TWENTY65 research collaboration delivers SuDS recommendations to government

On 2^nd February 2017 Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management  (CIWEM) launched their SuDS Report “A Place for SuDS?” at the house of Lords.  Theme 4’s Pete Melville-Shreeve joined the panel discussion having spent the last few months supporting the development of the report. The work will be presented at the TWENTY65 annual conference in Manchester. The report was written in conjunction with a wide range of industrial parties. Ana Arahuetes (visiting researcher from University of Alicante) Pete and the wider Theme 4 team, David Butler, Virginia Stovin and Raziyeh Farmani were contracted by CIWEM to undertake the data analysis for the 500+ survey responses which underpin the report. Baroness Parminter opened the launch event and promised to take the recommendations of the report forwards and informed the authors that she has already coordinated a ministerial meeting to enable the work to be tabled in detail.

The report is freely available here (http://www.ciwem.org/suds/ ) and received national press coverage on the day of the launch https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/02/rush-to-build-new-homes-will-increase-flooding-experts-warn?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco

“We recognise the urgent need for 1m new homes but it is pointless to build in a way that creates flood risk for the future,” said Terry Fuller, chief executive of the CIWEM, one of the bodies that produced the report.

“Our analysis shows the main obstacles to high quality and widely implemented SuDS are political and institutional rather than technical or financial, so there is no reason why government should not support stronger policy,” he said.