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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much of the flood risk and coastal erosion risk management budget has been allocated to nature based solutions in the current financial year.

Many projects in the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Capital Investment Programme deliver a combination of nature-based solutions (NBS) and hard defences, and we do not explicitly capture the expenditure on NBS separately. Due to this, we are unable to separate spend on NBS into each financial year.

For the years available, the total investment across the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Capital Investment Programme from April 2021 to March 2024 was £3.5 billion, with approximately £40.6 million spent on NBS. The total forecast investment across the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Capital Investment Programme for the current financial year, 2025/26, is £1.1 billion, with an estimated £24.8 million allocated for schemes that include NBS.