Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken to prevent inland flooding in the North West.

Across the North West (NW), investment from the Environment Agency (EA) and local councils from April 2015 to March 2021 will better protect approximately 42,000 properties against inland and coastal flooding by April 2021. Around 5,000 of these will be better protected this financial year. Included in this programme was the £21 million investment at Lytham (Lancashire) that benefits 2,300 homes.

The EA carries out maintenance of critical flood defences and rivers that pose the greatest risk to communities. 600 miles of open channels are managed across the NW. For example, in Cumbria and Lancashire, 13 miles of culverts are regularly inspected to ensure water can flow freely.

The EA is investing approximately £4 million in natural flood management across the NW. This is in addition to further investment in natural flood management by the NW Regional Flood Coastal Committee’s local levy.

Planning, responding and recovering from flooding is a key aspect of the EA’s work in the NW. The EA works closely with all five local resilience forums to deliver a coordinated local response to flooding - ensuring they have a large number of trained and capable staff, temporary defences, pumps and other key equipment. They also help many local community groups develop emergency plans.

The EA warns and informs the public about flood risk. Across the NW, 147,669 properties at risk receive flood warnings. By March 2022 all properties at high risk of flooding from main rivers or the sea will be able to receive a flood warning.

The EA also works closely with local planning authorities to help ensure local plans appropriately account for current and future flood risk. The EA comments on strategically significant individual planning applications to ensure flood risk is appropriately accounted for in decision making. They also regulate work in or near main rivers to ensure that it doesn’t increase flood risk or cause environmental damage.