Asked by: Rachel Reeves (Labour - Leeds West and Pudsey)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when he plans to respond to the letter of 25 January 2018 from the hon. Member for Leeds West on the Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme.
Answered by Baroness Coffey
I replied to the hon. Member for Leeds West on Friday 2 March. I apologise for the delay in replying.
Asked by: Rachel Reeves (Labour - Leeds West and Pudsey)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much of his Department's planned £2.5 billion investment in flood investments will be allocated to Leeds; and what the timetable is for completion of those schemes.
Answered by Baroness Coffey
Between April 2015 and March 2021, the Government plans to invest £54.5 million within the Leeds City Council boundary. This will deliver more than 15 individual schemes and projects to reduce flood risk to communities and safeguard the economy. The majority of these will be completed by March 2021.
Asked by: Rachel Reeves (Labour - Leeds West and Pudsey)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress has been made on supporting businesses who are unable to get flood insurance as part of their commercial insurance.
Answered by Baroness Coffey
The British Insurance Broker Association (BIBA) insurance product, launched in December 2016, provides flood insurance for many small businesses that have struggled to access it to-date. We understand that this new product is already providing insurance and has strong support from brokers. BIBAs ‘Find a Broker Service’ can help business identify local brokers participating in the BIBA scheme and is accessible through BIBAs website.
https://www.biba.org.uk/find-insurance/results/?insurance=908
The Government continues to work with commercial interests under the Property Level Resilience Roundtable to promote the uptake of measures that make properties resilient to flooding. These are measures that prevent water entering a property and speeding recovery when it does. One objective is to develop better standards and certification, enabling insurers to take greater account of resilience measures in the future.
Asked by: Rachel Reeves (Labour - Leeds West and Pudsey)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent progress his Department has made on investment in flood defences.
Answered by Baroness Coffey
As the Government manifesto outlines, we will continue to invest a record £2.5 billion over six years to better protect the country from flooding. This includes over 1,500 flood defence schemes, which will better protect more than 300,000 properties by 2021.
From April 2015 until May 2017, this investment has given better protection to 97,000 homes. This has been achieved by £785 million of Government grants in aid and £179 million of external contributions.
Asked by: Rachel Reeves (Labour - Leeds West and Pudsey)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress her Department has made on supporting access to mobile digital technology for farmers.
Answered by Rory Stewart
Improving mobile connectivity across the country is a key priority for the Government. Defra works closely with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on this, with a key focus on rural and hard to reach areas. Defra Ministers are directly involved through meetings with DCMS Ministers and the Digital Implementation Taskforce.
4G mobile rollout in the UK has been one of the fastest in Europe; 90% of premises now have 4G coverage from at least one operator. Two legally binding licence obligations will help deliver improved mobile coverage across the UK. Telefonica will provide indoor 4G coverage to 98% of UK premises by the end of 2017. This complements the obligation on each of the UK’s four mobile network operators to provide voice and text coverage to at least 90% of UK landmass, also by the end of 2017.
To facilitate rollout, the Government is reforming the Electronic Communications Code to make it cheaper for the industry to provide coverage and is introducing reforms to the planning regime to allow, amongst other things, taller masts and to enable upgrades of communications infrastructure.