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the need to support development and employ- ment opportunities, Councils were often keen to help where they shouldn’t be. Instead they should be putting trees on that land to combat flooding and as a public amenity.’ Although building on floodplains has been


banned in Scotland since 1995, with the excep- tion of 200 homes in Moray (England, on the other hand, has allowed over 200,000 houses to be built on floodplains since 1995, a quarter of them in Somerset), there are still resid- ual issues. Some houses built on floodplains before 1995, says Spray, are now increasingly so at-risk that it would ultimately be cheaper to abandon them and house their occupants outwith the floodplain. When he said as much to a parliamentary committee at Holyrood, the next person on the stump was then environ- ment minister, SNP MSP Mike Russell, ‘whose


first point was that “there is no way that we will abandon any community”.’ Compulsion is not a workable approach in


any sphere of the flooding debate, say both Spray and Comins. Much as government ministers would always baulk at forcing householders to move, nor would they consider forcing farmers to participate, especially where they believe flood management conflicts with their finan- cial necessity to maximise production. ‘However, what the work of the Tweed Forum


has shown is that it is possible to weave flood management measures into the working land- scape with no loss of income,’ says Comins. ‘We have, for instance, worked with farmers and land- owners to restore natural features on their land that will help attenuate floods, whilst complementing their farming system. In many cases, it can actu- ally increase production and business resilience.


Above: Tree planting on farmland at Crookston in the Borders. Left: River breach at Kirknewton.


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