They were still removing sodden drum kits and waterlogged guitar amps from York’s Melrose Yard Studios yesterday. A week earlier, floodwaters from the nearby river Foss had inundated the popular music studios with ruinous effect and left the North Yorkshire business among those feeling shortchanged by its insurers. A hitherto unnoticed clause in Melrose Yard’s insurance policy has left the firm ineligible for reimbursement, despite its owners calculating that it will need at least £20,000 to get the studio back up and running.
“It looks like we were badly advised, It’s very small print, cleverly worded,” said Sam Holdstock, who set up the studios in the city’s Walmgate area seven years ago.
The situation facing the York studios, where bands including The Enemy and Halo Blind have rehearsed, has turned the spotlight on how insurers are responding to companies at risk of flooding, with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reiterating demands for new initiatives that ensure modestly sized firms can get affordable flood insurance. Recent FSB research suggests around 75,000 smaller businesses at risk of flooding have run into difficulties finding insurance, while another 50,000 have been refused flood cover. Proportionally, the organisation says this equates to 9% of small firms in flood-risk areas reporting difficulties.
Insurers and the government have made references to the an insurance scheme, Flood Re, which comes into effect from April and claims to guarantee affordable flood cover. However, small businesses are excluded from the programme.
Sixty-five miles further west in Whalley, in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, homeowner Andy Davis thinks his insurance will cover much of the damage to his house. But it’s the impact on his family that he is struggling to deal with as the extent of the damage from the floods over Christmas becomes clear.
“It looks like a war zone, doesn’t it?” he says, surveying the rubble, the ruined extension he’d almost completed, and the orchard of fruit trees now set against a swath of grey-brown earth.
“One moment you’re up, the next you’re back down on the floor because someone has told you it could be six months before you can come back home,” he says. “Overall it’s pretty depressing. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to clean up and dry things out, but this morning I couldn’t be bothered.”
Davis works every day with water as a design engineer for diving equipment. He knows only too well its immense, unyielding power. Previous floods had spared him, his wife, Clare, and their children, Ruby, four, and Wilf, two, from misery but this time, with his family safely with relatives, he stood as the water lapped at his thighs, trying to grab anything and everything.
By the time he abandoned his cottage home, the water had breached the garden wall and was three feet deep in the building. His beloved VW campervan was swamped and, worse still, the diary in which he and Clare had written from their early days together was lost to the water.
“We found it in a pile of debris,” he said. “It was sodden and stuck together. Some friends have taken it away to see if they can salvage it, but it’s still pretty crushing. That was the moment Clare broke down.”
With his campervan now towed away to be restored, Davis is trying to concentrate on the most important tasks as they present themselves, but is dismayed by the loss of an extension that would have given the family a third bedroom.
“The house would have been worth between £350,000 and £400,000 with that, but the flood came within days of us having it plastered.”
Gangs of friends and neighbours are helping each other with both moral and practical support. The Davis family benefited when a group of locals shifted 15 tons of sand and silt from their garden. Much of it went to rebuild the road that was washed away.
Four years ago, the Environment Agency wrote a report which recommended a flood defence designed to withstand disasters. The document has yet to be acted upon, though Davis believes that, even had it been built, it still would have been breached. He points to the massive increase in water run-off created by new housing estates.
“For every new estate there are hundreds of new driveways and watercourses,” he said. “It means that whereas water might previously have sat in fields, now it goes rushing in straight lines to the river.”
In York, Holdstock says that the sense of injustice is compounded by claims that flood defences introduced to protect businesses like theirs failed because of budget cuts.
“It [the studio] had never flooded before … the only reason it has this time is that someone took the decision to lift the flood barrier,” he said. “There’s a lot of speculation that it’s because of recent cuts to maintenance… Until now, it hasn’t flooded since those defences were put up in 1982.”
