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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what additional resources he will allocate to areas that are likely to be affected by Storm Christoph.

The Government is closely monitoring the impact of Storm Christoph on affected communities and the National Flood Response Centre is open, coordinating the cross-Government response to flooding impacts.

The Environment Agency (EA) is prepared to take action this winter wherever it is needed and is constantly working with local authorities, and Local Resilience Forums made up of all Emergency Responders. The EA’s front-line staff are ensuring their incident response is undertaken in a Covid-secure way. Throughout the year the EA has continued to build and repair flood defences. The EA has 250 high volume pumps available and 6,500 trained staff across the country, including 314 trained flood support officers. Defra can also call upon the support of military assets and personnel to assist the EA and local responders, if required.

The EA has 40km of metal frame temporary barriers, which can be delivered anywhere in the country within 12 hours, providing additional protection to locations where there are no permanent defences or where forecast river levels could overtop existing defences. As of 8 January 2021, there were over 1.52 million properties in England signed up to the EA's free flood warning service, which sends a message directly by voice message, text or email when a flood warning is issued.

With localised flooding incidents local authorities are expected to have well established contingency arrangements in place and to be able to respond and support their local communities from within existing budgets.

However, following severe weather with significant impacts across multiple local authorities the Government is able to deploy the Flood Recovery Framework which includes a Community Recovery Grant, Council Tax Discounts and Business Rate Relief.

We will continue to monitor the situation and assess whether further support is needed in the event that flooding impacts increase.