How to develop a flood plan – lessons from NCHA

At Nottingham Community Housing Association, we have been improving our understanding of flooding through analysing our flood risk and developing a flood plan. This Flood Action Week we wanted to share a little bit of the process.

Establishing flood risk

Our first step in building flood readiness was to understand our level of risk. To do this, we used a free Geographic Information System (GIS) software called QGIS, but you can opt for paid GIS systems managed either in-house or by a provider.

We then geocoded our property addresses (i.e. we found the eastings/northings for the property addresses). There are external companies that can complete this or a GIS provider may offer this service.

We then mapped all our NCHA properties and compared them to the Environment Agency’s National Flood Risk Assessment (NaFRA) datasets for both surface water and river/sea flooding. This allowed us to see which of our homes were in high, medium or low risk flood areas.

Creating a flood plan

Once we knew our level of risk, we were able to create a flood plan to outline colleagues’ roles and responsibilities, and to establish the proactive and reactive actions we will take before, during and after a flood.

Before a flood: proactively managing flood risk and vulnerability

For this section of our plan, we looked at the proactive steps we would take to reduce vulnerability of our customers, homes and business, prior to any flooding. Examples of actions we have included are listed below.
Improving business:

• Engaging with our insurers.
• Refining our record-keeping process.
• Staff training.
• Considering how budgets would be managed if flooding occurred.

Improving homes:

• Working with local stakeholders like the Lead Local Flood Authority.
• Considering property-level flood resilience.

Reducing customer vulnerability:

• Providing guidance on what to do before, during and after a flood.
• Developing a welfare fund if flooding were to occur.
• Developing an annual communication plan for high-risk customers.

During a flood: coordinating a response

How a housing association is able to respond to floods is likely to be very different dependent on flood risk levels, property numbers, geographical spread etc.

For NCHA, we have focused on procedures, actions and processes that cover the following:

• How to assess the ‘live’ flood risk to customers and homes (NCHA is using the Environment Agency’s flood warning system).
• How to raise awareness of the risk to the business.
• How to react to the flooding:
  • E.g. How we will raise awareness of flooding to customers.
  • Whether and how we will send out any reactive support e.g. flood barriers, sandbags, etc.
  • How we will ensure staff resources (on site or in the office) are in place, including any senior management.
  • How we will support customers if they need to leave their properties.

After a flood: recovery and lessons learned

Our plan also focuses on what should happen if flooding does occur. We included processes on:

• How we will repair our properties (and potentially include flood remediation measures).
• How we may allocate budget for decant costs and property repairs.
• What support we can offer to customers to support them and their mental health.
• And how we will develop records and lessons learned following a flood.