ADS on UK flood risk guidance: the SuDS regulatory gap for designers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Updated planning guidance on flood risk and coastal change still leaves a regulatory gap for mandatory sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), argues Stuart Crisp, UK manager at Advanced Drainage Systems (ADS). He notes that, outside Schedule 3-type regimes, many English developments can proceed without adoptable SuDS features such as attenuation tanks, geocellular storage and permeable pavements, despite long-term surface water and groundwater flood risks. For civil and drainage designers, this keeps SuDS largely policy-led rather than enforceable, complicating investment in higher-spec systems and long-term maintenance planning.
Technical Brief
- Despite industry calls for clearer obligations, sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) are still not mandated in all developments, leaving room for traditional piped drainage solutions.
Our Take
Among recent Policy pieces in our database, UK-focused items like this one on flood risk sit alongside several safety-tagged transport and road-policy stories (such as the New South Wales demerit scheme), underscoring how regulators are increasingly tying physical infrastructure performance to explicit safety outcomes rather than just design standards.
Advanced Drainage Systems’ presence in a UK planning and flood-risk discussion signals that proprietary drainage products are likely to feature more directly in regulatory debates, which can advantage suppliers whose systems already have performance data aligned with sustainability and resilience criteria.
With 149 Policy stories and many tagged to Sustainability and Safety, the UK flood and coastal change guidance covered here fits a pattern where infrastructure rules are being tightened around climate-exposure; for UK civil contractors and asset owners this likely means earlier, more detailed drainage and coastal-defence design inputs to secure planning consent.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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