Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what assessment she has made of the effect of recent floods on small businesses.

The most recent available data indicated that 4,940 businesses across northern England had been flooded following this winter’s exceptional rainfall. The vast majority of these will be small and medium size businesses. Impacts included flooded property, loss of stock and equipment and interruption to trading.

Our interventions, include business recovery grants (a total of £11 m from BIS, of which £4,572,000 has been paid out), business rate relief (£4.26 m from DCLG), and property level resilience scheme (£5,000 per household or business, to incorporate greater flood resilience into property repairs).