'I warned ministers of extreme flooding'

The view from Patricia Purkiss's 600-year-old home in Tewkesbury is normally a tranquil panorama of sheep meandering across a meadow. Not, however, this weekend. Since Gloucestershire was lashed by the torrential rain a week ago, the green fields surrounding her home have been swamped by several feet of water. On the other side of the torrent, a few hundred yards from her garden gate, stands an anonymous brick building.

"That," she says angrily, jabbing a finger at the building from the doorway of her flooded home, "is the water treatment works. They built it on a flood plain and, despite all the talk of climate change and heavy storms, they failed to protect it. So now our homes are flooded, we are surrounded by water… and we don't have a drop to drink because the place that is supposed to clean the water is flooded too. It's stupid and it makes me absolutely furious.

"Frankly, if the head of Severn Trent water company stepped into my house today, I'm telling you, he would not get out alive."

Like many of the 350,000 in Gloucestershire who are still without water, and the thousands who have no electricity either, Ms Purkiss is furious. So doubtless she will be less than impressed with the announcement yesterday by Lady Young, the head of the Environment Agency, that water bills must rise - to pay for protecting water plants and electricity stations from the kinds of severe floods that have left great swathes of middle England under water in the past fortnight.

The cost of flood-proofing our towns and cities, Lady Young insists, will have to come from increased bills. "You either pay upstream to prevent or you pay downstream to mop up, but you've got to pay," she says. "Climate change is coming home to roost."

Monsoon-like conditions have done £5 billion of damage to 50,000 British homes and businesses this summer. And the truth of the matter is that, despite a host of warnings, Britain was woefully ill-prepared for the tidal wave that engulfed it. Consumers are expected to foot the bill for flood prevention measures, yet the water companies have failed to invest enough in infrastructure, such as drainage systems, which could have lessened the impact.

This has made a difficult situation for the flood victims all the harder to bear, expecially coupled with the facts that:

• almost half of Britain's flood defence systems are not up to the required standard;

• funding for these systems is almost £200 million below necessary;

• the Government has been warned repeatedly that the UK does not have the capacity to respond to a major flood;

• fire fighters and Armed Services were initially forced to stand idly by while agencies squabbled over who was responsible for what.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect has been the lack of funding. Under a deal with the industry regulator, Ofwat, the water companies were supposed to spend £4.3 billion on infrastructure in 2005-2006. Instead, in a cost-cutting exercise, they invested only £3.4 billion.

What is even more staggering is that since 2000 there have been 25 separate reports from government bodies and parliamentary committees advising how to reduce flood risks and the way they are handled. Yet despite this, the National Audit Office has revealed that only 57 per cent of Britain's flood defence systems are in ''target condition''.

It has all contributed to the current chaos and confusion: made all the more infuriating by the fact that when floods last created chaos, in the autumn of 2000, the shambolic response was heavily criticised by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which said such mismanagement could only be resolved in future by giving overall responsibility to the Environment Agency. It was never done.

As Ed Gallagher, who was chief executive of the agency from 1995 to 2000, observes wryly: "The fact is that funding for defences ebbed and flowed according to the bad headlines. When flooding disappeared off the news agenda, funding was cut.

"When John Prescott told me in 2000 that funding would be increased, I told him it wouldn't be enough. The events of the past few weeks would not have been as serious if the Environment Agency had had the resources it needed. And it has not been made into a co-ordinating authority."

A brief history of the situation makes miserable reading. It began with storm clouds sweeping across the south-east of England. The heavy downpours caused transport chaos in London and the surrounding area. As the storm moved west, it slowed, pouring torrents of rain on to Gloucester, Cheltenham and Worcester. In Evesham, one of the worst-affected areas, 60 people had to be airlifted to safety and more than 70 special needs pupils and teachers were stranded for two nights as roads were cut off.

Thousands of motorists had to abandon their cars as motorways turned to fast-flowing, 6ft-deep rivers. With more water cascading down real rivers, Tewkesbury was overwhelmed at the point where the Avon meets the Severn. The rising waters then flooded a water treatment works in Mythe, near Gloucester, leaving thousands without water before threatening to swamp an electricity substation.

Initially, Britons faced the destruction and devastation with their accustomed stoicism. There was an abundance of community spirit: an aura of "let's all pull together". But when communities such as Hull, where 10,000 homes were wrecked, were left to fend for themselves and looters and cowboy builders swiftly took advantage of vulnerable householders, that quickly dissipated. Almost five weary weeks later those affected in that city are now furious at how ill-equipped the councils, water companies and the EA were to deal with the deluge.

The floods that hit Hull, and the chaos that ensued, should have sounded warning bells. They didn't. Two weeks ago, in the days before the downpours that heralded the floods in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, forecasters at the Met Office monitored the building storms. They issued an official warning of the impending weather to the EA on Wednesday July 18, a full two days before it hit.

From the agency's headquarters in Bristol, officials were able to watch real-time radar images that charted the progress of the storm clouds as they spiralled towards the UK and then moved across the country, dumping torrents of water in their wake. But despite this early warning, the EA failed to predict the true extent of the floods and mobilise defences in time. What ensued was a bungled attempt to do too little, too late.

Hotel owner Nick Mossop, for example, landlord of the Swan Hotel in Upton upon Severn, was told by the Environment Agency on the Wednesday before the storm that temporary flood barriers were on their way. The next day he was told the defences were now on their way from Kidderminster and would be in place by Friday morning. But by Friday afternoon, as the worst of the storm hit, the barriers had still not arrived. Ironically they were stuck on the motorway - in the floods that blocked the roads to the town.

Flood defences also failed to reach areas of Gloucester when the lorries transporting them became bogged down. It was the second time in a month that the Environment Agency had failed to put up the moveable steel flood barriers to protect the city.

It is little wonder, then, that as the water begins to settle, the initial shock felt by people like Mr Mossop has turned to anger. In the Swan Hotel, which he owns with two friends and which he refurbished earlier this year at a cost of £150,000, litter floats listlessly through the oak-beamed bar. Normally, the riverside pub would be bustling with customers, but four feet of stinking, sewage-filled water - at one stage 6ft deep - now floods it. He blames the EA's tardiness with the barriers.

"We have lost everything that made our hotel what it was," said Mr Mossop. "All the chairs, tables, fittings and kitchen equipment are ruined. There are a lot of angry people here in Upton upon Severn. They promised to have the temporary flood barriers up but they didn't and now they are telling us that they would not have held back the water anyway, but they didn't know that at the time.

"It could have bought us a day to start moving stuff like kitchen equipment out."

He is not alone in his anger over the slowness of the operation. Prof Ian Cluckie, chairman of the government-funded Flood Risk Management Research Consortium and a hydrology researcher at Bristol University, saw the warning issued by the Met Office and believes it gave ample warning of the weather to come.

The storm, unusually, dumped a lot of water downstream, at the bottom of the catchment area for the Severn and Avon rivers. It then moved upstream, raining all the time and causing more water to run into the affected areas, topping up the floods. The Environment Agency was caught out, he believes, as its plans were designed to cope with more conventional flooding.

"It should have been very clear what the nature of the storm was going to be,'' he says, "yet they seem to have been unable to adapt to an unusual situation. Normally you would have water coming downstream giving you a day or a couple of days' notice before it hits the larger towns and cities. But on this occasion it filled up the bottom of the river first and then topped it up from further upstream."

The problems have been exacerbated by the confusing patchwork of who is responsible for what. While rivers and the coastline are the responsibility of the Environment Agency, drainage is in the hands of local authorities and water on main roads is the remit of the Highways Agency. Private water companies are also responsible for sewer flooding. Thus, no single body is charged with preventing and managing flooding, even though drains, sewers and rivers all contribute to flood risks.

Although flood defences have been built up over the years, under-investment in the drainage systems and poor management of minor brooks and streams have created a weak spot. Residents of Tewkesbury and Evesham, two of the worst-hit areas, reported that street drains were heavily blocked with debris and litter. And rescue workers say horrendously-blocked culverts and conduits diverting streams under roads and bridges contributed to the devastation. In the village of Dunley, in Worcestershire, one stream under a bridge was so blocked with branches, leaf litter and mud that the water building up behind it tore away the bridge wall and the gable end of a house.

Ed Gallagher insists that he had warned the Government that more investment in flood prevention was needed. "During my time at the Environment Agency, I warned ministers that flooding was getting more and more extreme. We said that more investment was needed, not just on defences but on research and development."

The fact is that funding for flood defences across the country has changed little over the past five years. It rose slightly in 2005 and fell back sharply this year. According to the insurance companies the current £570 million spent needs to be increased to £750 million. Admittedly Gordon Brown has promised the figure will rise to £800 million - but not until 2011.

The vast shortfall is seen by many as symptomatic of how little thought the Government has given to flooding. And yet the information has been known and the warnings ignored. Two years ago a report published in the wake of a simulated flooding exercise revealed serious flaws in the country's responses and another, produced by the Chief Fire Officers Association, also in 2005, warned that the UK "simply does not currently have the capacity to respond to a major flood event". It criticised the confused command structure and called for the fire and rescue services to be given a lead role in such emergencies. But according to the report's author, Paul Hayden, chief fire officer for Hereford and Worcester Fire Service, few of its recommendations were acted upon.

"It would only require a £5 million one-off investment to establish the nationwide resources we need, but frustratingly floods have been largely overlooked," he says. His report also warned that the protection of water treatment works and electrical generators should be a priority.

The Government repeatedly warns Britons of the threat from climate change, and is determined to build three million new homes - with lax planning laws allowing them to be built on flood plains, leaving them uninsurable. It seems evident that the need for coherent, workable flood defences is essential.

Even then, it will all be a bit late for the residents of Gloucestershire who, this morning, are braced for more devastating floods after yet more heavy rainfall. Mark Williams and his family, from Newtown, near Tewkesbury, already face nine months out of their home and are trying to be sanguine about further trouble.

''I don't see how another flood can do any more damage than we have already suffered anyway,'' he says.