National Flood Resilience Strategy: consultation analysis

Introduction

This report presents analysis of responses to a public consultation on a new Flood Resilience Strategy for Scotland.

Background

Scotland’s climate has changed significantly and will continue to change for decades to come, creating challenges in adapting to an increased risk of flooding. As part of Scotland’s National Adaptation Plan and wider commitments to a Just Transition, the Scottish Government is developing a Flood Resilience Strategy that will focus on how to make our communities more flood resilient. The Strategy aims to move away from trying to ‘fix flooding problems’ to an approach that focuses on creating flood resilient places. This means avoiding flooding where possible but, where this cannot be done, being well prepared, responding well, and recovering quickly after damaging flood events.

The Scottish Government worked with partner organisations to run workshops and online surveys to engage with communities and stakeholders to find out what big changes are needed to make Scotland flood resilient. The information gathered has been distilled into three themes for the Strategy:

• People: Involving people in decisions about improving flood resilience in their places and highlighting the contributions individuals can make to community flood resilience.
• Places: What changes we must make to our places to increase flood resilience.
• Processes: Making changes to the way we do things and the way we work together to enable us to create flood resilient places.

The consultation

The consultation was launched on 20 May and ran until 13 August 2024, asking a total of 22 questions. The consultation document is available on the Scottish Government’s website.

This consultation exercise sought views on the key guiding principles and the actions needed to improve flood resilience in Scotland. Responses will help to inform development of the Strategy.

Profile of responses

A total of 198 responses was received, of which 87 were from groups or organisations and 111 from individual members of the public. Where consent has been given to publish the response, it can be found on the Scottish Government’s website.

Respondents were asked to identify whether they were responding as an individual or on behalf of a group or organisation. Group respondents were allocated to one of seven groups by the analysis team. A breakdown of the number of responses received by respondent type is set out in Table 1 below, and a full list of group respondents is appended to this report as Annex 1.

Analysis and reporting

The report presents a question-by-question analysis of answers to the closed questions and comments at open questions. As with any public consultation exercise, it should be noted that those responding generally have a particular interest in the subject area. Therefore, the views they express cannot necessarily be seen as representative of wider public opinion.

Both the proportion of respondents answering closed questions and the number commenting at open questions varied from question to question. To reflect this differing level of response, tables and charts are presented with different baselines, so the total shown in each case is the total number who answered that question.

Reporting results at closed questions

There were two types of closed questions: four questions where respondents were asked to choose a single option (e.g. yes or no) and a further nine where they were invited to rank a range of options in terms of their importance. The main report sets out answers to simple closed questions (Questions 1, 11, 14 and 18) in tabular form, but presents only key findings at the ranking questions (Questions 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17 and 19) in chart form. Full numerical analysis and charts illustrating all the ranking questions is appended to the report as Annex 2.

It should be noted that there was some variation in how respondents answered the ranking questions – for example, some ranked all options given, but others used only some of their possible choices. Further, respondents who submitted a response other than via Citizen Space sometimes created alternative ranking systems – for example by giving more than one option the same rank.^[1] This means that the results at these questions should be seen as indicative.

All of the ranking questions gave respondents an opportunity to rank an ‘Other’ option, and then provide further information relating to that option. ^[2] A summary of the additional ideas suggested is presented at the end of each of the ranking questions, and data relating to the ranking of the ‘Other’ option is set out within the numerical analysis in Annex 2. However, this data is not presented in chart form.

Word limits on open questions

Respondents were asked to limit the length of their responses at open questions. Some respondents (who did not submit their responses through the Citizen Space platform but sent them directly to the Scottish Government) provided longer, and in some cases lengthy, comments. All these responses/comments are available to the policy team at the Scottish Government. For the purposes of this analysis, however, only key points from these longer responses have been included.

Qualitative analysis

The analysis of further comments is qualitative but may give an indication of the more frequently made points. In this context, frequently made refers to an issue raised by 10% or more of those commenting at that open question.^[3]

The analysis may also either refer to particular types of respondents tending to make a comment, or to ‘some’ or ‘a number’ of respondents raising an issue. This indicates that a least five respondents have highlighted/raised this issue.

Otherwise, please note that many of the other points or suggestions will have been made by only one or a small number of respondents.