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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many people have registered for free flood warnings provided by the Environment Agency; and what steps she has taken to ensure that more people so register.

As of 1 March 2016 there were a total of 1,146,146 properties registered to receive flood warnings in England.

Environment Agency staff work with communities to prepare them for flooding. They encourage people to fully register for the service by knocking on the doors of residents and businesses who are not registered to receive flood warnings, running local events and attending appropriate shows and seminars to encourage sign-up. Callers to the Floodline call centre are encouraged to register if they are not already on the system.

Alongside work to encourage people to ‘opt-in’ to the service, the Environment Agency has automatically added 400,000 mobile phone numbers registered to locations at high risk of flooding provided by the company ‘EE’. They are currently working with 3 other major mobile phone companies to access their numbers too. This approach increases the number of people that the Environment Agency can automatically add to their warning system.