Winter Floods along the River Ribble - reasons to protect floodplain and riverside green belt

This winter, we have again seen widespread flooding alongside the River Ribble, including the extensive fields and woodlands from Penwortham and Preston to Walton le Dale. 

This area was originally proposed for a River Barrage and 4,000 new homes, plus a business park, in 2005, a proposal successfully sunk by local opposition - hopefully never to resurface. High rainfall leads to regular flooding in the area, which highlights the need to ensure green land (whether fields, woodlands, or wetlands, or ideally a combination of all three as we have here) is always included alongside future building across the country, to soak up the rain to help manage flood risk, and also be allowed to safely flood during periods of extreme weather. 

Recognition of this has also led to further wetland creation and tree-planting in the area, currently nearing completion, alongside new, higher flood defences for local communities, now mostly completed in the Broadgate and Penwortham section (with the remainder of Broadgate then Frenchwood the next stages). 

We need to ensure balance between housing and green land, and future-proof our communities and our natural ecosystems against increasingly extreme weather events, and help mitigate against the pressures ourselves and our wildlife and ecosystems are already under, pressures which are only predicted to increase as climate change worsens.