In February 2015, the DCLG Local Digital Programme hosted a ‘flood resilience discovery day’, which explored how local and national organisations involved in flood mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, could make better use of digital tools to work better together and increase UK flood resilience. The day brought together over 90 representatives from local authorities, fire services, Defra, Environment Agency, DCLG flood policy teams, the Cabinet Office Resilience Direct team, and the voluntary and third sectors. Together, we  identified areas where central and local government could collaborate on designing digital solutions to solve problems, deliver savings and improve services both locally and nationally.

In addition, following the 2013-14 winter floods, Defra, DCLG and the EA have together been considering how digital tools could improve the information available to decision-makers in an emergency.

Our conclusion was that before we got working on particular digital tools and products to meet some of the needs identified, we needed to establish as a group to ensure projects taking forward digital tools were co-ordinated across all parts of Government with a role in flood management or responding to flood events and that they made used of best practice and tools developed elsewhere across Government.

Four themes

Four themes have been identified as being the key areas that the group should consider. These themes, set out below will develop individual work streams, identifying projects were cross-government input will help aid delivery.

• Understand risk and prevention: Improving risk assessment; making best use of data in flood risk planning (land use planning, flood risk management planning, live updates for strategic development, crowdsourcing); building and improving flood defences; works to reduce incidence of flood events; land drainage activity.
• Preparedness: warning and informing public; warning and informing partners; digital support for community resilience e.g. community flood plans.
• Response: real-time flow of data in an incident; improving flood reporting data.
• Recovery: moving from recovery into resilience; post-incident investigations.

Those involved in the steering group and underlying themes include central government Departments and their agencies and local government leads.

Membership of the steering group

Names are to be confirmed but to include:

• Defra – floods
• Defra – network corporate services
• EA (national flood resilience / technology innovation)
• DCLG – resilience and emergencies
• DCLG – local digital programme (tbc)
• Cabinet Office – Civil Contingencies Secretariat
• Local Authority representative(s) (tbc)
• National Flood Forum  (tbc)
• SEPA / NRW (tbc)

See the Trello board for this project. It will be updated as each theme identifies deliverables.

(What is Trello? Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.)