The cumbria situation

[No1newts]

I havent got all the exact figures of amounts to hand as I heard this on the radio and dont particularly have the time to go and research everything, so please bear with me and if need be read a little further yourself.

Essentially after everything that has happened in Cumbria recently with floods estimated repair bills of infrastructure, mainly bridges and roads comes in at around £200-300 million. This is not taking into account repair bills for anything else such as public services like schools etc, any emergency relief fund which may be needed for people who have lost everything so you are talking another couple of hundred million there. All of this is essential monies, nothing to just help the people who are suffering a very, very hard time is taken into account.

So one of our own counties is in such a horrible state, with our own people suffering with an estimated repair bill of between £300-500 million. What is our governments response?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091121/tuk-pm-s-1m-pledge-to-help-flood-hit-cum-45dbed5_1.html

£1 million quid it is ******* insulting. It is an absoloute disgrace and shows ince again that the moron in charge does not have a clue. How can he justify pledging so little especially when a few days later he goes and pledges £6 billion to tackle climate change?? Have a word with yourself! At the same time we are giving £7 billion away every year to overseas aid whilst our own people are out of their homes with their livelihoods destroyed.

£13 billion of our tax money, a portion of which will be paid by those who have been effected by those floods, is being given away whilst the government insults its own people by pledging a pittance on repairs! Surely they can take the money out of these wasteful overseas giveaways to help its own citizens?

I find the whole situation quite simply astounding and I am surprised that more people have not objected to the lack of care the goverment has shown to its own people. Your own views?

 

[Sankari]

Your own views?

(a) Where is the figure of £200-300 million coming from?

(b) The cost of repairs for damage to property in any part of this country is not the sole responsibility of government, and very often not the responsibility of government at all.

(c) If you make the government pay for all the repairs, the insurance companies will be very happy but their policyholders will not. I suspect a lot of insurance companies will be paying out some pretty big claims in Cumbria very soon. Why would you want the government to let them off the hook by paying the bill for everything?

 

[[TW]Fox]

Why do they need loads of money?

We pay for insurance in this country, there is limited need for public funds?

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

The best solution to this is to build more houses in floor plains / flood prone areas. At least that's government thinking.

 

[Dave M]

Your own views?

You don't know what your talking about - but then brown's 1M pledge was the stupidest knee jerk sound bite I've seen for some time so your no worse than the most powerful man in the country.

 

[No1newts]

http://www.cumberland-news.co.uk/ne...r_cumbria_flood_devastation?referrerPath=news

I heard it on the radio too where someone from cumbrian council estimated repair bill on bridges alone to be £200-300 million.

 

[Dave M]

Why do they need loads of money?

We pay for insurance in this country, there is limited need for public funds?

There are a lot of roads that are already in a poor state, the force of water literally ripped up the tarmac, after a good freeze / thaw this winter those roads will be little more than rubble strewn tracks.

That's the highways agency or local council's responsibility and both should have contingency funds for these events but I'm sure the government would give favourable consideration to requests for emergency funding in the circumstances.

 

[Naffa]

Please do correct me if I'm missing something, but I assumed that the £1million was not going to be covering repairs, structural damage, insurance and what not. I assumed that it was a relief fund for the people involved and other funds would be taking care of the rest as £1million would quite obviously not be anyway near enough money to make a dent in the repair costs.

 

[big_white_dog84]

The cost of rebuilding the bridges and other infrastructure might be £200-£300m, but that's not really the actual cost.
A significant amount of this can be put down to 'Deferment of Time for Renewal' of the assets (to use a phrase from my industry). What this means is that if a bridge expected to last 150 years is destroyed after 100, then although it might cost £50million to rebuild, that sum of money was going to be due in 50 years anyway. Really you're just bringing forward capital investment, and can apportion the money accordingly.

Obviously this is not an ideal situation, and still means there is some additional expenditure compared to the council's plan - but I don't think their accountants will be calling it a £50 million additional spend.

 

[JBuk]

snip

Browns pledge is a joke

(c) If you make the government pay for all the repairs, the insurance companies will be very happy but their policyholders will not. I suspect a lot of insurance companies will be paying out some pretty big claims in Cumbria very soon. Why would you want the government to let them off the hook by paying the bill for everything?

From what i've heard quite a lot of people are not insured for the type of damage that has occurred ,without going into thew whole ocuk typical "it's their own fault then" arguments, how will these people and the communities rebuild?

 

[Sankari]

From what i've heard quite a lot of people are not insured for the type of damage that has occurred ,without going into thew whole ocuk typical "it's their own fault then" arguments, how will these people and the communities rebuild?

How many is "quite a lot"?

What you've heard might not be reliable, so I'd advise against assumptions at this stage. I'd also be staggered if there were many people completely uninsured for this type of damage. After all, they do live in Cumbria. They know what to expect when catastrophic weather strikes, and most insurance policies will provide some form of flood/fire cover.

But even if we assume that "quite a lot" of people aren't insured for this type of damage, how does this automatically make the government responsible for their reconstruction costs? I don't see the logic there. At the very most, the local government could take some responsibility (particularly if their infrastructure was poorly maintained, or their storm preparations were lacking).

Frankly, I doubt that the number of people without insurance is so great as to render the community incapable of recovery without a £200+ million handout.

 

[rypt]

One could argue that it is the local and national governments job to maintain the rivers and prevent them breaking bank ... meaning that they are responsible for the flooding due to failure to have adequate flood defences in place.

 

[Strife212]

£1 million is literally a pittance though, why even come up with this.

 

[Naff8000]

Yeah stupid Brown, why are you not also an insurance company which I don't pay for. If Brown doesn't come shine the shoes of those affected it obviously means he's the worst PM ever.
Also the 6 billion is to help prevent things like this and far far worse things from happening in the future. It would be nice if the gulf stream shut down wouldn't it.

 

[Scania]

Brown is a joke

Fixed.

 

[JBuk]

How many is "quite a lot"?

What you've heard might not be reliable, so I'd advise against assumptions at this stage. I'd also be staggered if there were many people completely uninsured for this type of damage. After all, they do live in Cumbria. They know what to expect when catastrophic weather strikes, and most insurance policies will provide some form of flood/fire cover.

But even if we assume that "quite a lot" of people aren't insured for this type of damage, how does this automatically make the government responsible for their reconstruction costs? I don't see the logic there. At the very most, the local government could take some responsibility (particularly if their infrastructure was poorly maintained, or their storm preparations were lacking).

Frankly, I doubt that the number of people without insurance is so great as to render the community incapable of recovery without a £200+ million handout.

I don't know how many quite a lot is, but it's enough to have been mentioned on the news, you advise me against assumption yet you assume Cumbrians will be insured because "they know what they can expect" which is not correct, there's rarely any floods of this scale and people have been affected that would never expect to.
Yes a lot of people will have insurance but not all will have the correct insurance which was the case in Carlisle a couple of years ago, and some of those can not get flood insurance now so I would expect anyone who is in a hot spot would be in the same situation.

I didn't say the Government were responsible for covering the costs, not sure where I even implied it although now you mention it, it's my opinion that they should at least help out, especially with the rebuilding of the infastructure as I'm not sure local government alone could not pay for some of the substantial bridges and roads that have been wiped out or damaged beyond repair.

 

[JBuk]

One could argue that it is the local and national governments job to maintain the rivers and prevent them breaking bank ... meaning that they are responsible for the flooding due to failure to have adequate flood defences in place.

Sadly it's not possible to prevent it in some places and a flood on such a huge scale wasn't expected

 

[rypt]

Sadly it's not possible to prevent it in some places and a flood on such a huge scale wasn't expected

We hear that every time there is flooding "we weren't expect it to be this big" ... and yet they preach MMGW and say that this will cause worse, and worse floods.

 

[JBuk]

We hear that every time there is flooding "we weren't expect it to be this big" ... and yet they preach MMGW and say that this will cause worse, and worse floods.

What's MMGW?

There is flooding in some places now and again which have been dealt with but last weeks flooding was due to record rainfalls so yeah, it wasn't expected. Some of the bridges have stood for decades if not centuries without a problem only to be destroyed last week, so such an amount of water is unheard of.

 

[rypt]

man made global warming