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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the ability of the proposed Teddington Direct River Abstraction Scheme to provide resilience in a 1:200 year drought event, in the context of the 1:40 drought event of 2022 seeing naturalised flows over Teddington Weir drop as low as the limit of the M2 (LTOA) abstraction licence.

The performance of the proposed Teddington Direct River Abstraction has been assessed through the water resources management planning process and shown to be effective under a range of drought conditions.