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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they have taken to reduce the risk of flooding for communities that have already experienced flooding in the last 12 months.

In the March 2020 Budget, Government provided additional funding of £120 million for 2020-21 to repair assets damaged in the 2019/2020 autumn and winter floods. In the last 12 months, the Environment Agency (EA) has completed around 20,000 inspections of flood assets that were damaged in the winter 2019/20 floods. The EA has a prioritised programme of repairs based on risk to lives and livelihoods underway. All of the flood defences damaged last year have either been repaired or have contingency plans in place to reduce the risk to their communities this winter.

The EA has continued to build and maintain flood risk management assets and is on track to better protect 300,000 properties from flooding and coastal erosion between 2015 and 2021.

The EA has continued to engage with communities during the pandemic, sharing scheme updates and consulting with local residents in a COVID secure ways with the help of new technology. The EA’s Flood Action Campaign last Autumn helped ensure communities know how to check their flood risk and are better prepared using the three-point plan to PREPARE, ACT, SURVIVE. Over 1.4 million properties are signed up to receive free flood warnings.

Following the flooding in winter 2019/2020, government announced Property Flood Resilience (PFR) repair grants of up to £5,000 in affected areas to help eligible homes, charities and businesses become more flood resilient. The repair grants apply to those affected in district or unitary authorities that have 25 or more severely flooded properties. The most recent figures (held by Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government) show that over 47 district or unitary councils with over 7000 properties are eligible in England for the November 2019 and February 2020 PFR repair schemes.

In recognition of the challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic, both the 2019 and 2020 schemes have been extended by 9 months to give homeowners and businesses more time to carry out repairs and local authorities a greater period to process the grants.

Local authorities on the November scheme now have until 31 December 2021 to recover their costs whilst local authorities on the February scheme have until 1 July 2022.