Update on plans to reduce flooding in Staffordshire town - but £65m funding yet to be secured

Councillors have been given an update on plans to reduce the risk of flooding from the Rivers Tame and Anker in Tamworth. However, funding for the £65.5 million project has yet to be secured.

Last year, boreholes were drilled at 86 locations across the town to investigate the ground conditions. The results are still being analysed. Funding to progress the major project to move on to the second stage of the project is currently ‘tied up’.

An Environment Agency representative said there had been an indication that funding to progress the project could become available next year. However, no start date has been set and work could still be five years away.

Will Groves, a senior flood risk adviser at the Environment Agency, said: “We completed the first stage of a business case, which looked at raising the flood defences in 2024 and that identified that there were about 3,000 properties, including homes and businesses at risk and basically suggested that we need to raise the flood defences roughly by half a metre to a metre.

“That business case concluded that there was a really strong reason to investigate things further and had a cost benefit rate of 14 to one, which is really strong. Normally we would go to the second stage of the business case straight away but the funding from the National Flood Defences budget is tied up in a lot of construction projects at the moment.

“So we haven’t been able to do as much as we’d like, but we did get funding for ground investigation works.”

The Environment Agency also had funding to conduct hydrologic models, which will give the exact height the flood defences need to be and funding for a landscape vision to see what environmental and amenity improvements can be made.

A recent model predicts that a one-in-50 year event would cause property flooding in Tamworth. The current flood defences were installed to stop a one-in-200 event, but climate change is understood to have reduced their effectiveness.

Councillor Martin Summers called on the agency to investigate flooding at The Arches which makes the road impassable at times and cautioned that if the problem was not solved then improved flood defences could make the situation worse.