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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking (a) through research and applied science to assess the extent to which good soil health reduces flood risk and (b) to help improve soil health.

Soil is one of our greatest assets, essential for delivering a range of natural capital benefits including, food production, biodiversity, carbon storage and flood mitigation. Improving soil health is a key aspect of a range of natural flood management measures that can slow water flows and improve water storage to reduce flood risk.

From July 2017-21, the Government delivered a £15 million natural flood management programme across England. The programme funded 26 catchment scale projects and 34 community scale-projects and developed the natural flood management evidence base. The Environment Agency will publish a full peer reviewed evaluation of the natural flood management programme in 2022. Evidence from this programme is feeding into the Government’s evidence directory on working with natural processes to reduce flood risk. The directory includes a chapter summarising the existing evidence on run-off management including soil and land management.

We are continuously considering the developing evidence base in our policy, including the Natural Environment Council’s ongoing Natural Flood Management Research Programme. Within this programme, the LANDWISE project and Q-NFM projects will evaluate the effectiveness of natural flood management measures including soil infiltration.

Further testing of practical and innovative solutions to mitigate flood risk is also taking place through the £200m Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme 2021-27. This includes funding 25 local areas to take forward innovative actions that improve their resilience over six years, such as nature-based solutions where relevant.

A Soil Health Action Plan for England is being developed to deliver a strategic and coherent plan for preventing soil degradation and improving soil health. The Action Plan will encourage changes to land management practices that help improve and protect soil health and make it more resilient to the impacts of climate change, including flooding.