Sir James Bevan laid out his thoughts on the future of flood protection during his keynote speech on the opening day of the Flood & Coast 2018 conference.

‘A few weeks ago I visited the village of Sea Palling on the Norfolk coast. It was my first time there, and yet when we turned the corner and I saw an old row of houses just behind the huge sand dunes that lead to the beach, I had a moment of powerful déjà vu. I had seen this place before. And then I remembered where: in a documentary about the great floods of 1953, when an East Coast storm surge swept down the North Sea and killed over 300 people in Britain. In Sea Palling seven members of the same family died. The documentary I had seen contained a deeply moving moment in which one man, only a boy in 1953, told of the loss of his family in that row of houses at Sea Palling on that terrible day.

So let us never get too romantic about the sea or our rivers: beautiful they are, and we must cherish and protect them, but when they rise up, they flood. And floods kill. The story so far: fifty years of astonishing successes. We have come a long way since that dreadful night back in 1953. Those floods were a wakeup call for the country.

In 1953 our flood defences were still primitive and incomplete. The great storm led directly to the construction of the Thames Barrier which today keeps London safe round the clock, and to the building of many other permanent flood defences up and down the country with a much higher standard of protection than ever before. Almost every day in this country, when rivers and tides rise, rain falls and storms blow, thousands of people sleep safely, unaware that they are being protected from flooding by those defences.

In 1953, most people died because there was no system to warn them of the approaching storm surge. Today there is such a system: together with the Met Office, the Environment Agency runs a cutting-edge flood forecasting service that produces a daily forecast of flood risk for the coming five days for ourselves, the emergency services and local authorities. And when flood does threaten, from rivers or the sea, we warn people in the communities concerned, giving them vital hours in which to act. Click here to read the speech