Lower Marsham · part 3 of 7
The Estate Beyond the Willows
Lower Marsham, Episode Three. On Willow Rise, the sequential test, and the anaesthetic that wears off at completion
The field beyond the willows was never built on, and the village always knew why. The old maps mark it as Lammas land; the older residents mark it as the place the water goes. In 2023 an inspector granted outline permission for ninety-four homes there, the development to be known, with the industry’s usual gift for accidental confession, as Willow Rise.
The Patels completed on Plot 41 this June. Four bedrooms, ten-year warranty, a kitchen island the size of a small barge. In July they did what completing buyers do and shopped for buildings insurance, and the quotes that came back were not like the quotes their friends in the old village pay. Some carried four figures. One carried an exclusion. Plot 41 was built after the first of January 2009, and homes built after that date are barred from Flood Re by design, so the Patels have been introduced, alone among their new neighbours’ acquaintance, to the actuarial price of the field the water goes to.
Understand the design before condemning it, because the design was intelligent. The scheme’s architects knew that subsidised premiums would otherwise summon houses onto floodplains, so they cut new construction out of the pool entirely. The planning system would hold the line at the front, refusing the risky sites; the exclusion would hold it at the back, denying subsidy to anything that slipped through. Two jaws of a vice. The battery of safeguards written into the framework have a comforting sound when listed, and the list is the last comfortable thing in this essay.
The jaw that never closed
Between 2022 and 2024, 11 per cent of the roughly 397,000 new homes built in England went up in areas of medium or high flood risk. That is about 44,000 houses, and the share is rising, up from 8 per cent across the prior decade. Project the trend across the government’s promised 1.5 million homes and something like 115,000 of them will stand in the highest-risk zones. The chief executive of Aviva, a man with a direct commercial interest in this not being true, put the matter beyond euphemism this February: as a deterrent to floodplain building, the post-2009 exclusion “simply hasn’t happened.”
How does a planning system permit this? Attend closely, because the machinery is a small masterpiece of English administrative evasion. The National Planning Policy Framework contains a sequential test directing development away from the highest-risk land, and the sequential test, that exists precisely to keep houses off fields like the one beyond the willows, is guidance rather than law. Following the Mead Realisations judgment, failing it is merely a factor to be weighed in the planning balance. At Yatton the inspector acknowledged the test was failed and approved the scheme anyway. At Faversham the test was not conducted at all; permission proceeded on the reassurance of “no real world harm.” In December 2024 the framework’s refusal threshold was softened from “clear reason” to “strong reason,” a one-word amendment whose direction of travel requires no annotation from me.
The Environment Agency, the body that actually knows where the water goes, is a statutory consultee with no veto. In the last reporting year alone, 301 homes were permitted over its objections; since 2016 the running total is near three thousand. And where flood conditions are attached to a consent, a Defra review found that more than half of local planning authorities rarely or never inspect completed developments for compliance, with 73 per cent checking only when somebody complains. The jaw at the front of the vice, in short, was never connected to anything. Walking the estate at dusk, the river is nowhere to be seen, which is precisely the condition under which planning permission flourishes.
The interaction
Now put the two halves of the machine together and observe what they do to the Patels, because this is the cruellest paragraph in the series and I have checked it twice.
For nine years before Plot 41 existed, Flood Re taught the entire property market that flood risk is not something house prices need to reflect; the Bank of England measured the lesson, and the discount on wet houses vanished. The Patels therefore bought in a market whose risk perception had been professionally anaesthetised, from a developer who sold the field long before the water could embarrass him and bears nothing further, that being the oldest agency problem in construction. Then, at completion, the exclusion arrived and the anaesthetic was withdrawn from the Patels alone. Full actuarial pricing, in a village where every older neighbour pays the 1991 tariff. The subsidy inflated the price they paid; the safeguard denies them the subsidy. They have managed, without a single dishonest act by anyone, to purchase the costs of both policies and the benefits of neither, and there is 44,000 households like them and counting.
One decorative absurdity, offered as a service to connoisseurs. The bungalow at the edge of the old village, pre-2009 and therefore eligible, was bought by a developer last year, demolished to the slab, and rebuilt twice the size. It keeps its Flood Re eligibility, because the exclusion attends to the date of the address rather than the date of the building. The scheme will subsidise a brand-new house on the floodplain provided an old one is knocked down first, which as a piece of environmental policy resembles a rule against new arsonists that exempts anyone burning down an existing fire.
The tenth-anniversary reform package of this July, which other episodes in this series weigh at length, is worth recording here chiefly for its silence. Eligibility was formally reviewed, and the review’s one published concern is leaseholders — a real anomaly, and a small one. The post-2009 exclusion stands, as on its own logic it should. The planning system that makes the exclusion cruel appears nowhere in the package, because it is not in the scheme’s gift: Defra co-signed the announcement, but the sequential test lives in another department, which is how a machine with two jaws comes to be serviced one jaw at a time, forever. Willow Rise received nothing in July. The Patels, reading the coverage, would have found the word “reform” used several dozen times and their situation described in none of them.
The residents of Willow Rise will learn the field’s habits in the usual instalments. The show homes stood a metre proud of the road on engineered fill; the gardens do not. The drainage was signed off against a storm the climate has since outgrown. And the river, who used the field longer than the parish records go back, regards the ninety-four new arrivals without malice, malice being a human economy. The river has not read the sequential test. She has never once failed it either.
Principal sources: Aviva new-build analysis (February 2026); TCPA on the sequential test (2025); Mead Realisations v SSLUHC; i Paper FOI data on EA objections (November 2025); Defra enforcement review (2021); NPPF (December 2024 revision); Flood Re/Defra reform announcement (1 July 2026). Next in the series: The American Letter, on a scheme that was also temporary, in 1968.