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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to research by Fathom and the University of Bristol, entitled A climate-conditioned catastrophe risk model for UK flooding, published on 7 March 2023, whether his Department has made an assessment of the implications for its policies of that research and its forecasting of future damage from UK flooding.

The Environment Agency (EA) flood mapping provides a national picture of flood risk for England. The EA provides all its flood risk mapping as open data, as well as it being available to view on gov.uk services, such as check your long term flood risk and flood map for planning. This combines both local and national modelling, and uses industry best practice in terms of modelling software and approaches.

The EA always seeks to improve modelling to reflect the latest climate science, including a major investment in producing a new national assessment of flood risk by 2024. This will be used to update its Long Term Investment Scenarios (LTIS) last published in 2019. LTIS are an economic assessment showing what future flood and coastal erosion risk management could look like over the next 50 years in England.