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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she has taken to increase public awareness of potential flood risk for home-buyers.

Maps showing flood risk are available on the Gov.uk website, allowing home buyers to check whether a property they are considering purchasing is at risk of flooding. Individuals can search by postcode and later this year the Environment Agency (EA) is introducing the ability to search by a specific address.

The EA also share this flood risk data with companies that produce home buyers reports, and approximately 400,000 property reports are produced annually that include this data.

Much of this data is already available as Open Data and several third party applications have already been developed that encourage public awareness. The EA is releasing more information by the end of June 2016, to encourage further growth and development of similar public awareness raising applications.