In October 2023, Brechin, a Scottish town near the North Sea, was hit by a wall of water that changed it forever. During Storm Babet, a record 150 to 200mm of rain fell in parts of the area. The resulting flooding damaged some 189 homes, including houses, flats and caravans, and more than 1,000 residents were evacuated. In 2016 a flood protection scheme had been put in place to guard against river levels of up to 3.7 metres—what was then thought of as a once-in-200-years event. But in 2023, the level rose to 4.6 metres.
Seven people died in that storm, three of them in eastern Scotland. Hundreds of homes and businesses were affected. Schools had to shut; infrastructure was damaged. “We don’t know if it is an area that anybody will ever want to live in again,” Jill Scott, a local councillor, tells me when I visit in early summer.
I catch the bus from Dundee to Brechin, a place with a long history and attractive Victorian buildings. At the Crickety, a community hub at the local cricket club whose members helmed the response to the crisis, I meet council officers at a session for those affected by the heavy rains. Ian Stewart has walked up from his house on River Street, which was ruined by flooding. Stewart was born in Brechin and has lived on the same street all his life, but it’s not what it once was. There are empty houses all around his home, where he has returned to live with his wife Jane, and there are break-ins at night. “It’s been tiring,” he says with a wry smile.
For weeks, councillors, council officers and staff from the Crickety worked day and night before the immediate crisis subsided. Grant Hutchison, the Crickety’s manager, says Brechin “feels like a ghost town. There used to be people sitting out on the benches by the river. That’s all gone now.”
In 2024, the European Environment Agency reported that Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the world, with storms and flooding putting extreme pressure on many of its countries. According to a report published by the European Union, last year the continent experienced its most widespread flooding in a decade, with losses exceeding €18bn. That September, severe flooding afflicted around two million people in central Europe. In October, a deluge in the Spanish city of Valencia killed more than 200 people and destroyed homes and businesses. Cars were piled high on the city’s streets, roads and pavements were reduced to rubble, houses submerged in mud.
Brexit is, or course, no protection from these dangers. New official flood and erosion risk maps, such as the National Flood Risk Assessment and the new National Coastal Erosion Risk Map, show that in England alone around 6.3m properties, residential and business, are in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea and surface water. On my visits to communities affected by flooding and erosion in Scotland, Greater Manchester and East Anglia for this report, which is part of a broader European journalism project, I met many people who felt abandoned. As responsibility for the ravages of flooding falls between the cracks of various authorities, people who have lost everything are left to face crisis with little support.
Surface water flooding, when heavy rain overwhelms drains and sewers, is one of the fastest growing problems facing the UK. Last December the Environment Agency (EA) assessed that 4.6m properties are at risk, a 43 per cent increase on 2018.
Another underreported cause is what is known as groundwater, where water under the ground rises to the surface, causing flooding which can persist after heavy rainfall. Critical infrastructure is already vulnerable to this, with the EA reporting that more than a third of England’s roads, railways, water pumping and treatment centres are vulnerable to flooding from different sources.
In England, responsibility for managing these risks rests with various government bodies. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs is charged with flood and coastal erosion policy and funds bodies who manage flood risk, such as the EA, which has strategic overview and manages risk from rivers, reservoirs, estuaries and the sea. Local councils are tasked with tackling surface and groundwater flooding. This picture is largely replicated across the four nations that make up the UK. Labour’s manifesto included a pledge to form a UK-wide Floods Resilience Taskforce, but it is still early days, insiders say.
In December, parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) announced an inquiry into flood resilience in England, which is yet to publish its findings and recommendations. Hannah Cloke, professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading, is one of the experts advising the government. “We are a small island with a lot of floodplains and a lot of coastal areas exposed to different kinds of flooding,” she tells me. “We still encounter a lot of people who think that defences will protect. But it’s impossible in many places.”
That’s the case across the UK. In 2024, the Scottish cabinet secretary for net zero and energy, Màiri McAllan, launched a consultation on the nation’s first Flood Resilience Strategy. The “Scottish National Adaptation Plan 2024-29”, published later that year, describes flooding as Scotland’s “biggest climate challenge”.
In Angus, where Brechin is found, the cash-strapped council faces yet another (albeit related) challenge. South of Brechin, coastal Montrose is experiencing rapid erosion. The sea is eating into the sand dunes that protect the low-lying town at a rate of around three metres a year, according to the Dynamic Coast project, which works to provide evidence of the extent of coastal erosion in Scotland. The winter of 2023-24 saw the beach erode seven metres—another annual record. Some £400,000 of Scottish government funding has shored up the most at-risk areas, for now.
If the dunes are breached, two flood corridors could open up into Montrose, endangering its 12,000 residents. Council workers show me how the gaps in the fragile, golden dunes, which give way to species-rich grassland behind them, have been filled by engineered sandbags made of a UV-resistant material so the sun does not degrade them. This is short-term coastal flood protection. To protect the town long-term will cost millions. But if nothing is done, experts have warned of severe flooding in the coming decades.
“We measure time in storms. We’ve maybe got three more storms.”
Vicky Whitecross walks the coast every day with her dogs. Her dad was an avid golfer. “You would stand on the second tee and see sand dunes,” she recalls, “Now it’s a sheer drop to the beach.”
Places like Montrose “are at the forefront of the climate transition in the UK,” explains Briony McDonagh, a professor of environmental humanities at the University of Hull, who works with communities affected by flooding or coastal transition, and who gave evidence to the EAC. “But lots are also living in large and medium-sized towns, on relatively large rivers, where we have fluvial risk as well.”
Such concerns are felt further south, too. On a clear spring day in north Norfolk I meet Simon Measures, chairman of Save Hemsby Coastline, a community group. We’re sitting at a busy beach café where lifeboat workers chat and dogs chafe at leads. The village, a popular tourist destination, faces the powerful North Sea. “We don’t measure how long we have in years,” he tells me as we walk up to The Marrams, the street where he lives, named for the grass that grows on the dunes. “We measure it in storms. We’ve maybe got three more storms.”
Measures is referring to how long he has before his home is lost to the sea, which is what happened to his friend and neighbour, Kevin Jordan, in the winter of 2023, when Storm Ciarán hit. Jordan had consulted experts about erosion before moving to Hemsby in 2010. “The general view was that I had 80 to 100 years. It would see me out,” he recalls. When he moved in, a dune protected his property from the sea. It was washed away with one big surge in 2016, followed by the series of storms known as the Beast from the East in 2018, when The Marrams lost 13 properties. The UK’s east coast, from the north of Scotland down, is one of the fastest eroding shorelines in Europe. Its disappearance is measured in human misery.
Over the phone, Jordan recalls the time he spent lying awake and listening to Storm Ciarán arrive. “When daylight came, the sea was right up to the road. That evening a building control officer knocked on my door and gave me a letter.” The letter told Jordan that he would need to give the council permission to demolish his house. If it fell onto the beach he would have to pay for clean-up. There was no compensation. He had no choice but to accept. He now lives in a socially rented bungalow in another village.
Jordan is part of a legal challenge launched by Friends of the Earth. The charity is taking on the previous government’s 2023 National Adaptation Programme, which the statutory body, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), has repeatedly warned did not sufficiently fund adaptation to climate change. The claimants argue that the programme breached their human rights and that the government did not ensure enough provision for coastal erosion and heat. They lost in the High Court, but the team filed another challenge in July this year in the European Court of Human Rights. “The government’s plan is failing us all, but particularly those most at risk, those who are poorer or disabled, or if you live in flood-prone areas or areas at risk of erosion,” Niall Toru of the Friends of the Earth’s legal team tells me. The CCC’s latest assessment continues to find that the UK’s plans on flooding and coastal erosion are insufficient.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day this year, the floods came to Stockport in Greater Manchester. Less than a fortnight before the flood, Rick Vere-Hoose had been planning to open his first gym in Meadow Mill, a former cotton mill by the river Tame, which has businesses on the ground floor and flats above.
As heavy rain fell over the region, Greater Manchester Police declared a major incident. Four hundred residents were evacuated from Meadow Mill when the river burst its banks.
At first, the building was only accessible by boat. Vere-Hoose was escorted back into the building by search and rescue to survey the damage. “There was a foot of water in the gym… I sobbed like a six-year-old,” he says. Vehicles floated in the car park outside. His family, friends and builder pitched in to clean up, but he is dreading this winter’s floods. “I can’t afford to fit the gym out again,” he says, adding that “nobody seems to take responsibility for flooding.” Money crops up frequently in conversation with people like him, whose lives have been blighted by the waters.
At Stockport’s town hall, which is currently led by the Liberal Democrats, I meet Rachel Wise and Christine Carrigan, councillors from the opposition Labour group. Wise says that many tenants had gone to stay with family, thinking it would be a short-term problem. “But there was no light, heating or power and the floodwater had got into the drinking water supply. I don’t think [the council] reached out to people to say, ‘This is likely to be a three, four-week problem.’”
Part of the problem is the sheer number of bodies tasked with responsibility for flood risk, with none taking charge
The council leader, Mark Hunter, wrote an open letter to the owners, managers and buildings insurers for Meadow Mill asking them to help those displaced secure paid-for temporary accommodation. Carrigan tells me that “the residents genuinely felt that [the aftermath] was the council’s fault. They felt abandoned.”
Part of the problem is the sheer number of bodies tasked with responsibility for flood risk, with none taking charge. Wise laments how hard it is to work “within such a fragmented system. It was difficult for us to find out who was responsible for what.” Councils do have responsibility, but not sufficient powers. “We can scrutinise the work of the council, but we don’t have any scrutiny powers for the Environment Agency, and we cannot compel them or the water company, United Utilities, to do any of the things we suggest.”
Greater Manchester is a region in a natural basin, vulnerable to flash flooding and with overloaded drainage systems. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) makes much of working closely with the Environment Agency and United Utilities, but those I spoke to did not feel it was sufficiently present during the crisis in Stockport.
The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, declined a request for an interview, referring me to the water company and the EA.
A spokesperson for United Utilities explained that the company is only responsible for flooding from “the public sewer, our water mains or other network assets”, also confirming that it is collaborating with the GMCA “to deliver the variety of measures that are needed” to manage rainfall. The company also clarified that the water issue in Meadow Mill, Stockport, was “a private supply issue and not related to our drinking water mains”.
As authorities shuffle responsibility, experts raise other issues. Paul Cobbing led the National Flood Forum (NFF) charity until 2022. Since then, he has focused on the concept of flood poverty. “The impact of flooding is related to exposure to the hazard, and that’s related to vulnerability,” he tells me.
That finding partly stems from pioneering work in the town of Rochdale, northeast of Manchester. In 2015, one of the first named storms in the UK, Storm Eva, brought devastation to the town centre, to Littleborough in the upper Roch Valley and to the ward of Wardleworth, which has high levels of deprivation. Wardleworth developed around the mills, with neat brick terraced housing built for the workers near the river Roch. Now many local people with South Asian heritage live in the area.
One June morning I take the tram from Manchester to Rochdale to meet Shaheen Qureshi and Farzana Begum, who both experienced the flooding in 2015. They help to run a flood group with Charlotte Jones, one of the flood resilience officers working with the NFF, to support affected communities. There are now 300 such action groups in England.
“We had never seen the river that high,” says Begum. “I’m in a terraced house and we all have cellars. On Boxing Day that year, the cellars flooded.” The community rallied, with a youth group helping clear out ruined belongings.
Flooding is “our biggest natural disaster in the UK”, notes Jones. “It happens multiple times a year and yet there seems to be such a huge lack of empathy for those affected.” Qureshi lives nearby on the banks of the Roch. “My garden looked like a swimming pool. I sent the kids to their grandmother. If it had carried on for another half hour, it would have come into my house.”
“People say, ‘Why don’t you just move?’ But how? Because we have to tell anyone who moves in. I mean, who would buy our houses now?”
The effect on Wardleworth galvanised work in Rochdale. The council, NFF and Cobbing started to articulate the links between flooding, housing and deprivation, somewhat pioneering work in a British context, as Cobbing tells me. These efforts led to the seminal Rochdale flood poverty report and the ongoing Resilient Roch project, which is one of 25 initiatives funded by the National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England to tackle flooding at local level.
In the Rochdale council offices, the leader for strategic planning, Fran Comyn, and climate lead councillor, Tricia Ayrton explain to me that, as the council started to put a recovery plan in place from Storm Eva, issues emerged. Houses had been further damaged by leakage. Flood grants did not cover the cost of flood doors or other barriers, so the council funded 300 itself. Not everyone had insurance, which the NFF has found is replicated elsewhere. In low-income areas, only around 37 per cent of renters have home contents insurance. And even if they do have insurance, the cover is not always adequate. Others struggled with the cost of drying out their houses: damp and mould persist long after flooding.
Despite the work, some local businesses still feel that they are being left behind. Philip Holt owns Carpet Creations, a family business in the village of Milnrow, east of Rochdale. He bought his premises in 2008 and when I visit, the shop is busy and has the comforting smell of fresh carpets.
The shop has suffered frequent flooding since Boxing Day 2015. “The problem is that we are at the lowest point of the village with a Victorian system of drainage that just cannot cope,” he says. “They are building now on areas that would have soaked up water. The riverbed level has risen. It’s all down to cost, they say they haven’t got the funds. But all my life savings is in this shop.”
Like others who frequently experience flooding, Holt cannot get flood insurance. The government’s Flood Recovery Framework sets out what is available for those affected by such disasters. Much compensation is discretionary unless a storm is deemed severe, with local councils expected to foot the bill for less serious incidents.
Over coffee, local councillor Andy Kelly points outside. “As soon as the river rises, the water is forced back up into the village and you can get three, four feet of rainwater,” he says. “There hasn’t been enough investment in flood management… We don’t even know where all the drains are.”
But when I ask climate lead Ayrton about Milnrow, she says that both geography and restricted council powers hamper action. “Sometimes the flooding is a combination of surface and river flooding. We have to work with the Environment Agency and United Utilities. We have to look at highways drainage, the sewage system. Sometimes there is a lack of understanding of who is responsible.”
There are fears that Labour’s housing targets may mean even more people will be exposed to flooding, says Tracey Garrett, NFF’s chief executive. She calls for the cost-benefit criteria for flood defences to change so that smaller places and rural areas can gain, too. “The government’s approach seems to be that people need to take responsibility for themselves,” she notes.
But what if more rain falls? What if the banks of more rivers are breached? What if erosion reaches further and further inland? “We may need to move people out of flood plains”, says Larissa Naylor, a professor of geomorphology and environmental geography at the University of Glasgow, who also gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee. “And we are going to have to accept people coming from those places, who are internal climate migrants.”
For now, back in Brechin, the council has decided not ask for people and buildings to be moved away from flooding risks, although council housing ruined in the storm and the floods will not be filled or repaired and may be demolished. The council is, however, consulting widely on relocating and remodelling some of the housing. Gavin Nichol, another one of the local councillors here, is keenly aware that they are living with an ever-present danger. “We are going to struggle,” he says, looking out over the river.
The costs of extra protection are prohibitive, not just in Brechin, and choices need to be made at every level of government. Councillors have also agreed funding for the river wall in the town to be increased in height, but it may not be enough to save it again, as climate change upends forecasts. This is the conundrum for everyone affected by flooding: councils try to protect places that were once forever homes, but they know that, one day, the people living in them may end up permanently displaced.
This investigation was supported by a grant from Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU). It is part of After the Floods, a collaboration between six European countries looking at how communities weather flooding and how authorities are meeting the challenge
