Top council boss speaks out on latest extreme flooding at notorious Northampton holiday park

Significant flooding hit Northamptonshire overnight, and a multi-agency response has been underway since to support people affected by Storm Bert, with a major incident being declared this afternoon.

Over at Billing Aquadrome, hundreds of residents were evacuated off the site after it was deemed to be a ‘danger to life.’

Speaking with Chronicle and Echo today, Ms Earnshaw said: “It’s obviously a huge worry for the residents. What I would say is every time something like this happens, we always do a bit of a lessons learned about what went well and what didn’t go well, etc. And this time, the evacuation of people has been much smoother. The rest centres were set up very, very quickly, we identified very quickly who was vulnerable and who wasn’t, and made sure people got to relatives and things like that. So while it is very distressing for people, the key is, we manage it as effectively as possible so it doesn’t cause even more upset.

“Our thoughts are with those affected. It’s really devastating and really difficult. What I can say is, across the county, we’re doing lots of work to make sure gullies are cleaned and drains are unblocked. We’ve got 80 people out working on that at the moment, and about 40 other people doing other things like getting rid of trees. We’re doing everything we can, and we’re doing it in priority order to make sure people are safe ahead of whatever happens with the weather later this week.”

Billing Aquadrome, a floodplain, flooded in September, which saw hundreds of residents evacuated off the park. It also flooded at the start of the year and again in February.

When asked what, if any, improvements had been made since then, Ms Earnshaw said: “There’s always a loop of what lessons were learned. We’ve been working with the Environment Agency on that. We’ll follow up on this about what’s needed but, we have to be honest, Billing Aquadrome is built on a floodplain, and it’s grown a lot. It was built in the 1960s, and it’s got a lot bigger. Of course, then, we didn’t have the same planning infrastructure and rules we have now that stop places being built that would be flooded like that. So, we’re kind of dealing with a historic issue. But we’ve got to work with the Environment Agency to say this is what’s going to happen regularly, and this is what the weather’s going to be like, and how do we mitigate that? That takes some longer-term planning."

When asked to expand on her point about planning permission, specifically if Billing Aquadrome would be given it today, Ms Earnshaw said: “I think in this day and age, what you have is lots and lots of conditions because it’s a known site. You’d have to put in place a lot of mitigations to make sure you took water away from the site, and so it would be a very different environment today. If you look at modern house building, you’ll see quite a lot of infrastructure around run-offs and taking water away from those sites. So I think it would be a very expensive thing to address. It is what it is now, but I think in this day and age, if anything else was happening, it wouldn’t be allowed to be in there without the mitigations built in ready.”

West Northants Council has spent nearly £40k on emergency accommodation for those who have been evacuated off Billing Aquadrome with nowhere else to go so far this year.

Asked about people potentially living on-site with no residential address to go to, Ms Earnshaw said: “It’s a difficult one. We’ve got to be sensible and sensitive to that balance because if there’s no other accommodation available to them… if we sort of step in and say you can’t live here, then we’re going to have to house them in another way. One way or another, we’re going to have a duty to house them. So we need to work with them, and we need to work with the owners to make sure we’ve got better solutions to that. It’s not ideal because it just creates a bigger problem if you have to evacuate.”

Asked about WNC’s relationship with the Billing Aquadrome owners, Ms Earnshaw said: “The new owners have been much better. We’re much better prepared. We’re very clear about which homes have vulnerable people in them; that’s really important because previously it was exceptionally difficult to find who we needed to worry about and what priority to do it in. We were, in effect, having to doorknock all through [before]. They’re much better organised than that [now]. We’ve agreed a whole set of actions around early warnings and evacuations. As I said, we have the vulnerable register. We’re confident they’re helping and working with us. We do still have some issues like informal lets on the site, vans and stuff that shouldn’t be occupied that shouldn’t. We’ll work with them around securing the site and making sure that only people that should be there are there.”

As we move further into winter, Ms Earnshaw was asked what’s in place in the likely event this will happen again. She said: “Our response is always the same in the sense that we have teams set up, mechanisms working with our blue light partners, and other agencies where, the first time we get a warning, we kick into action. We were already in planning over the weekend ready, so we had evacuation centres set up very early this morning so that we’d be ready to go quite quickly. We’ll continue to do what we need to do until we have some longer-term solutions in place. I’d encourage anyone to use our Fix My Street app.”