Details of emergency spending, totalling £4.8 million, to get flood-hit Cumbria back on its feet have been revealed.

In the past six months Cumbria County Council has forked out money to pay for divers, temporary bridge solutions and other urgent work. It will now be clawed back from the Government.

Cumbria County Council has revealed how much it had to shell out in the immediate aftermath of Storm Desmond and beyond.

The multi-million pound bill is just part of wider flood recovery costs, which chief executive Diane Wood has estimated will total £200m.

However at present she fears the total amount of recovery funding coming into the county will fall about £40m short of what’s needed.

In December councillors delegated special powers to Ms Wood, enabling her to take swift action to address urgent problems without the expenditure first having to be approved by the cabinet.

By February that particular bill stood at £2.25m. A further £2.58m of costs have since been incurred, taking the total to just over £4.8m.

The biggest single cost was £488,500 spent on emergency dredging at the Port of Workington, a key piece of economic infrastructure.

The second highest was £350,000 to assess damage to roads.

The council also paid out £250,000 to Story Contracting as part of the installation of a temporary bridge at Pooley Bridge, where the historic structure and vital route was washed away.

Other examples include £180,000 of surveys and assessments of potentially flood-damaged bridges across the county, such as Carlisle’s Eden Bridge, which had to be closed while its safety was established. A further £130,000 was spent on dive inspections, plus another £140,000 on urgent bridge inspections in South Lakeland.

And £50,000 was used to bring in designers to come up with temporary solutions at other affected bridges.

They included Eamont Bridge and Brougham Old Bridge at Penrith and Isel Bridge at Cockermouth.

The council then spent £150,000 on contractors to carry out work at the two Penrith bridges. Several other payments were also made in relation to tackling bridge issues across the county.

Although the A591 repairs were largely conducted by Highways England, the council still had to cover some of the initial costs. This included installing and removing temporary access measures, totalling £225,000 and design and investigation services costing £83,000.

Money was also spent on vital resources, including sandbags, road markings, temporary road signs, traffic lights, bollards, water pumps, security, electrical works and consultant fees.

A number of contracts were significantly higher than estimated, mainly those relating to the A591.


Diane Wood A report going to the county council’s cabinet on Thursday sets out all of the spending in detail. It explains: “In December 2015, the cabinet agreed to delegate certain functions to the chief executive to enable her to take decisions quickly in response to Storm Desmond.

“For a significant period following December 4 2015 there were circumstances of extreme urgency, including immediate danger to life or property, which have required the council to incur expenditure without allowing the time for the council’s usual procedures to be followed.

“The aim was to ensure with certainty that officers had the necessary powers to take all urgent decisions required in connection with the flood recovery programme, with the necessary expediency.”

The powers awarded to Mrs Wood will now be revoked and authorisation procedures for council spending will return to normal.

The council’s emergency spending will be funded through the Bellwin Scheme – which reimburses local authorities following disasters – and grants from the Department for Transport.