QLocal is delighted to post this latest chapter in the ongoing saga of 'who knows what' at both County and Borough level re flooding in the village...

From its secretary, Gavin Rattray: 'I would like to respond to West Lancashire Borough Council's statement on P2 of the Champion 25/4/18 re. “Residents group accuse councils of excluding them from meetings about flooding issues”.

As outlined in the article, Burscough Flooding Group's concerned that WLBC and Lancashire County Council (LCC) are denying the group access to flooding meetings to resolve flooding issues in Burscough and have asked that the two councils confirm that BFG will not be excluded from meetings of flood groups with flood management agencies.

WLBC claimed it is unaware of any communication, yet BFG wrote to the Leader of WLBC on the 17th November 2017 and again on 3rd January 2018 and each time it was copied to Councillor John Hodson and Councillor Gary Dowling, see an extracted part of the letter following.

Dear Councillor Moran,
Would the council consider representation from Burscough Flooding Group (BFG) on a way to improve the downstream drainage from the current Yew Tree Farm (YTF) application (on Higgins Lane) that shouldn’t drag the building process out and wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive?
This is an opportunity for your administration to improve on its record for at least one aspect of flooding for the residents of Furnival Drive, Truscott Road and the entire downstream area of the surface water sewer and watercourse. Some of the people who live in these areas are likely to be caused severe financial hardship by flooding.
Yours sincerely
Gavin Rattray – Secretary Burscough Flooding Group

Both letters, seeking common ground and meetings between BFG and WLBC to resolve one of the long term flooding problems in Burscough, were unanswered by WLBC.

Furthermore LCC state that they are “happy to work with flood action groups that have been established to represent communities in line with national guidance with appropriate governance arrangements in place” but omit to mention that it doesn’t meet or communicate with BFG.

BFG can only assume that this is since our working relationship broke down when LCC refused to accept flooding data collected by residents for their S19 flooding report following the serious widespread flooding that took place in Burscough on the 26/12/2015. LCC deliberately excluded all of the flooding evidence provided by BFG for their S19 government report, this meant that many floods, which were the duty of LCC to record and investigate, weren’t.

The data highlighted that LCC was failing to act properly as a Local Lead Flood Authority and, shockingly, rather than try to rectify this situation, LCC binned the flooding evidence collected by Burscough’s residents. Much later they then made a statement to Burscough Parish Council (who formed BFG) similar to that above but offered no constructive advice on how BFG were to achieve this, given that both parties consider that BFG is a properly constituted flooding group operating inside national guidelines.

I now ask that they publish the acceptable requirements for the constitution of a flood group, because this issue is being used as a reason for the exclusion of BFG alone of all the Lancashire Flooding Groups and at the moment it very much looks like LCC’s purpose, through repeatedly issuing this statement with no clarification, is to exclude residents who criticise them from their flooding meetings.