Given the welter of reports and studies during the past 12 months, no chief constable, fire officer, council leader, water company chief executive, emergency planner or Environment Agency engineer could claim not to be better prepared for flooding in future.
As well as a raft of national reviews, local councils have studied the events of last summer in detail - and their own response to them.
The city of Hull, badly affected last June by failure of its urban drainage system to cope with excess run off, offers a snapshot of what has happened on the ground. Carl Minns, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council says: "Our initial focus was residents' safety, relieving hardship, plus a massive clean-up operation. Then we moved swiftly to looking at why Hull had been so badly affected, and immediately commissioned an independent review. The recommendations from the report are being implemented to improve our flood resilience."
The city council has put in place a training programme for all its staff with a specified emergency role; business continuity plans were reworked; the out-of-hours capacity of its call centre increased and its incident room revamped. Plans for opening rest centres were reviewed; a sub-regional group looked at the involvement of the voluntary sector and a "warning and informing" campaign for residents was launched, to encourage better preparation for emergencies.
The council swapped data with the Environment Agency and neighbouring East Riding council on their respective ownership and management regimes for watercourses, and a multi-agency flood forum was established. The city now has a policy on sandbags as part of a revised flood and severe weather response plan and a strategic flood risk assessment made of all forms of flooding to the city.
In Gloucestershire, 4,000 people and over 500 businesses were flooded, while power, drinking water, sanitation and public transport was lost or heavily disrupted. The council's overview and scrutiny committee issued recommendations including relocating the emergency management centre, measures to improve communication between the county and district councils, more training for councillors and the development of a database of vulnerable people in the area.
Doncaster council felt it had a story to share after the River Don threatened the area around Thorpe Marsh power station and this summer convened a special conference to explore the lessons, which some 200 people attended. Its mayor, Martin Wiener, says because of the "fantastic way all out staff and partner organisations responded, I pressed for a major event to take stock."
Most organisations involved in flood rescue and recovery have emphasised what they have learned from last year. A voluntary mountain rescue team, based at Woodhead in the Peak District, helped rescue efforts in Sheffield and Rotherham. Its leader, Mike France, said the incident "had done a lot for our learning as an organisation, as it wasn't our usual run-of-the-mill job. We have since done some new risk assessments and training and, within the region, we now have a specialist water team who can give advice".
Equipment has been an issue. Andy Mancey, of the Royal Berkshire fire and rescue service water safety working group, says: "We have been looking at how best to deal with flooding in Berkshire in the future. This includes, for example, issues such as appropriate personal protective equipment for fire crews working in flood water, movement of equipment and resources and how we work with our neighbouring fire and rescue services and other partner agencies."
The past year has tested the potential of council scrutiny committees. A number reviewed the floods and made recommendations - the proof of the pudding is whether they are now acted upon. The North East Lincolnshire council's scrutiny committee, for example, proposed that it should use its existing permissive powers to do drainage work where there is an urgent need - and charge the drains' owners accordingly. Its community care directorate has compiled a council-wide list of vulnerable people - a proposition it recognised would offend some people's sense of privacy but was necessary: in an emergency, the council had to make sure it reached people in need.
It is still unclear who bears the principal financial responsibility in the aftermath of floods and other emergencies. The Audit Commission reported last December, querying the ad hoc nature of the government's grants to local authorities. Flood grants schemes each had an internal logic, it said, "but there is no consistency between the approaches adopted". Some authorities where the cost of flooding was low received financial assistance, while others suffered losses, which they have had to bear themselves.
Little seems to have been done about the Audit Commission's finding that councils did not fully understand their insurance cover, especially for flooding. A separate study in South Yorkshire confirmed wide differences across the region in the coverage of flooded schools - some were fully insured, others not.
Sir Ken Knight, the government's chief fire and rescue adviser, read what happened during the floods as endorsement of the controversial plan to relocate local command centres to regional hubs. In Gloucestershire, where the police run a joint call centre with the ambulance and fire and rescue services, the pending decision to move fire command to Taunton in Somerset is disputed. Tim Brain, the chief constable of Gloucestershire, says co-location helped enormously during the floods.
