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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where the UK's main mobile flood pumps are based; and what time is taken to mobilise such pumps.

The Government-funded New Dimension project saw the deployment of 50 High Volume Pumps (HVP) positioned across the country, with 46 allocated to 38 English Fire and Rescue Services and four in Scotland; an additional Strategic HVP was located centrally. There are four mobile HVPs in Wales. Under the Fire Rescue Service mutual aid arrangements Wales also have access to all of the strategic assets in England. The planning assumptions for a major incident involving man made or natural flooding, assumes a minimum of one HVP will be mobilised to respond to an incident within a maximum of two hours of request.

The Environment Agency holds a range of strategic incident response supplies at its depots across England, including:

· three 12 inch pumps

· six24 inch pumps

· 425 smaller mobile pumps

· 3.8km of demountable and temporary flood defences

· 21 sandbag machines

The larger 12 and 24 inch pumps can be deployed within 24 hours. The Environment Agency also has access to a further six 24 inch pumps through its contracted suppliers.