Work starts on Tenbury Wells flood wall 18 years after town was first promised one

Diggers moved on to the riverbank at Tenbury Wells on Monday to begin a £24m flood defence scheme that the Worcestershire market town was first promised in 2008 and has been fighting for ever since.

The Environment Agency project will build 1.2km of walls and embankments along the River Teme and its tributary the Kyre brook, raise the bank behind the town’s swimming pool and install two pumping stations to stop water backing up through the drains. It is designed to protect 460 properties against a flood with a 1% chance of occurring in any year, with an allowance for climate change.

Tenbury has flooded nine times since 2007, most severely in February 2020 when Storm Dennis sent the Teme through 130 homes and shops on Teme Street and left the town’s only bank, pharmacy and library closed for months. An earlier version of the scheme was cancelled in 2010 after its cost rose above what the agency’s funding rules would allow, and a second was shelved in 2021 when a landowner withdrew consent.

“I have been to four public meetings in this hall where someone from the agency stood up and said it would happen, and I have sat through three floods since,” said Margaret Bissell, 74, who has run a haberdashery on Teme Street for 41 years and estimates she has lost £90,000 of stock. “I will believe it when the wall is higher than my knees.”

The money comes from the agency’s six-year capital programme, with £6.2m from Worcestershire county council and a £1.5m contribution from the Severn Trent water company, which operates the sewage pumping station that is one of the first assets to flood. Construction is expected to take until spring 2029.

“Tenbury is the textbook case of a town that fell between the cracks of a funding formula designed for big cities,” said Gavin Thornley, the agency’s area flood risk manager for the West Midlands. “The partnership funding rules changed in 2023 to weight places with repeat flooding more heavily, and that is what unlocked this.”

The scheme has not satisfied everyone. Farmers upstream at Eastham and Lindridge say the walls will push water on to their land, and the Teme Valley fishing association has objected to the loss of a gravel bank used by spawning grayling. The agency has agreed to create a replacement spawning bed and to buy flood storage easements on 38 hectares of farmland.

Across England, about 1,300 flood schemes are in the current capital programme, which the agency has said is running £1.1bn short of what is needed to meet its 2027 target of protecting 200,000 additional homes. The agency acknowledged in its annual report in July that 96 schemes had been delayed by more than two years.