Surface water management planning: guidance (2018)

8 Develop preferred option, confirm funding

Develop preferred option
Once the preferred option is chosen it will probably need to be developed and assessed in more detail. The level of detail required will depend on the flood risk and scale of the action (e.g. enough detail should be provided to have high confidence in the effectiveness of the action, and to inform and have high confidence in funding decisions).

Timings for confirming funding and assigning responsibilities for implementation, and for further development and design of the preferred option, are likely to vary (e.g. depending on the scale of option, source of funding and so on).

Good design is essential to ensure that surface water management infrastructure is able to realise multiple benefits, including integrating with and enhancing the urban landscape. It is therefore important that multidisciplinary teams include landscape architects, as well as flood management and drainage engineers.

The outcome of this stage should be an agreed set of feasible and sustainable actions to manage the risk of surface water flooding in an area.

Confirm funding and implementation
SWMPs are likely to identify a range of different actions. Where they include actions for different authorities they should be used to co-ordinate funding and implementation. An agreed action plan that clearly sets out the actions, those responsible for them, the funding mechanism, the implementation dates and key information on actions (particularly structural actions) should be confirmed. This will provide information on the finalised objectives with confirmed dates for achievement making them SMART, as well as aid communication with the various stakeholders, e.g. the public, responsible authorities, information for the LFRMP and the FRM Strategy (see Figure 8.1 and Table 8.1). The Environment Agency programme of flood and coastal erosion risk management schemes provides an example of information that could be recorded https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/programme-of-flood-and-coastal-erosion-risk-management-schemes.

If existing funding and delivery mechanisms are not capable of supporting the most sustainable actions, then Local Plan District Partnership Groups should be informed.

SWMPs may include priority actions that are implemented over the short term, for which more detail is likely to be available. They may also include longer term, aspirational actions for which there is less certainty or information available. Nevertheless, all information that is available should be shared.

Sources of funding will vary depending on who is responsible for implementation, the scale of action required, and so on. They may include:

• Local authority revenue
• Local authority capital via FRM Strategy prioritisation
• Scottish Water maintenance
• Scottish Water capital via quality and standards process
• Private funding (e.g. developer contributions)
• Other sources e.g. EU funding, or if joint projects are being taken forward other funding sources may be available.
  

Where different authorities are jointly implementing actions, funding may need to be aligned. This should be taken into account when planning implementation.

Figure 8.1 Example SWMP actions

Table 8.1 Example SWMP action plan and SMART objectives