Consultancy - Strategic Flood Risk Assessment

Liverpool City Council is seeking to appoint suitably qualified consultants to undertake a detailed, up to date and robust Strategic Flood Risk Assessment across the City, including detailed assessment of a number of allocated sites. The Local Plan will set out both strategic objectives for the development of the city over the next 15-20 years and will include detailed guidance to manage the type, location and scale of this development, including allocation of specific sites.

The National Planning Policy Framework requires that in preparing a Local Plan up-to-date and relevant evidence about the economic, social and environmental characteristics and prospects of the area is utilised. The City Council prepared a Draft Local Plan in September 2016 for a second round of consultation with stakeholders under Regulation 18 of the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations2012.

Responses are currently being analysed. The Council require a Level 1 SFRA to identify the potential flood risks across the City, followed by a more detailed assessment of the flooding implications of developing sites allocated in the Local Plan (Level 2).

The Level 2 SFRA should augment the information in Level 1 to enable an Exception Test and a Sequential Approach to be applied and an assessment of existing flood defences. This Assessment should form part of the evidence to inform planning decisions.

The 2008 Liverpool City Council Level 1 SFRA reviewed data from the Liverpool Bay Shoreline Management Plan (SMP 1999): Sub Cell 11a - Great Orme's Head to Formby Point and the Mersey Estuary Draft Catchment Flood Management Plan (March 2007). In 2011, LCC completed a Preliminary Flood Risk Assessment (PFRA) to comply with the Flood Risk Regulations (FRR) 2009, as a Lead Local Flood Authority.

The PFRA was the first element of a programme to produce Flood Risk Management Plans by 2015. In 2012, an update to the 2008 SFRA commenced but remains unfinished.

The current review and update of Liverpool City Council's Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment (SFRA) 2008 and the unpublished 2012 SFRA, should take into account new information that is now available regarding flooding/flood risk and planning policy. The review should focus on the data that is available from Culverted Watercourse Survey studies that have recently been undertaken or are ongoing, together with new coastal and fluvial flood map data now available from the Environment Agency (EA).

These have been extensively updated and the findings need to be incorporated into these SFRA's. Consultants are invited to submit a quotation for the project broken down into separate quotations for each of SFRA Levels 1 and 2.