What does autumn mean to you?
Drinking a Starbucks pumpkin spiced latte while sat on a sofa watching the outside world?
Country walks with the family kicking the red, gold and orange leaves in your new Hunter wellies?
The rugby season starting? Especially the world cup!
Or does it mean that you know that holiday season has come to an end and now you know you are going to be busy helping people complete the sale of their home?
Whatever it means to you, autumn means that the nights draw in, temperatures drop and the wet and windy weather increases as we transition from summer to winter.
To some of us this means that the risk of areas around our home flooding increases which more often than not brings devastating consequences to our homes and sometimes our lives.
Let us explain why.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Britain’s population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade with more than 64 million people now living here.
The population has grown by five million since 2001, the same amount it gained in the previous 37 years. That’s a rate of 0.7% a year, just over twice the EU average of 0.34%
Yet immigration accounts for five times as much of the growth since the millennium as in the period before, ONS added.
Alp Mehmet, Vice-Chairman of the campaign group Migration Watch UK, said: “Population growth on this scale is clearly unsustainable and raises serious questions about the ability of public services and infrastructure to cope with such a rapidly growing population.
“The Government will have to build schools, GP surgeries, hospitals and homes as well as expand an already creaking infrastructure in order to cope with this demand.” (1).
We only have to read the daily newspapers which reveal that not only is there a national housing shortage but also our population will continue to grow as we aid refugees over the next five years. Currently the UK needs to build 240,000 houses a year to meet demand.
The Government also have plans to improve and modernise transportation; with talks of building a third runway at Heathrow and extend the HS2 railway lines.
However all the building and expanding of cities causes flooding. When property is built on flood plains, trees are cut down, town planners change the course of rivers and the roads are tarmacked it leaves nowhere for the water to go. After a heavy downpour of seasonal rain, the water collects as the urban drainage system cannot cope and so we are left with devastating pluvial flooding.
Professor Nigel Arnell, from Reading University’s Department of Meteorology and Robert Muir-Wood, a London-based consultant who advises the OECD and UN are just two of the nineteen climate change scientists who have contributed to UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Their paper says: ‘The scientific community needs to emphasize that the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.’
Adding that: ‘It is clear that current trends in human activity on the landscape continue to cause an increase in flood damages’ (2).
As Britain’s population grows, our landscape gets densely built upon and our climate changes it is apparent that our risk of flooding has greatly increased.
Conveyancing Data Services has an online ordering platform which actually checks the post code entered by its clients to recommend which other searches they should be considering, whether it be HS2, Cornwall tin and clay mining or the more seasonal searches such as flood.
Can you really afford not to use an intelligent system such as ours?
For a demonstration on our system please email Erica at ewillmott@conveyancingdata.com.
References
This article was submitted to be published by Conveyancing Data Services as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
