Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a great favourite of the Insight Team at Defaqto, with his idyllic cottage lifestyle, his love of great food, and his shop in Axminster being particularly appealing.  Living near to a river sounds like absolute Heaven.

But what about all those other people whose addresses are ‘River Cottage’, or ‘Millstream House’ and the like?  I’m talking about those people who live close to rivers. The summer floods have brought home how vulnerable some homes are to potential climate change, and how ill prepared out infrastructure is to cope with unseasonal rainfall.  Many of those people whose houses were flooded this year are still not back in their homes for Christmas, and will be lucky to get back for Easter. 

While people worry about the rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice-caps, the floods of the summer were caused simply by a bit too much rain in some areas.  The flood drainage systems (such as there are) were simply overwhelmed in places like Sheffield.  Clearly we have problems ahead if we get more freak weather like this, and the expectation is that we will.

As a nation we have some big problems coming up.  Our population is set to boom over the next 40 years, with immigration, a steady birth rate and increasing longevity all contributing.  And these people will need somewhere to live, which is why the Government is intent on building 3 million new homes in 20 years (although if you look at the population estimates this number might be too low!).

Unfortunately many of these new houses will be in areas which are currently uninhabited - fields which have been left empty for thousands of years - and for a very good reason!  They FLOOD!  We appear to be giving permission for more and more estates to be built in areas which are really unsuitable, but population pressures drive us to it.

We need to accept that for some - the River Cottage crowd - flooding is going to become a regular occurrence, with 1-in-a-100 year events now becoming 1-in-30 year events, or even more frequent than that.  And insurers are NOT going to carry the can indefinitely.  A serious flood claim could cost £30,000 or more.  If this were to happen just once in 30 years the annual insurance premium would need to be £1,000 just to cover the flood risk, let alone all the other claims, and insurers still need some profit.  There is a real risk that riverside properties will eventually become uninsurable - either because the insurers won’t give cover, or because the customers simply cannot afford it.

At the very least we need to think about where and how we build new houses.  If we are going to insist on building homes in flood plains we need a completely new set of building regulations.  I think that every new home which is likely to be even remotely at risk of flooding should have the following features as standard:

• NO wooden stud partition walls on the ground floor, all downstairs walls should be solid brick or breezeblock
• All downstairs walls should NOT be plasterboarded - they must be skimmed with concrete
• All downstairs plug sockets should be set at LEAST 3ft above floor level
• All downstairs floors should be solid concrete
• In really high risk areas there should be NO habitable rooms on the ground floor, just garages and storage.

And those homes which have already been flooded should be repaired to the same standard. 

These are just some of the things which will help in flooded areas.  They won’t stop your home flooding, but at least you can just throw away all your ruined furniture, hose down the inside of the house, let it dry out, then move straight back in again.

In the meantime I personally would escape from houses with names like River Cottage - I suggest people look for houses in streets like Clifftop Drive or Hilltop Lane (but inland and granite cliffs only!).