Foreword by Somerset Rivers Authority (SRA) Chair Councillor Mike Stanton to the SRA Annual Report 2024-25
I’m pleased to introduce the tenth annual report of Somerset Rivers Authority (SRA). The SRA is a unique partnership, the only rivers authority in the country. Nowhere else do partners work quite like we do in Somerset to reduce the risks and impacts of flooding. This annual report gives you details of what we did in Somerset between the start of April 2024 and the end of March 2025.
Text continues below the photograph of Councillor Mike Stanton, Chair of Somerset Rivers Authority.
It’s just over ten years since Somerset Rivers Authority was launched as a partnership on 31 January 2015. The big triggers for the SRA’s creation were the destructive summer flooding of 2012, then the devastating winter flooding of 2013-14. People living in Somerset, people working in Somerset, people visiting Somerset, people travelling through Somerset, all wanted more to be done to ‘stop all this ****** flooding’ – to quote a common sentiment of the time.
We have not been able to stop flooding in Somerset, no one will ever be able to stop flooding in Somerset, but a decade on, more has been done. More than 260 extra schemes and activities have been funded through the SRA, that would not otherwise have happened, and more than £45 million extra has been spent or allocated to ongoing projects.
What has sustained us? In past decades, Somerset had many post-flood initiatives. All were for a while enthusiastically pursued, before they ran into the ground like water into a Mendip swallett… Initiatives like the Parrett Catchment Project which ran from 2000 to 2007 were good and full of ideas. But they did not last.
In the tenth anniversary year of the SRA, we can reflect upon the reasons for our relative longevity, beyond our partners’ determination to work together as the SRA: Somerset Council, the Axe Brue and Parrett Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs), the Environment Agency, Natural England, Wessex Regional Flood & Coastal Committee, Wessex Water.
A lot is owed to the strength of our original design.
We are properly funded by council tax payers (although the value of that funding is diminishing each year, as it is not index-linked).
We serve the whole of Somerset, not just one catchment.
We have our own Memorandum of Understanding and Constitution and public Board meetings where people can come and ask us questions. There are sometimes awkward questions but that is how it should be.
In January 2025, it pleased us greatly to welcome a delegation visiting from Lincolnshire to learn more about the SRA. In the dark wet days of 2014, Somerset looked to Lincolnshire for lessons. It is encouraging to feel that other places now look to us.
You will find in this report much continuity between the SRA ten years ago and now: dredging, major and minor flood defence improvements, modelling, investigations, moves to get water off roads and into drains.
But there are also some changes of emphasis.
I have become more convinced of the importance of dealing with water as close as possible to where it lands, especially as flash flooding has become much more of an issue across Somerset. In January 2025, for example, more than 120 properties were flash-flooded in Chard, Ilminster and South Petherton. I know from listening to victims of flooding across Somerset that climate change has sometimes frighteningly intensified downpours. You will see in this report some measures we have funded to incentivise people to hold more water back where it falls: these include natural flood management schemes, planting ‘trees for water’, inspecting Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS), distributing water butts in Chard, and drawing up climate adaptation plans in the city of Wells and several towns and villages.
There are increasingly tight financial constraints on what the SRA as a partnership can achieve. As I said above, we are privileged to have ringfenced funding, but it is tied to the levels it was in 2016-17, and just over £3million a year goes considerably less far than it used to.
This is one reason why we have increased our efforts to help you deal with water yourselves as close as possible to where it affects you in Somerset. Hence, for example, our investment in localised flood warning systems, grants for training and equipment, workshops about responsibilities and plans, and our new Community Flood Action Fund.
It has been very heartening to see your responses to initiatives such as this.
Because, underlying everything I have touched upon in this introduction, you, the people of Somerset, are what sustains the SRA.
We are grateful for your continued support.
I trust that you will find this report about our combined activities useful and informative.
If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch.