Backing Woodborough’s Flood Action Group at Westminster

By Simon Crowther BEng (Hons) FCIWEM C.WEM MIET, Director at FPS Environmental Ltd.  2nd March 2026

FPS Environmental at the Houses of Parliament supporting Woodborough Flood Action Group

On Tuesday 23rd February I was at the Houses of Parliament with Michael Payne MP and members of the Woodborough Flood Action Group to talk about flooding in the village.

Woodborough has a way of bringing everything back to first principles for me. It’s where my family home flooded in 2007. We went through the same process that so many others in the community have been through – the strip-out, the drying, the long return to normality that never quite feels normal. The measures we installed afterwards have protected our former house since, but as a village the problem has never gone away.

When you write the years down – 1994, 1999, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2020, 2023, 2024 and again in 2025 – you stop talking about “events” and start talking about a pattern.

Over time residents have done exactly what policy has asked them to do. There is Property Flood Resilience in place. There are local interventions that work at individual property level. You can see the difference they make when flood barriers hold back the water. But when the road in and out of the village is under water, when access becomes uncertain and daily routines are disrupted, it shows the limits of solving flood risk one house at a time. That is the reality for linear settlements like Woodborough, and it doesn’t sit comfortably within the way schemes are currently scored.

The technical case for reducing the risk is not new. A catchment-wide approach was identified after the 2007 floods. The mechanism is understood. What has been missing is the route from strategy to delivery.

A few miles away in Lowdham that journey is happening. In Woodborough it stalled. You can see what happens in Lowdham when the scheme makes the jump from strategy into delivery – you can read more about the project here which is currently under construction: Lowdham Cocker Beck Flood Alleviation Scheme.

Lowdham in flood 2023:

Being in Parliament was about supporting the Flood Action Group who have kept pushing this forward for years. They are a textbook example of what we saw when we partnered with Cranfield University to look at how community flood groups operate in practice. The conclusion from that research was simple: community action on its own is not enough, and engineering on its own is not enough. The places that make progress are the ones where the two align and are properly supported.

Woodborough has the knowledge, the lived experience and the organisation. What it needs is a deliverable pathway.

The conversation inevitably turned to funding, because that is the constraint across the industry at the moment. Not just for capital schemes, but for Natural Flood Management, for Property Flood Resilience, and for the way all of this sits alongside planned development. The Frequently Flooded Communities Allowance was a positive move, but it still doesn’t fully capture what repeated flooding does to a place. It is not only about counting internal property impacts. It is about the loss of access, the pressure on infrastructure, the impact on work and school journeys, and the cumulative effect of living with the same disruption over and over again.

From an industry point of view it is a difficult period. But the reason I am still optimistic is that Woodborough is not starting from zero. The catchment has been studied. The options are known. The community is organised. This is about turning a long-standing evidence base into an action plan that can actually be delivered.

What stays with me after a day like that is the persistence of the volunteers. The progress that has been made at property level shows what happens when people are given the right information and the right support. The next step has to be bringing that same alignment back to a coordinated, catchment-scale scheme.

FPS Environmental will continue to support the Flood Action Group.

This is not an abstract policy discussion. It is a real place, with a long memory of flooding, and a solution that has been talked about for years.

Woodborough already has the evidence, the community and the technical understanding. What it needs now is a funding and delivery process that catches up with the reality on the ground.