’ as one of the main defences for Fishlake, and ‘must be carried out before the coming winter months’.

“Not being included in the funding announced is unacceptable to the residents and communities affected,” Mayor Jones said.

“The communities are still in recovery; many residents still do not have habitable homes and are genuinely fearful that repeat events may occur in the forthcoming season.

“Not being allowed access to the capital funding means no mitigation measures being put in place, which means there is now a lack of trust in the sincerity of the Government’s assurances provided by you and others who visited at the height of the devastation.

“Our residents should feel supported by the Government and instead they feel abandoned.

“Urgent consideration needs to be given to funding the work that can, and should be carried out to provide Doncaster communities with the standard of protection from future flood risk that they deserve, to improve their resilience to future floods.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “We understand the heartbreak, devastation and disruption faced by communities when flooding hits and we are committed to making the country as resilient to flooding as possible.

“This is why we have already built 59 new flood defences in Yorkshire since 2015, better protecting 13,200 homes, and nationally we have committed record levels of investment over the next six years to better protect 336,000 properties.

“We will continue to work with local leaders and communities across Yorkshire - including holding a roundtable discussion when it is appropriate to do so.”

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