The Tories ignored expert flood advice in favour of austerity. Behold the results

It has become an almost annual event. Heavy rain leads to widespread flooding, and people claim that we didn’t see it coming. Except we did. In 2007 the UK experienced a series of floods and the government commissioned a report from Michael Pitt, which stated: “The scale of the problem is, as we know, likely to get worse. We are not sure whether last summer’s events were a direct result of climate change, but we do know that events of this kind are expected to become more frequent. The scientific analysis we have commissioned as part of this review (published alongside this report) shows that climate change has the potential to cause even more extreme scenarios than were previously considered possible. The country must adapt to increasing flood risk.”

The Labour government acted on the report’s recommendations. Central government spending on flood defences increased by 10% in the financial year 2008-09, with an additional 10% increase in 2009-10. But then austerity happened. In 2011-12 and 2012-13, spending on flood defences was cut sharply.

Although the floods of December 2013, when a tidal surge hit towns along the east coast, prompted the government to increase spending, this has never matched the 10% increases we had after the Pitt review; the average increase in flood spending each year since 2010-11 has been a pitiful 1.2%. Indeed, spending in 2018-19 as a share of GDP was substantially lower than it was in the last year of the Labour government.

Money wouldn’t have stopped the rain from falling, but it would have kept many of the homes that were flooded over the decade dry. Flood defence projects pay for themselves many times over.

Today the costs of UK flooding illustrate the lost decade brought about by austerity. The Johnson government may pretend that austerity is over, but that is merely a play on words. The fiscal contractions of George Osborne’s tenure as chancellor reduced the size of the state that Johnson inherited – and we will not see that reversed in any significant way by the new government. Anyone who claims that Johnson is “moving left” on economics because he is not shrinking the state even further is making a basic mistake – failing to distinguish between the overall size of the state and minor changes to the size of the state.

Beyond the folly of austerity, the failure to enact measures that could have prevented flood damage illustrates something else about the attitude of Conservative governments in general, and this one in particular: a lack of interest in evidence.

The Pitt review in 2007 collected all the evidence available at the time, and made clear recommendations that spending on flood defences needed to adapt to a reality where periodic, severe flooding would become normal.

The warnings in the Pitt review have proved correct, yet that expertise was ignored by Conservative governments – just as they ignored the opinions of a majority of macroeconomists over austerity, and the opinions of a majority of trade experts on Brexit. There is an obvious pattern here. Tory governments are more interested in policy-based evidence than in evidence-based policies. Why?

Part of the answer lies in the failure of the broadcast media, with only a few honourable exceptions, to hold Conservative governments to account. I have not seen any television reports on the recent flooding that have mentioned austerity – let alone the Pitt review. Informing the public is invariably limited to showing us pictures of flood plains and submerged living rooms. When a minister is occasionally questioned about state spending, they roll out a prepared soundbite to put the government in the most favourable light – and the interview moves on.

This isn’t about political bias in the media. An obsession with breaking news has crowded out memory and background research. Flood victims ask why this keeps happening to them – but ministers simply respond with statistics that their interviewers have not been briefed about. No interviewer asks ministers why they have ignored the Pitt review, because they don’t know that the Pitt review ever existed. Increasingly, ministers are simply not made available for comment – and yet even then, producers seem reluctant to provide information that puts the government in a bad light, because that might seem “unbalanced”.

Related: UK flood defence plans are inadequate, warn scientists

If much of the media is bereft of the information that can hold the government to account, then don’t be surprised when people elect governments that ignore experts.

• Simon Wren-Lewis is emeritus professor of economics and fellow of Merton College, Oxford