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 Government grants statistics 2020 to 2021, published on 31 March 2022, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the Natural Flood Management (NFM) Community Programme Grant 2020-2022.

The Natural Flood Management (NFM) Community Grant Programme entry in the Government grant statistics 2020 to 2021 relates to part of a wider £15 million NFM programme. The Government’s £15 million NFM programme, which ran from 2017-2021, delivered NFM measures across England to further develop the evidence base on working with natural processes to reduce flood risk. The programme funded 34 community scale-projects as well as 26 catchment scale projects. The Environment Agency published the evaluation in 2022. Evidence from the programme is feeding into the Government’s evidence directory on working with natural processes to reduce flood risk, and it helped to reduce flood and/or coastal erosion risk, improved habitats and biodiversity, and promoted partnership working.