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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress he has made on assessing the effectiveness of arrangements for responsibility for the property level resilience programme following the meeting between the hon. Member for York Central and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for his Department on 2 February 2021.

In 2020, the joint Defra-industry Property Flood Resilience (PFR) Roundtable developed a code of practice which gives guidance and sets standards on delivery and scoping of PFR works. Further updates were published in February 2021.

The Environment Agency is updating its national PFR procurement framework, the update will embed the Code of Practice. This is expected to be published by early 2022.

The Environment Agency is also funding training for partners, including local authorities, to strengthen consistency and confidence of PFR.

Since February the Environment Agency have implemented several steps to help overcome delivery issues in York and to ensure that future PFR installations are delivered more efficiently. Installations have now been completed in 42 properties.

In February this year, we launched a Call for Evidence on local factors in managing flood and coastal erosion risk and property flood resilience to inform PFR policy, including looking key enablers such as incentives, standards, and skills, as well as roles and responsibilities. We also published a consultation on changes to the Flood Re scheme to accelerate PFR uptake which included discounted premiums and increased claims to repair properties in a more resilient way. We will shortly publish a summary of responses to these documents.