Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether claimants of flood resilience grants can reapply if the measures installed by that grant are damaged in a subsequent flood.
Flooding has a devastating impact on people’s lives which is why we launched the Property Flood Resilience (PFR) grant in November 2019 and again in February this year.
The Defra PFR grants are intended as one-off payments to assist home or business owners in making their properties resilient to future floods as a part of the repair process. They are not intended as compensation or relief funding. To provide good value for public money, if a property has already been made more resilient through a previous PFR scheme, there should be no need for a further grant.
Home insurance policies generally put properties back to the state they were in before the flood. This should mean that those people who adapted their properties should be able to secure repairs from their home insurer. Similarly, some items may be covered by product guarantees.
The grant is therefore not available to repair damage caused to previous resilience measures.