Solutions are needed to ensure valuable land for development is not lost by flood and coastal erosion risk
CLA Cymru responds to the Welsh Government’s revised policy on Development, Flooding and Coastal Erosion and its Flood Map for Planning calling for action to mitigate the risks to enable sound development to take place
The Welsh Government has announced a new planning policy requirement that developers must consider potential future flood or coastal erosion due to global warming. CLA Cymru Director, Nigel Hollett says, “We welcome the Welsh Government’s approach to managing the impacts of climate change. Government must work together with landowners and developers to ensure sound development proposals are not excluded, and create solutions to enable suitable land to be developed to meet the government’s housing targets.”
The revised Welsh Government’s Technical Advice Note (TAN) 15: Development, flooding and coastal erosion introduces changes to the way flood and coastal erosion risks are assessed in the planning process. The TAN formally comes into action on 1 December. Designed to be used alongside the policy to identify risk areas and potential risk areas, a new Flood Map for Planning has been made available by Natural Resources Wales (NRW). It builds in future risks associated with climate change, thus ensuring these will be taken into account in decision making.
Nigel adds, “In recent years we’ve seen how the area of Welsh land threatened in this way has increased to a level of 11.3 per cent. It will be important for landowners and developers to be aware of the policy and, looking forward, in order to facilitate suitable land being released for development, we need to work together to find new solutions to tackle the problem.”
TAN 15 can be viewed here.
The background consultation report, which led to TAN 15, is available here.
The Flood Map for Planning is available here.