Herefordshire has committed to better mapping and maintenance of its drainage networks in the face of more severe predicted downpours.

Ross-on-Wye Liberal Democrat councillor Ed O’Driscoll put a motion to fellow members for the council to accurately map the county’s drains, gullies and culverts, to urgently repair those that are damaged, and prepare a publicly available schedule of their future maintenance.

“We are going to have to deal with heavier rain in the coming years”, he said. “Every delay in addressing drainage issues will cost us more in the future, financially and in human terms.”

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Herefordshire must first “maximise what we already have”, he said. “How can we organise a maintenance schedule when we don’t know where everything is?”

Other counties have real-time online mapping, enabling parishes and residents to find out the last and next scheduled dates of the cleaning of individual drains, he pointed out.

Members from all parties backed Coun O’Driscoll’s motion, which passed unanimously.

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Conservative councillor for Castle ward Robert Highfield said: “We know this will get worse, and I forecast it will replace roads as the thing on everyone’s lips when we knock on doors.”

Ledbury Green party councillor Stef Simmons was also supportive but said such mapping work “can be difficult, particularly of private drainage in rural areas”, and questioned how it would be funded.

LibDem Hinton and Hunderton councillor Kevin Tillett added that mapping “is far from complete even in the city”.

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Independents for Herefordshire group leader Coun Liz Harvey said she had “just re-reported blocked drains in the heart of Ledbury” which had first been logged on the council’s website in May yet remained unfixed.

“We are not helping the public to report these issues,” she added. And she pointed out that while the council models rainwater flooding in the county and the Environment Agency river flooding, “these do not appear to be joined up”.

Likewise LibDem councillor Dan Powell said there were disputes in his city ward between National Highways and the council over responsibility for drainage around the busy A49, “resulting in desperately poorly maintained drains” – which needed “sorting out once and for all”.