I think so. I thought there was just too much for the river to handle coming in off the mountains. But they said the flow could be faster down the river by taking awy restrictions or maybe some river diversions around locks or watever, and flow into a large low level (low tide level) lagoon.
The people in Shrewsbury were told, in the local press, that the barrage would create a low level lagoon to absorb the water and dispose of it on the outgoing tide. I recall they were on about some means of allowing the water to flow quickly past certain parts of the upper reaches of the river and past Gloucester to empty into the lagoon which is ~32 foot below sea level virtually all of the time. So the theory went.