You are right and it is a tragedy what we are seeing. To pick up on the OP point and sorry to get political but it is due to Austerity over the last years which has caused this. I have seen first hand that when budgets are tight that the servicing and maintenance doesn’t happen and then things break. One local hospital had to stop operating due to an air handling plant failing due to poor maintenance, this caused and is causing long waiting times. The Council will be in the same place.
BE
It isn't down to austerity. The abandonment of river management (dredging is just one tool in the box) is down to EU environment directives which have demanded "managed retreat" in the supposed interests of bio-diversity. This means the NRA will not permit anyone to touch a river if there's the slightest risk of inconvenience to a newt or a water vole and to hell with the human beings.
The NRA has successfully implanted the notion that dredging is "inappropriate" because it moves the problem elsewhere. Management means treating a watercourse as a single entity from source to sea with the correct maintenance at the right times in the right places.
Dredging doesn't mean making the whole river deeper and faster and removing natural flood plains by turning sluggish flat land stretches of river into deep drainage channels; it simply means removing periodically the soil which has washed off cultivated land and silted up the river and returning it to the land, so that the flood plain is maintained in its original extent instead of creeping ever outwards as the river channels silts up. That doesn't cause any problems downstream.
It's not rocket science, it's common sense.
Where I live there is a winter stream that runs through about six villages before it joins the river. At our end it frequently floods the road and any low lying gardens.
For years the local council sent two blokes and a transit pickup out regularly to thin out the weed and repair the banks. They striped the bulk of the crowfoot out without removing it entirely in mid to late summer after the aquatic life had done its breeding. They built up squashed banks with sandbags filled with grit and cement dust. These settled into place and slowly went hard; then they replaced the turf. They spent no more than three or four days a year on this work but none of it happens any more.
On top of that there is a fish farm at the stream's source which farms a non-native species and imports fry with the water from the tanks they come in released directly into the stream along with whatever plant spoors are in it. So not only is the native weed allowed to grow unchecked but invasive alien species are introduced as well. (I'm pretty sure that's where a sudden and massive outbreak of Himalayan Balsam came from a few years ago).
The council don't clear the roadside drains either. Many of the gully pots are completely choked with silt. You couldn't drop a fag butt down most of them and the entire system is probably beyond repair now and much of it would need to be relaid to get it flowing.
You could say (and they do) that it's all down to austerity. But it isn't. The district council is in surplus. It even even plays the stock market and buys "investment" property. It isn't a company. It should be returning the money to taxpayers in tax cuts and the only investments it should be making is a proper programme of maintenance. But purging drains and maintaining streams isn't "eye-catching" and no one it seems, at any government level from the parish council to county council and including Natural England has the slightest knowledge of aquatic biology and can tell one weed species from another. The old boys with their transit and scythes could.
