OFTEN it takes a crisis to make us appreciate the importance of public services and the unsung heroes who help provide them.
The recent flooding has certainly had that effect.
Flood prevention is normally buried in the background work of local government, out of sight and mind.
Then an extreme episode occurs and everyone wants to know who was responsible for preventing it.
There is never a straightforward answer because responsibilities are divided and much depends on money.
If councils don’t have it, they can’t spend it, however much they want to.
Since 2009, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency’s (SEPA) role is limited to being “the flood warning authority for Scotland”.
If you want to know where there is going to be a flood, they are the people to go to – a limited role, one might think, for an organisation with “protection” in its title.
SEPA’s website helpfully advises us on “who to contact” in the event of flooding – mainly to make clear that it isn’t them.
It’s the local authority which “plans, implements and maintains flood protection measures” and “works with emergency responders when flooding happens”.
But the Scottish Government hold the purse-strings.
Councils are responsible for drawing up flood prevention plans but must submit them to Edinburgh for funding approval, which filters through only slowly.
Councils themselves have to find 20 per cent from hard-pressed capital budgets.
So local authorities have been put in the front line but without the means of ensuring delivery.
A whole string of flood prevention schemes were submitted to Edinburgh more than a year ago but were initially rejected – only two, at Brechin and Selkirk in the Borders, were given the immediate go-ahead.
Now that the extreme experience of the North-east has highlighted the threat, there has been a flurry of political activity to promise money for more schemes.
We are told that £235million will be spent throughout Scotland over the next six years but that’s not “new money”.
The people most likely to understand the adequacy or otherwise of that figure are the specialists who have studied risks and reached conclusions on how, within reason, they can be countered.
That is a discussion which now needs to take place in a public forum, not least in the North-east.
In mid-January, that £235million figure was presented by a Scottish Government minister as “Scotland’s first flood-risk management plan”.
In fact, however, that is no more than a re-packaging of schemes in the pipeline for which local councils have been awaiting approval.
There is now an urgent need for clarity about what exactly has been approved, whether councils and communities consider it adequate and when each part of it is going to happen.
This is not a subject which can be dealt with through political spin.
The reality is what counts and less than £50million a year across Scotland may not be enough to meet it.
There is nothing local authorities can do about that.