Response from Mrs Maggie Mason, South Lakes Flood Partnership
1. Mrs Maggie Mason, South Lakes Flood Partnership : 16 Jul 2017 20:39:00
Please indicate which Development Management policy or document you are commenting on. You will need to use a separate form for each policy you wish to comment on.
DM6 Flood Risk Management and Sustainable Drainage Systems
Please make your comments in the box below, making it clear which policy or document your response relates to.
The N E Kendal Flood Action Group welcomes the revised approach to policy DM6 in the current draft of this DPD. In particular we support the following elements :
• The three bullet points under "location of development - Avoiding areas of Flood Risk", referring to capacity to store flood water, lifetime safety, not increasing flood risk elsewhere, and not compromising implementation of any adopted flood risk strategy.
• The requirement for the approach to surface water drainage to be based on an independent assessment of site conditions
• The table showing which documents must be submitted at each stage of the planning process,
However, following a constructive meeting with SLDC officers on 21 June 2017, we consider that changes to and clarifications of the policy wording are required to ensure that the policy is capable of being used to refuse development that would either flood, or increase flood risk elsewhere. Currently some of the wording is too imprecise, and in some places ungrammatical and any proof reading should ensure that there are no soft "loopholes" of wording that would enable developers to gain planning consent at Appeal against the intention of the policy.
For example the FLAG believes that:
The location of development bullet points should say that development should be refused if it cannot be demonstrated that the criteria would be met. Whilst this is not the “positive wording” government guidance suggests, the NPPF does allow such wording in the case of flooding, and it puts the burden of proof on the developer rather than any public authority.
Discussion of surface water should include a section on overland run off from outside the site, e.g. where the proposed development is adjacent to farmland or upland areas.
Groundwater should be taken account of in all sites where this is raised in either an SFRA or in the independent assessment of site conditions, not just where required to protect vulnerable aquifers.
Cumulative effects of the proposed development together with other new or proposed developments should be considered.
We agree that the Design of Sustainable Drainage Systems should use the most up to date guidance available locally and nationally, but are not sure whether this should restricted to adopted guidance. In some cases, given the specific local problems in Cumbria and Kendal in particular, new and emerging science on aspects such as sub-regional and local rainfall and climate change
should be capable of being a material consideration, leading to potentially higher standards of design to address flooding.
In addition we are concerned that the design requirement to utilise naturally wet areas of a site as Sustainable Drainage Systems risks inaccurate calculations of attenuation, in effect directing site rain water from non- permeable areas into low lying areas of the site that already provide natural attenuation for upland run off and seasonal springs, and which would be full to capacity in winter storm conditions.
To summarise we welcome the broad approach but believe that the policy wording is not precise enough to refuse any development that would either flood itself, or increase flood risk elsewhere, including in situations where developers are failing to take account of the special local circumstances in many parts of our District. Therefore we consider the policy is sadly still unsound because it fails to ensure that the NPPF's requirement to make sure that development that increases flood risk elsewhere is not permitted.
