The tragedy of Sir Philip Dilley’s short reign as chairman of the Environment Agency, which ended when he resigned today, is that until he chose to stay in Barbados rather than travel back to Britain to take control of the response to the floods, he was unusually well-qualified for the job.
With his appointment in September 2014 we finally had an engineer in charge of the nation’s flood defences. Prior to that the quango had been led by a long line of chairmen and chief executives who seemed to have little grounding in water management or any kind of construction. Baroness Young of Old Scone, chief executive between 2000 and 2008, had come to the job from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. No wonder then that during her leadership the focus of the agency seemed to slip away from protecting people and property and rather more towards providing habitats for wading birds.
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