Welcome to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee. I am pleased to say that today’s meeting will be on the subject of flood resilience. We will be hearing in the first panel from Philip Duffy of the Environment Agency, and then in the second panel from Minister Emma Hardy. Welcome, Mr Duffy. Thank you for joining us. Can you start by explaining the role of the Environment Agency with regard to flooding and your own role within it?

Thank you, Mr Perkins. My name is Philip Duffy. I am chief executive and accounting officer for the Environment Agency, a 1995 creation as an arm’s length body. We do three things on flooding. First, we are a tier 1 responder under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. We discharge that duty through our work with the local resilience fora and in responding to flood emergencies. Secondly, we are the principal infrastructure operator and builder of flood defences for coastal and fluvial flooding across the UK. There are currently about 270,000 assets around England that protect communities against flooding. Our third role, under the Flood and Water Management Act passed in April 2010, is to maintain a strategic overview of coastal and fluvial flooding. We discharge that strategic overview role in many ways, principally by modelling risk for the country—we recently issued our latest national flood risk assessment. Secondly, we publish a statutory flood and coastal risk strategy; the last was published in 2020 and the next is due in 2026. Other risk management authorities and actors working in flooding must have regard to that strategy in the discharge of their duties on flooding. Thirdly, we provide a wide range of support, alerts and warnings. We have a partnership with the Met Office to deliver that, the Flood Forecasting Centre. We also have a national hydrometry and telemetry service, which delivers flood warnings right around the country during flood events. We provide a significant level of advice and services, including training to local communities. We have online hubs for things like surface water flooding. We work closely with the relevant directors in local authorities to provide technical support for their duties. Last, as this Committee knows, we are also a statutory consultee for a variety of applications for the land use planning system. That is mostly when you are looking to build in one of our higher risk areas, particularly categories 2 and 3. We also have a role as a consultee in things like environmental impact assessments and some strategic planning where there could be an interface between land use and flood risk. That is an overview.

Lovely, thank you. You referred to the flood and coastal erosion strategy. Although, as you say, it will be strengthened or looked at again in 2026, we have heard evidence that it should be strengthened further and have specific binding targets in there, so that flood schemes move out of the political arena and there is more transparency about how things are chosen. Regarding the advice that you provide to Ministers, do you think that it should be strengthened further in line with the increasing risks that we are all aware of?

The first thing to say is that the 2020 strategy was quite a big evolution in thinking in England about flood risk. It was the first time that the Environment Agency had talked about the need to work closely with local communities on adaptation pathways, accepting that in some communities in some locations there are limits to what heavily engineered flood defences can do, and there was a need for thinking about alternatives such as natural flood management schemes. If you look at the action plan we issued following the 2020 strategy, you will see detailed milestones, including the £25 million investment we announced in 2023 in natural flood management schemes, which in turn has set up the first 38 such schemes across England. That has been an important milestone, and it also represented the first time we talked about flood risk and climate change together and how the two interrelate. On the next steps, we are doing this in quite a sequential order. The first step for us was to refresh the flood risk assessment with more credible climate science. It was a major undertaking to do that modelling, but it has enabled us to give much more detailed views on how climate science is interacting with flood risk across England, not only on things like classic river flooding but also summer storms and groundwater and coastal erosion. The next step for us in thinking about the strategy is to work out by a process called the long-term investment strategy scenarios what the nation needs to spend—I stress the nation, rather than the Treasury or taxpayer—to mitigate or maintain those risks either at a broadly common level or on a reducing pathway. We last did this four years ago. We concluded for the then Government that they had to spend around £1 billion a year to keep flood risk broadly flat, and that is in fact what the previous spending reviews did. You can see in the data that that has been borne out in the results. The third stage for us is then turning that into a strategy that sets out how to execute it. We have done a lot of work with the Government this year in the context of the spending review to look at how we might evolve our strategies for spending on flood defences. There are a couple of big shifts in that that might be worth flagging for the Committee. First, as we have been saying to the new Government over the last year, it is important to maintain your existing flood defences as well as to build new ones. It is greatly cheaper to maintain a current asset than to rebuild it after it has collapsed, causing damage to a community, and the balance of new construction versus maintenance or replacement of existing flood defences probably needs to shift. That is at the heart of the spending review. It will change how we are doing our flood risk profiling. The second thing that comes out of NaFRA2, which I think is quite striking, is that although the number of homes that run the risk of being flooded from a river remains broadly constant—albeit that some people may flood more often with climate change—the startling increase is in the number of homes that might face the risk of flooding from surface water. That number has increased to 4.6 million by 2050. Many of those homes are not in places people think of as having a flood risk; they are not necessarily next to a watercourse. It is an enormous challenge for all of us working in flood risk to work out how we respond to that and what kinds of measures you need to reduce risk to those households. That is where we are in the cycle that will feed into a new strategy next year. As part of that, we will look very closely at things like whether our models are coping with climate change. We saw over last winter that we had some failures in our modelling, so how do we adjust those models to cope with the changing climate? We are looking quite hard at our links to community groups and how we can have outreach, because tackling flooding is very much a team sport between us and local partners.

If I can stop you for a minute. I appreciate you going into that, but we are possibly moving on to other areas that we will be covering shortly. I just want to push you on whether there should be a statutory binding target within the strategy. Do you believe that we should have binding targets for the Government on the level of flood risk are willing for people to experience, and for them to have a priority list? We saw a similar approach when we visited the Netherlands recently. Do you think we should have statutory binding targets, or are you content simply with the approach that we are taking at the moment?

I think that we in the agency are unconvinced by that. I have also been to the Netherlands; I was there in November looking at how they do their flood defences. They have a statutory target that is based around the risk of death from flooding that a typical Dutch citizen experiences in the Netherlands in a year; that target is one in 100,000. They have a very low tolerance of flooding, which is not how we have operated our system historically. We have had more floods than they have had because of their topography and the risk to life they would face in that scenario. Rather than have a target like that, another way would be, via the modelling we are doing, to say, “Is the goal of the Government and Parliament to keep the risk constant or declining, or are you happy for it to increase over time?” You also have to think quite hard about how you would calibrate that target, because flooding is not just one thing. We have flooding in people’s gardens, where it is difficult to say it causes property damage; we have flooding up to people’s doors, which causes damp and water intrusion; and you have flooding right through a property, making it uninhabitable. They are different things. No doubt we will come on to that when we talk about property flood resilience, but in reality, we have to calibrate risk against all of those different scenarios. None of them is desirable, but they are different, and a single target that captures that complexity would be quite difficult to construct.

The FCERM strategy runs across Government Departments. You are very conscious of it within DEFRA as a result of your specific areas of responsibility. Some people we have heard from previously have concerns about the amount of house building that happens on floodplains, the impact of transport and other things. To what extent do you think that the FCERM strategy is central in the thought processes of other Government Departments, and what are you doing to make sure that they are all conscious of this?

In the last FCERM strategy, infrastructure protection was one of the key points—pointing out that it is not just about whether your home gets flooded; if your power supply gets cut off and you cannot travel that is equally serious. That is a significant interrelationship between infrastructure and flood risk. As I said to the Committee when I was in front of you last week, we have a pretty good track record in the planning system of getting either conditions or refusals on the grounds of flood risk accepted. There have been times when the answer has not been not to build the infrastructure; it has been to build the infrastructure, but you have to put a lot of defences around it. That will be true in areas like electrical supply, where there are fewer options to get the grid to where it needs to go and some have to cross floodplains, so we are pragmatic about those areas. You do rely on something that worries us, which is the degree to which businesses and other infrastructure providers are doing realistic costings on the level of damage they could experience from a flood event, and whether they should be doing more to self-help in dealing with the problems they face rather than expecting, essentially, taxpayer funding via the Environment Agency to fund those defences for them. There will never be quite enough money to do what we want to do and at some point we need people to think about how they can protect their companies and businesses. We are in dialogue with the major transport providers, Highways England, Network Rail, National Grid, with big scheme promoters like Sizewell C, Heathrow runway 3, to make sure that they are incorporating flood defences and flood management into their schemes at an early stage.

The Pitt review recommended that the Environment Agency assume strategic responsibility for all forms of flooding. If you will consider for me the Environment Agency’s place within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the questions as to the precedence DEFRA is given in the face of Government projects, with that in mind, do you still believe the Environment Agency is best placed to lead that role?

We have a very good track record of delivering against that strategic agenda. If you think about the progress we have made, even in the last five years—integrating climate forecasting, sounding the alarm about the infrastructure relationship, thinking about adaptation rather than just hard engineered defences, natural flood management, updating our forecasting, introducing summer forecasting with the Met Office—I think we have done a good job of getting that whole agenda moved forward. On the wider government, the truth about the EA is we talk not only to our colleagues in DEFRA but to other Government Departments just as much. We are deeply involved with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Transport in our work. We have a lot of joint work with Homes England and MHCLG on things like new towns and the Oxford-Cambridge arc, and in fact we work increasingly with devolved administrations on things like the development of Teesport and strategic sites in Greater Manchester. We are out there because we are a national body. We work in local areas up and down England and that gives us a unique perspective on the range of issues we are facing. Also, through our permitting system and through our role as statutory consultees, we have a degree of hard influence on decision making. We use that sparingly and try to come up with solutions rather than block things, but we have used it to good effect in certain areas, so I feel pretty confident about our ability to discharge those duties. The one area where I think we all need to stop and reflect is summer flooding and surface water flooding. You will know that the other local lead flood authorities, predominantly local government authorities, in some areas are struggling for resources. They have the levers rather than the EA because they are the roads and highways authority and they are also responsible for green spaces, parks and local planning. Making sense of hydrology and making good decisions every day on that is difficult. You have to become alive to these risks—and I very much am. Every time I go around the country, I am looking at road junctions and parks and thinking, “This is not engineered properly. We could do better than this,” so I feel there is something there. We have done some work increasing our training offer for local government. We have run some seminars and we have a new website on surface water flooding. We are providing technical support to some authorities, but that is an area where we need to redouble our efforts in the next period.

Thank you. I certainly agree on the pluvial flooding issue. You mentioned when you introduced yourself that the Environment Agency is a tier 1 responder, that you are a principal builder and operator of flood defences, and that you have strategic overview for coastal and fluvial flooding but not pluvial flooding. A lot of this sounds much more like an operational level headquarters agency rather than a strategic level agency. What changes do you think are needed that would help you to have that strategic level influence? You mentioned talking to other agencies, but you are not above those agencies—if anything, you are subordinate to them.

With hydrology, the technical facts matter. You cannot busk whether something will flood or how groundwater works. You know the analysis, it shows what is happening. Anyone making policy in the world of floods, whether that is in DEFRA or elsewhere, needs to listen and have had technical advice and modelling. The people who have the expertise to do that modelling are predominantly in the Environment Agency and a bit in the Met Office. Between us we provide that service for the country. It is computationally difficult and requires a significant amount of analysis to make that credible. Whoever does the decision making about the budget and the priorities and all those things that we discuss with Minister Hardy and her team, they will need to have strong technical support from people who understand that, and those people work in the Environment Agency. Secondly, I find no shortage of people who want to hear from us about the risks they are facing in all the projects they are running. There is pretty much an open door between the agency and local government, mayoralties and scheme promoters. Of course, because of our statutory role, particularly in permitting, people do need to come to talk to us to acquire the permits they need to take those works forward. I think it is more of a partnership relationship in some of those key developments, rather than a sort of parent-child relationship. Last, setting budgets, balancing how much money is available for the country and setting the policy framework are of course matters for elected politicians, not for the heads of an arm’s length agency, but we work closely with our colleagues in DEFRA on those issues. An example of that is a recent consultation on the funding formula, where we were arguing for a number of things with DEFRA, such as less bureaucracy at the lower end and more control at the higher end, greater facilitation of natural flood management, and rethinking co-financing to make it work for more deprived and cash-strapped communities in particular. I think we were listened to on those points, and we are happy with where that document ended up. I do not particularly feel we have lost influence on these issues. What we need to do, though, is to continue to argue our case from a position of technical knowledge, and that is what we will do.

Thank you. That leads me on nicely to my next question. The Committee has heard suggestions that a single overarching authority on flooding could improve public clarity and cross-system co-ordination. What is your view on that proposal, and would such a model strengthen existing flood responsibilities?

When you deal with a flood incident, you have to remember that it is not just a hydrological incident. It is a social and economic incident with a strong humanitarian dimension. A lot of the time when I have been to see people who have been flooded, the impact on them personally, on their mental health and wellbeing, is devastating. Recovery often requires complex multi-agency responses involving social services, housing authorities and the police. I am struggling to see how an agency could combine what we do, as technical and environmental management, with that broader social side. I am a bit sceptical about that. I do think, though—you have heard this in evidence here—that there is a need for more focus on how we help people during an incident and after an incident, to get the help they need. No doubt you will come on to the phone numbers and the contact points and the complexity of that. We have a split system. That has come up in the Floods Resilience Taskforce that Minister Hardy is chairing. There could be room for more harmonisation around that. Could we simplify how you get help? Could we be clear on how we support people in those responses? Could we do more exercises with local government on some of those areas? We are members of the local resilience fora and we turn up at all of them. They have just received additional funding for this year from MHCLG to improve their work, their strengths and their capability. That is very welcome. Some of them are superb at this because they live with river flooding all the time; they understand it very well and they know their communities well. For others it is a slightly more unusual problem which they have not traditionally worked with. So I think there is a case for making sure that the Environment Agency and the LRFs are really on top of their planning and response and have a consistent level of response for flooding. We are thinking a lot clearer going into the summer flooding period now. We have seen the horrific events in Texas and there were serious events in Paris a few weeks ago. We are thinking about how we communicate effectively on the climate risk and what people need to do in the event of severe summer flooding. What are the key messages? Who gives those messages and how credible are they? That needs real focus, and we will work closely on that with the Met Office and our colleagues in the Flood Resilience Taskforce.

Mr Duffy, when will we be getting formal clarification of the funding for the flood alleviation scheme for the Wembley Brook in my constituency?

I do not know about the Wembley Brook.

But you will do shortly, I am sure, and you will write to me to tell me.

Sure. I will write to you on that. Would it be helpful, Mr Gardiner, if I say a bit about where we are with the allocation of funding more generally? Is that useful?

It will probably be useful for somebody else who will ask you a question on that, but not for me. You rightly mentioned the mental health impact being devastating on people. That is why the Wembley Brook project—I am grateful to your officers for coming last month to meet me there and to work with local residents—needs to be progressed.

Okay. I hear that.

I understand it has been approved in principle, but the funding has not yet been formally allocated. I want to ask you about assets, and you touched on this already in your response to the Chair. The EA-managed high consequence assets were not at the required standard. The 94.5% that was agreed last year was down to 92.2%. If you look across the whole of the network, we are talking of a drop from 97.9% just six years ago to 92.6%, so over a 5% drop. It was interesting that you said at the beginning of your remarks to the Chair that we had to make a decision: do we want to reduce the risk or keep it roughly the same, or do we want to let it slide? Well, it seems that at the moment, we are not taking a decision on that. It is just happening. It is sliding. The first thing is about those degrading assets that are not in the required—it does say “required”—condition not being repaired due to lack of funding. That is revenue funding. Do you want a recommendation from this Committee, which would chime with what the Public Accounts Committee said in its report, that you should have flexibility to use any capital underspend where you have not been able to expend the full amount and transfer that to your revenue budget, so you could do maintenance?

Mr Gardiner, you are right, there has been a long-term decline in the condition of the assets. The modelling we did about what is the optimum level in value for money says that around 98% should be in good condition because that is the balance between reducing all costs and the risk of failure and the right value for money pathway. Actually, the issue is a combination of not having enough revenue funding to fund this maintenance, because it is revenue funding rather than capital, and having had record-breaking weather which has damaged our assets. A lot of our embankments have been damaged by having such high water levels, for example. We have been prioritising what we call high consequence assets—the ones that essentially protect homes and businesses. They have been prioritised first. There is some good news. With the agreement of DEFRA, we allocated £72 million for asset maintenance for this year, 2025-26, on top of the baseline of £215 million that we had. That has had a result and has slightly raised the performance nearer to 93%. We are at 92.8% as of today, in good high consequence assets. If you look at the shape of the spending review, we have looked at where the entire asset base needs replacement, which could be capitalised, rather than simply doing routine maintenance, which is clearly RDEL. That gives us the scope to do more asset replacement and maintain those assets at around the 93% level going into the next period. I would like more flexibility and more RDEL to make these assets stronger, but suspect I am not going to get it, Mr Gardiner, because that is not how the public finances operate. In the meantime, I can assure you we are focusing all of our efforts on getting us as high as possible. We are also making sure that the really critical things like the barriers you will have seen around the country in York, Hull and London, are being maintained. We have also raised our game through a thing called failure mode and effects analysis, looking at all the ways in which we could have a problem with our key high consequence assets and making sure that we are match fit and exercised to fix those problems.

If we can just disaggregate for a minute, can you give us the percentage for the high consequence assets and for the assets as a whole?

I do not have that number, but it is very much higher than 92.8%. I can write to you with a breakdown if that is useful.

Thank you. I want to look at the capital funding programme for flood defence that you touched on in your remarks to the Chair at the beginning. Severe weather from climate change is impacting on flood defences, and defences that were deemed adequate in the past are increasingly not as we go forward, because of storm surge swell and fluvial volume increasing. How many of your assets—let’s just focus on high consequence assets here—are in good condition against 100% for what they were expected to deliver when they were new, and secondly, against what climate change will demand of them in the next five to 10 years?

We do not cut our numbers quite like that. You are nevertheless correct.

But those are what we need, aren’t they?

It will vary, is the answer, and you are right that in some places, in some watercourses, the current level of protection will be inadequate. If you look at the delta in NaFRA2 on fluvial flooding and the modest increases there, that is largely accounted for by the fact that we do not assume we will upgrade the defences, so more people will be at risk because there will be more rain and higher water levels. There is a related problem, as we saw in south Manchester on the Mersey on new year’s day this year, unfortunately, where there was a combination of record-breaking weather. The Mersey was 50 centimetres higher than its previous highest recorded level. It is a large river and that is a lot of water. That led to the collapse of an embankment that caused severe flooding and could have caused loss of life had it not happened in the early hours of the morning. That combination of events is really worrying. To fix that we need to make sure our modelling understands where we have to upgrade the defences. For example in our work on the Thames, including the defences right outside this building, we know we have to raise the common defence standard between now and 2070, and we are thinking about how we do that. We will do that also on most of the main strategic rivers. There is a relationship between those two things. The NaFRA modelling assumes that no new flood defences are built, so the point of departure is, “With this level of flood defences, what would then happen?” and the answer is more people would flood more often, but we have choices about that and we can change that in various ways. The other thing I need to say is that some of our major defences—the Humber, the Lincolnshire coast, parts of our London defences—will be life expired in the course of this century and will require replacement, and the replacement probably cannot be like for like. It will need to be higher, more engineered and more costly. We will have to work quite closely with communities to help people to understand what that will look and feel like. For example, if we decide to raise the common defences in London, that will mean that there are choices about how to access the river, how you see the river and how you experience the river. If you want to see what that would look like in reality, you can take a look at what is going on currently in Woolwich, where we are trying to plan with the authority how you put flood defence in at a higher level without a barrier, because they are below the barrier level. That is a quite hard set of messages that we have to work through across the system, but you are right that there is a relationship between maintenance and climate change.

The Public Accounts Committee said in its report that you as an agency were forecasting that you would provide protection for at least 40% fewer properties than planned. The recommendation in the Treasury minute response was that the agency should include a robust forecast of the number of properties that will be better protected by 2027 and they specified that that should include properties in rural communities. Is that robust forecast detailing numbers of properties taking account of all the risks that have been identified; is that number of properties something that you are now able to deliver?

There are two parts to that. There is looking back and looking forward. Looking back, the NAO was correct to say that the outturn from the previous floods programme was around 40% lower than the forecast. That is in the main, but not exclusively, due to high inflation, since the agency has a fixed cash budget and many things we are buying, particularly fuel, concrete and steel, increased in price dramatically over that period. There are other factors too.

Does that not mean that you should be going for soft green engineering rather than concrete and steel wherever possible?

Quite possibly, Mr Gardiner. That is a very good point. Looking forward, of course we have a slightly different programme in future. The national infrastructure strategy that was published recently by the Government talks about roughly 840,000 properties benefiting from a 10-year programme. That is not quite a like-for-like metric because some of those properties will have their existing defences replaced over the period, but that gives you a sense of the sort of target we would want robustly over the next decade from the programme. That is, of course, barring massive inflationary shocks like we saw with the invasion of Ukraine, but that is the kind of ballpark we are in.

Mr Duffy, you have probably touched on this in one of the answers you gave to the Chairman, but you mentioned the need to change the balance between the capital spend and the revenue spend to maintain the structures we have now. Does that mean that you need your funding from the Government to change from capital to revenue? Does it simply mean that you need more flexibility within your existing budgets to decide what your priority should be in a particular year. How do you see that balance being shifted? How much change do you need to see from capital to revenue to achieve what you are aiming to achieve?

We are seeing that shift. For this year, there was a tactical switch of £72 million into maintenance from the capital programme. To give you a sense of where we are with the numbers, the Government have announced funding for us for the next three years, 2026 to 2029. That is £4.2 billion for flood defences, £2.7 billion of capital and £1.5 billion of resource, which is a shift in balance across those areas. That is necessary to maintain the level of warning service we provide and to do more maintenance. With those resources, though, we probably will not get back to 98%. That is a bit beyond our reach.

That improves the situation, I suppose, for people where there are already flood defences, but they need to be strengthened or maintained or whatever. What does that do to your programme for the people who have no flood defence at present and have been promised flood defences? If there is that shift, what kind of cuts are you going to have to make in future programming, or indeed the programming promised at present?

It is very important when you have a scheme that is in the advanced stages of planning that you do not suddenly cancel it. To be clear, if a scheme has a full business case or is in construction, it will continue from the previous programme. That is to give reassurance to people who may have those in their constituencies. Looking forward, we will recast the programme. We will look at this and at some communities that are prone to very frequent flooding where an engineered solution would be prohibitively expensive or just look very strange, because it would consist of extremely high walls or make life in that community very difficult. I have talked to a lot of Members of Parliament about those areas. There are options. We will probably come on to property flood resilience. It is not an answer for everyone and everywhere, but it might help. We are also looking at things like natural flood management options, which can be beneficial. They can slow the flow, reduce the intensity of flood and bring other co-benefits for communities as well. That might be an option in certain areas. We are making sure that we have shaken the tree for any options we can find—things like more flood storage ponds, on-farm storage ponds. Are there other ideas we can do in a more disseminated way that could give co-benefits, for example for farm irrigation? There are quite a lot of ideas out there that we are trying to work on with communities. I do not think anyone in the EA wants to say no to a community that faces regular flooding. It is a horrible thing to go through. I just want to say a word about the cost-benefit ratio as well, because I know that comes up quite a lot. It may be true that there are communities where it would be cheaper to buy up the houses than defend them, but a community is not just a set of house prices. It is a place, a community, an economy. I think all of us in the agency are conscious of that and we want to find solutions for those communities, so we try not to be too econometric about some of this.

One other way of improving the situation, of course, is to look at the whole picture. The EA is not the only body that has flood defences under its control. What collaboration do you have with other flood defence agencies—whether it is local authorities or whatever it happens to be—in ensuring that we get the best value for money by ensuring that you are not doing standalone schemes or that you are not maintaining, say, your assets while somebody else is not maintaining their assets? What is the level of collaboration? I think that Cameron pointed this out earlier. As a strategic body, what work is there with others?

That is a great question, and a lot is under way on that. Over the last period, we had a shift. Most of the defences were previously built by us or by our predecessor organisations—the Thames Barrier is owned by us and run by us—and for the very high consequences, very risky things that might be worth doing, but we are increasingly seeing local government delivering more of our flood schemes and they are doing it extremely well, if I may say so. An example is Portsmouth and Southsea, which is a local authority scheme, really well run. We have seen fantastic work in Leeds with the Leeds flood alleviation scheme, which was a local authority-delivered scheme. We want to work in partnership with authorities that have ideas for that and often it can be a really good partnership. We have the capital, and they can maintain and that may actually work better for everyone and for the taxpayer. That is an example that we are quite keen to see repeated. We have some good work under way currently in places like Derby with Our City Our River, which is a Derby Council promoted scheme. There is some very good collaboration there. Secondly, risk management authorities are important. Clearly, in rural areas it is the internal drainage boards that have faced significant financial pressures and the same problems we face with things like rural embankments being damaged through high water and with climate change. They have had more money from the Government, and we are now trying to strengthen our relationship with them, working out who is doing what across the assets and can we help them with pumping and technical equipment and water? Water companies are important for that. In the Manchester integrated water management plan, United Utilities are playing a big role in doing things in its water management that help us with flood risk. That way of thinking, that partnership thinking is important. Yesterday we published our new corporate strategy. One of our six principles for the EA is being better partners and recognising that, because water is complex and multifaceted, success for us will often look like being a fantastic partner and we will not do the work. Others will do the work, but we will help.

Is there a full register of all of the anti-flood assets across all of the various bodies? If not, is there any work being done to achieve that?

Your colleagues in the Public Accounts Committee follow this closely, but we have had our accounts qualified in previous years because of problems with data on the overall number of flood assets that exist across the country. The number I am using today is 270,000 and we are putting a huge amount of effort and money into improving that register. Quite often with flood defences there are lots of changes of ownership, a lot of custom and practice on who maintains an asset, who has access to an asset, who owns an asset, and so on. Quite rightly, they are then saying, “Well, where are the title deeds? Who is actually in charge of this asset?” We are trying to work that through, and that has come a long way. You want a consistent geospatially-enabled map of these assets that gives you the quality you need to work out where your maintenance projects need to be. It would also open up the prospect of doing some swaps sometimes. We could swap between us, a water company, a local authority so we have the optimised packet of ownership. That is really important.

Just on that, Mr Duffy, neither you nor local authorities actually have the power to find out who is responsible for those flood defences and who owns them. Would it be helpful to have a recommendation from this Committee that gave you and local authorities the authority, the power, to know who actually has those?

Possibly. I was dealing with a case recently in East Yorkshire about the interface between the water company, us, the Canal & River Trust. All this happened in the early 1980s and there were no records kept, no one knew. What you are really arguing about is cost, aren’t you, saying, “Who is actually going to take this on and keep it mowed, keep it maintained?”

Some repairs have been done at the Wembley Brook and nobody can say who has actually done them. We know it is TfL, but it will not own up to it.

Also, you have to make sure that if you start maintaining it, you are capable of handling the legal liability for that maintenance, you have the right permit structure for it, and you can keep it going on an ongoing basis. I am not sure it is the power. I think it might be about the money and the precedent that is causing some of these problems.

I have a few questions on planning and flood risk. In Mid Bedfordshire, houses in the village of Malden have been reclassified as being on floodplain following significant development upslope from them. I think that is something that people have experienced across the country. Does the Environment Agency believe the current planning framework does enough to prevent inappropriate development in flood-prone areas?

I have asked for information about your constituency in particular. We are not aware of construction in the functional floodplain in your constituency, but if you have any evidence of that we would look at it. It may be to do with surface water runoff in the case you are describing. There is also no main river in your constituency, so we are not actually the relevant risk management authority. It would be the local lead flood authority. More generally, we can see examples in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire of construction taking place in what we would call flood zone 3, which would be floodplain. We have generally managed to negotiate mitigations for that, but that requires you to raise the properties above the floodplain so that they do not flood. That is an expensive thing to do, but might be the right thing to do. Fortunately we have been successful in those and we are confident that has not increased the flood risk to other properties through our flood risk assessment process. I said last Monday, Mr Stephenson, that in general we have a good track record of getting our views heard by local planning authorities. There were just over 50 cases in the first quarter of this year where that was not the case: 40 were cases where the construction went ahead against our advice and 11 were cases where construction went ahead but we had asked for conditions, particularly things like evacuation plans, that were not put in the planning advice. That is a worry because we have seen the impact of risk to life of not having adequate plans if you are living in a home that is much at risk of flooding.

Thank you. My second question follows on from the questioning by Mr Thomas. I noted here that you said that you have a degree of hard influence but you use it sparingly. How often—and you may have answered this but maybe I am picking a bit—is the Environment Agency’s advice on a flood risk overruled by planning authorities? Would the agency support stronger powers, such as a statutory right of a veto when you see that there is a specific risk from flooding and the planning authorities are just continuing to approve development?

Overwhelmingly we are listened to. To give you some numbers, if that is helpful, in the period between calendar years 2016-17 and 2023-24, there were 2,649 properties constructed in England against the advice of the Environment Agency. In the year 2023-24, there were 89 homes constructed against our advice. That is quite a small proportion of the overall level of homes. Regarding the roughly 10,000 applications on which we comment a year, last year we had 234 objections where we were concerned about the application but we reached a resolution with the local planning authority. That is the side of the system working. We raise objections when we are concerned and we are generally listened to. In the last quarter we were left with only 51 applications that were not satisfactorily resolved. It does happen but not on a huge scale. There is a little nuance of complexity that we have to be aware of.

We may talk about a small proportion, so just 51 applications, but these are people’s homes and people’s lives. People will move into these homes, and it is reasonably foreseeable, from your analysis, that they will be flooded. In those cases, would you like the agency to have some sort of veto so that it is resolved and people do not move into homes knowing that there is a high risk of flooding?

I think you have to respect the role of the planning authority as the ultimate decision maker. There can be justifications for this. For example, the use of the property might be not as a permanent residence. It could be that there are flood defences planned that we are not aware of and cannot take into account. It could be that there is an important overriding public imperative for that development to go ahead. I think it would be a bit peremptory of us to say you could never build against our advice. Clearly, a planning authority takes a risk if they go ahead against our advice and that risk is on them. They are the stewards of their community, not the Environment Agency. It does not happen particularly often, but I would be nervous about undermining the democratic legitimacy of a local planning authority. That is an important principle.

I totally understand. This is my final question, Chair. I know we are under pressure for time. You talked about negotiating conditions in applications. One of the concerns, certainly that my residents have, is that conditions in planning applications are often not followed up. Do you see that there is a role for the Environment Agency to make sure that these conditions are actually built out when permission is given and houses are built? Do you see that as your responsibility to protect those houses to make sure the conditions have been built out?

I think that many of my colleagues at the agency would very much share your concern about developers promising one thing and not delivering what they promised. We very much welcome the strengthening of coverage of sustainable urban drainage systems in the latest iteration of the National Planning Policy Framework. We wish to see the SuDS obligation that was in the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act commenced. Section 3 has not been commenced yet. We are really worried about things like water consumption standards being met and making sure they are met before we release water credits, for example, so you are making a very valid point there. Enforcement of broadbrush planning restrictions can be difficult, and difficult for authorities as well, particularly when you are living in areas of extremely high flood risk. I can give examples where we insist there are no bedrooms on the ground floor, for example, and is that being consistently applied. I think there is a broader issue about the building control regime whether that is actually working currently, rather than for us. However, you are right, there is a risk of developers not living or abiding by the conditions we set.

Thank you for coming to give evidence to the Select Committee today, Mr Duffy. I know you have a very difficult job, so I do appreciate you coming along. I have a few more questions on planning and flood risk. We have heard about the sustainable urban drainage systems, and we have heard that they are often poorly delivered and sometimes not maintained. Do you think the current system is working and have you seen year on year better engineered, sustainable urban drainage systems? The developers that I have worked with in Scotland tend to be thoughtful about the way they go about these. Are you seeing an improvement in the specifications? Do you think that will continue to improve or the contrary?

I do not think I have any evidence to give about whether overall they are getting better or worse. A number of serious pollution incidents we have seen, and flooding risks, have come from poorly maintained urban drains, that is true. They are generally of an earlier vintage and have not been maintained properly. The latest planning policy framework is stipulating they should be incorporated into modern housing design. We are currently working with most of the very large housing schemes, through Homes England and through the New Towns Taskforce, to try to incorporate better nature design and urban drainage from the start into the sites, which gives me some confidence that we are doing better in professionalising these areas. A slightly trickier problem is not so much in the housing estate world but in urban design, where we do see serious problems, particularly where there is no river nearby, people do not think of the area as being a particularly high-risk location.

Do you think the Environment Agency should have a bigger role going forward, in enforcing maintenance of sustainable urban drainage systems?

We have argued that it should be a statutory requirement and that if you do not do that you are putting unfair pressure on water companies and raising the risk of sewage pollution. We do not have control of the house building process to insist that these measures are taken into account and the cost of this borne by the housing builder. There is that aspect of it. Recently we have strengthened our support for local government as planning authorities in asking what does good urban drainage look like and what are the design solutions? There is no shortage of guidance out there. If you went to the Netherlands with the Chair you will have seen they have done a lot of work on how you reduce risk in low-lying areas like Rotterdam. We are not quite seeing that consistent approach being taken to things like highways, park design, public space design, and that is something we definitely can do. I think there is a desire from many planning authorities to do better on this. A lot of the mayors are talking about this. We have recently seen Mayor Khan in London talk about climate resilience and adaptation and making that central to the design codes he wants London to be built under, so there are willing partners in this enterprise for us out there.

Thank you. What approach does the Environment Agency play in embedding property flood resilience within building regulations and planning policy, particularly the existing housing stock, and how can this approach be improved, enhance uptake and effectiveness?

There is clearly an important role for property flood resilience. I just want to say a word of caution about it. We talked earlier about the psychological consequences. There are people who are vulnerable for whom living in a home where they have to adopt and apply property flood resilience is probably not suitable housing for them in the medium term. I think that is an important point to make. We are working under the Floods Resilience Taskforce with the Cabinet Office on getting a better register of vulnerable people across the UK, so they can be flagged. There may be questions about whether they are appropriately housed, given that they may face very serious flood risk, even if they do have PFR. PFR is part of our product offer but there are barriers to its deployment. Recently, Minister Hardy commissioned Peter Bonfield to review with the EA how we can improve the offer on property flood resilience. The sort of barriers I am talking about is things like: do you have standardised products that are cost effective? Are people being overcharged? Do the products on the market work and have they been properly tested? Are they regularly incorporated in the right planning conditions for the right zones? You do not want to go ahead and build on a fully functional floodplain with PFR. PFR is used on the margin, where we have very high flood risk. How do you maintain and quality assure over time the PFR equipment? That is a subset of a bigger problem in the UK about the quality of construction materials and oversight, and whether we have enough supply chain to do this work at scale, which Peter Bonfield is looking at. That is an important aspect of thinking about how we can be more effective. On the scale of yield, I have a number I want to share with you on property flood resilience. We have been modelling how much of a role it should play. In the current long-term investment scenarios, which are now a bit dated, we think about 200,000 homes—about 16% of those at risk of flooding under the previous modelling—could benefit from PFR. That is a chunk that would be worth doing if the PFR was affordable and important. We are just doing a couple of pilots. We have done these 25 projects under the innovation programme, looking at how we can make these work better. A key finding for me has been it is very difficult to retrofit on historic properties and there are trade-offs to be made between things like conservation status and PFR—for example ripping out an historic door and putting a new door in has a consequence for the planning authority. There is a bit more fine-grained detail that I think Peter Bonfield’s report will get us into about how to make this market work better.

We have heard again and again from residents that they do not know who to contact during a flood, and even when they do manage to contact someone, they are bounced from one agency to another. What responsibility does the Environment Agency take for the ongoing confusion around this and what is it doing to address the problem?

I do think it is an issue. It has been looked at previously, but it is an issue. Given that there may be members of the public and your constituents watching this evidence, we should be clear that, if you have flooding coming into your property and there is risk to your life, you should ring 999. I want to be very clear about that. That is the answer. If you are having flooding and you are in an emergency call 999. After that it gets more complex and there is an issue for us to look at—and we will look at it. We have the Floodline service—a GB service with our partners, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and Natural Resources Wales—which can provide advice about flood risk in your area and where to go for information if you are thinking about being at risk of flooding, and a whole lot of guidance about how you should respond or cope with flooding, including your insurance options. That number is 03459881188. But—and this is a big issue—if you have been flooded, generally speaking we cannot provide the support you need. We are not able to provide you with housing support or housing advice, temporary accommodation—the whole range of things that you may need if you been flooded, which actually come from a local authority. Where the confusion comes in is, “Well, I have been flooded. EA are the floods people. Can they help?” and often they cannot. That is an area we are looking at. Could you integrate those services? The principal issue there is how you deal with a spike in demand during a major flood incident and how you provide a service that is reliable. I do not think it is a huge surprise that when we have a major flood incident, we have thousands of calls across our system and coping with that surge is quite operationally challenging for us.

Would you support the creation of a national flood incident reporting line—a first clear first port of call for anyone? I presume they could divert to the various places, but we need a number.

It would need to work. You could not have people who are desperate not getting through to a phone line, so you have to make sure it would work. Also, you have to make sure that the local authorities are involved—they are the housing authority, they have the support for temporary accommodation, they can help you with practical issues on the ground and they will be connected to local social services, particularly for the elderly or the vulnerable. That is quite a high bar to cross, but we are looking at the options to make that simpler and easier for people when they have been flooded, which is the main area of concern.

What is the alternative that gives people clarity?

The current position today is if you are in an emergency ring 999. If you want advice about flooding more generally, call Floodline wherever you are in GB. If you have been flooded, call your local authority. That is the current answer. The question is: could you make that better? Possibly you could if the service worked. We last looked at this in detail when we translated the Floodline service a few years ago. We thought it was impractical to cover the sheer range of issues that people who have been flooded need to do. If you look at how the local resilience fora operate, they generally have an emergency services lead during the actual incident because we are dealing with risk to life, and they transition to one of the social directors of the authority for the recovery phase. That is logical because the support that you need when you have been flooded is not what we do; it is about what local government does. That is quite a hard trade-off to make that feel seamless for communities. We put out flood information officers in flooded communities. All of my desk-based staff have second jobs. They go out as volunteers to talk to communities that have been flooded to make sure that, if you have been flooded, someone will come and point out where you go for support and advice. We are doing our best to make sure we have joined that up at the local level.

So many local flood groups, wardens and volunteers told us that they feel unsupported and under-resourced. What is the EA doing to help those community responders?

Yes, I think that is a factor. I have mentioned before that the local resilience fora have had more funding from MHCLG, but the community groups particularly are brilliant colleagues at the National Flood Forum. They are a very small group, operating with not a lot of resources. The question for us is: can we get other people to help finance the support or put more breadth into the operations of groups like the flood fora? We have been partnering up recently with Communities Prepared as a group, which has a wider range of sponsors and funding, and we are thinking about whether there are things that we can do with the Red Cross that would reach a broader range of communities? The existing flood community groups are brilliant where there are frequently flooded river communities. They really understand because they work well. They do not have the depth of penetration for communities who do not think they are at risk of flooding, so I think there is a genuine issue there around the country that we need to address.

Mr Duffy, thank you very much indeed for your evidence today. We will bring the first panel to a close and the sitting is suspended. Witnesses: Emma Hardy MP and Dr Sebastian Catovsky.

Welcome back, everyone, to the second of today’s panels on flood resilience. I am very pleased to be joined by Minister Emma Hardy. Alongside being the Minister responsible for water, she is, like many of us, a Member of Parliament in an area that has been hit by flooding, so she is very conscious of many of the issues we are going to raise. We will start with Alison Griffiths.

Welcome, Minister Hardy. As you will already know, flooding is one of the most immediate and growing climate risks facing the UK. What is the Government’s approach to managing this threat and ensuring the country is genuinely prepared for the longer term risks?

Yes, I absolutely agree with you on that. How are decisions on infrastructure, housing and land use aligned with future flood risks?

Avoid floodplain, do you mean?

I absolutely agree with everything you have just said. It is certainly an issue in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton with our own district council, but are you looking to legislate for that? What will change between what exists now and how you look to the future?

You talked about the role of district councils but, in truth, you have not said anything that specifically will change from what happens today. I know we have a fantastic planning team locally and I am sure you have too. What will change in the imperative going forward?

Yes, it is certainly an issue in my constituency. What structures are in place to ensure that flood adaptation remains a priority across the Government?

Yes. My constituency is quite similar to yours in that it is a coastal constituency. The impact of sewage is felt acutely in my constituency. Thank you.

Minister, Baroness Brown came before this Committee as the chair of the Committee on Climate Change’s adaptation sub-committee, and said that the UK is not adequately prepared for flooding and the public are largely unaware of Government targets or what they mean for individual households. Do you recognise that?

In response to the Public Accounts Committee’s report at the end of last year, DEFRA said it would “develop a measure which shows the net change in the number of properties at risk from flooding in order to give the true picture of England’s resilience to future flood and coastal erosion risk and set a target for the net change it aims to achieve”. Have you done that?

The Government always come out with these figures, “Because we are doing this, we will protect this many more properties,” but it is not a net figure. They do not say, “In the UK as a whole, 52,000 more properties will be protected,” because it does not take account of those properties that have now come into flood risk and are vulnerable. Is that correct?

Is that why the Public Accounts Committee said that you need to talk about the number of people and the number of houses that are actually affected here? Otherwise, you give us a gobbet statistic, “52,000 properties will be better protected as a result of what we are doing,” but 100,000 people might now be in greater danger of being flooded.

I want to drill down on this because the Public Accounts Committee was driving at this. Information should be clearly available from DEFRA about the number of properties in England as a whole that are at risk from flooding. It does not matter whether it is fluvial, pluvial or coastal, but just that are at risk. Then, as you progress schemes, that risk would be adjusted but, indeed, as climate change adversely affects those properties, it may be adjusted downwards inasmuch as you are working to try to address it in the other direction.

One change in the new national flood risk assessment is that the Environment Agency is able to update it much more regularly, doing exactly as you have just said, and so it will be possible for us to look over time at how flood risk is changing. With the previous flood risk assessment, we were not able to do that. We now have a much more dynamic risk assessment that will allow us to look at investment that is going in but also where development might go in and the impacts of climate change.

Indeed, where we are building homes on floodplains still.

Yes.

Great. It seems we have been talking about the Pitt review for a long time. How many of the 92 recommendations that the Pitt review made have now been implemented?

Why do we still, 15 years on, not have a unified framework to clarify the responsibilities for managing all sources of flooding, as the Pitt review called for? We still heard from all the witnesses that came before this Committee that it is a fragmented system with no overall responsibility and that is a huge part of the problem of co-ordination.

The EA does not have the responsibility, does it? It is not responsible overall. The Pitt review called not for an overview but for a unified framework and we are lacking that.

We have heard that overlapping responsibilities continue to confuse the agencies and the communities and they hinder the effective delivery of flood measures. This needs sorting out. You can say that that is the existing system and that these people have this responsibility and those people have that responsibility, but that is the problem. Every witness who has come before us has been saying this and yet the Government for 15 years—I know it has not been you for 15 years—has failed to implement the central recommendation of the Pitt review, which was to get this sorted.

You say contact 999, but that leads to another problem and that is that the fire service has no statutory responsibility for flooding in England. It does in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but not in England. If you call 999, you get the fire service, which does not have the statutory responsibility. They do an amazing job and we all recognise that, but because they do not have the statutory responsibility, they do not have a budget for training and so they cannot train on this stuff.

Would it add grist to your mill if this Committee made a recommendation to that effect?

That is good enough for me. I feel a Philip Dunne moment coming on, Chair, because the former Chair of this Committee spent so many years focused on SuDS and the final question that I want to turn to is about SuDS. I noticed in the Government’s response to the Public Accounts Committee that it said, “DEFRA has published the review of skills gap and training requirements for the implementation of SuDS and schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act (2010)”. In fact, that skills review was completed in 2023. I also noticed from your recent Westminster Hall debate a subtle shift in tone. You said there you were considering whether to strengthen the current planning-led approach or to commence schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, with a final decision expected soon. After 15 years of that schedule to that Act laying unimplemented, are you now telling us that it will not be implemented or will it?

There must be a reason this has not been implemented for 15 years. Why else does the Government delay something for 15 years that everybody is saying we need to do? You have championed it. The previous Chair of the Committee has championed it. We have all talked about the importance of it. Is this just money? Is this just saying, “If we do it that way, it will be too expensive and we need to cut this”?

Minister, as you will know, the National Infrastructure Commission recommended a minimum of £1.5 billion per year to manage flood risk effectively. The Government have committed £7.9 billion over 10 years to flood resilience. Given the disparity in the figures, how confident are the Government that this level of funding is sufficient?

Thank you, Minister. That is a pretty unequivocal answer. It is clear to see your confidence. Can I pick you up on some phrases you used there, though? I am interested to know how you respond to analysis by Flooded People UK that, in its view, average annual investment has been cut because the previous capital programme committed £5.6 billion over six years—£933 million a year on average. We have referred to £7.9 billion over 10 years, which is less annually. It also highlights that that figure includes costs for large-scale maintenance that were previously accounted for separately. Should my constituents feel misled by DEFRA’s claims of record investment and the largest in history?

Do you have any further response to that analysis from Flooded People UK?

Moving on, of the £2.6 billion pledged for flood defences in 2026, £25 million was allocated specifically to natural flood management. Could you outline to the Committee what steps you might be planning to take to secure a better balance in the future between traditional capital defences and adaptive nature-based solutions?

It sounds like quite a technical issue around whether you are moving from one risk band to another, but it makes a huge difference. It stacks the dice against natural flood management. By removing that requirement, in our view, we will see many more natural flood management schemes becoming part of the main programme rather than as a separate bespoke fund. Having the commitment to fund the first £3 million, as the Minister said, will also help. The consultation is open for a couple more weeks and so people can still respond. It is proposing a range of ways that we can remove some of the blockers to using natural flood management.

Without wanting to guess the outcome of the consultation, it sounds like you would expect that potentially to have a qualitatively different level of outcome for natural flood defences, significantly changing the number of them.

Yes, definitely. Mr Duffy talked about the shape of the new programme. It will look and feel very different, not just in natural flood management, but in a shift towards more maintenance, away from just building new defences. We will also see a greater range of alternative solutions, including property level resilience. The whole shape of the new 10-year programme will look and feel different from the previous programme.

We have had submissions to this inquiry that competitive bidding processes may disadvantage smaller local authorities and community-led projects. What steps are the Government taking to ensure long-term, stable funding that maximises benefits for all areas?

I have a final question, following up on evidence that we heard from Mr Duffy in the previous session. What plans does DEFRA have on funding the replacement of major assets, like the Thames Barrier, which will reach the end of their life this century? We have heard about the need for decisions on options by 2040.

Do you have anything to add on timelines or processes that DEFRA are currently looking at for that?

We were keen to give the Environment Agency a single budget that allowed it to prioritise the balance between maintenance and capital and also how much it funds things like these strategic studies. As the Minister said, these kinds of projects will be part of the overall funding envelope that the Environment Agency has, but it will have a degree of flexibility about when and how it brings these things forward. A lot of work is going on for Thames Estuary 2100 about the future of the Thames Barrier. That will be part of the overall package of funding. The Environment Agency will have more flexibility about how it can use it.

On the subject of the funding formula, clearly you have spoken about the overall money there will be and how you might utilise it differently. Wherever that money ends up being spent, which projects are least well served by the current formula and who are you trying to make more likely to receive these funds in future?

We are confident that the new programme will have a much bigger shift towards refurbishment, replacement and maintenance of existing assets. We can see under any scenario that the Environment Agency model is based on the change in the funding formula, because previously we essentially had two separate pots, a maintenance pot and a capital pot. Creating a single programme allows the Environment Agency to decide the best interventions in an area and we will naturally see a lot more of maintenance funding going on. More of the funding will go towards maintenance over and above new defences. Given the state of our assets, that feels like the right thing to be doing.

When people are listening to you talking about this—and we have heard you talk about the formula many times, in Parliament and outside—everyone considers if they do not have a flood scheme that the formula is not working because if the formula is working, their scheme will be there. However, given what you have said, there will be more nature-based solutions, more maintenance and more upgrading. It sounds like major engineered programmes for large urban areas will happen less. I can think of one in Chester and North Derbyshire that never got anything on the previous formula, but it sounds like potentially that scheme could be even further away. I do not know. Is it about the numbers? Are we talking about areas like your own city, York, that had large numbers of people flooded and were previously likely to be near the top of the scheme? Who are the losers in this new formula?

Do you have an idea of what you would like it to say and so who are likely to be the losers?

I certainly appreciate that but, with respect, you seem to be good at identifying who is more likely to get funding, but you are a little more shy about who is less likely to get funding. If I could just push you on that, you have a clear idea of the type of schemes that are more likely to get to the top of the list now, and that is great. By definition, within the overall pot, you must have some schemes that are now less likely to get to the top, or are you saying that you think all the major schemes are done?

Earlier you were talking about flood alerts and you said that sometimes people get flood alerts and do not know what to do. It has been made clear to me, and to other people who have met flood victims, that the problem is not too few alerts, but too many. They constantly get these alerts. They know exactly what they are meant to do: pick all the furniture up and march upstairs and clear downstairs. They probably do that the first couple of times these alerts come through, but they get these six or seven times in a couple of months and eventually they think, “This is the alert that cries wolf.” They do not bother and then, when the major flood event happens, they find that they have lost all their stuff and they say, “I did not get the alert.” It seems to them that even when there is a relatively low risk, they still get alerts and they are not that useful. You need to receive an alert of a high likelihood of floods, but you can have too many. Have you heard this before and is there any push on the Environment Agency to say, “Let’s be proportionate about this”? It causes a problem if you are giving people alerts all the time for their mental health and stress and for them eventually saying, “I am not moving my stuff again.”

I want to ask a bit more about the conversation that we had in the previous session about having a single national flood reporting system and whether you think that that would be beneficial. I am particularly concerned about local councils not having capacity to deal with increased call numbers, as well as what the EA was suggesting about its ability to flex up. Would a national flood reporting system have more flexibility than local authorities would be able to manage themselves?

When a major incident happens, vulnerability is quite difficult to pinpoint and lots of different lists exist from different companies. Do you think that there is more that should be done to integrate a vulnerability list? It can be quite difficult, particularly for vulnerable people, to access the correct information, to be able to report and get the support that they need.

Generally in a major incident context, it is under-fives and elderly people, and people with disabilities.

I am glad to hear that you are feeding into that work and that it is across government. Moving on to the support for local capacity, I know that flood wardens play a huge role and there are lots of voluntary groups. Small businesses can play a role but are usually quite hard-hit when flooding occurs. Is there more that can be done to strengthen that local capacity?

I will come back to Olivia in a moment, but on that, have you made any assessment about whether there is a class differential in these flood groups? We have tried in an area of Chesterfield to get a flood group together and found it very difficult. All of the examples that I have seen have tended to be in pretty middle class rural communities, with lots of people with plenty of time on their hands who love to get into that. Has any work been done on whether there is a difference in the ease of being able to successfully get these flood action groups together based on the kind of communities that we are talking about? Is there anything that we can learn or do in that regard?

Not many people want flooding to become their hobby. Apologies for interrupting, Olivia.

We have heard serious doubts that the insurance market will be ready to return to fully risk-based pricing when Flood Re ends in 2039. What discussions have you had about the future of the scheme and the risk of an affordability gap re-emerging? I know that this is something that you are passionate about.

What options have you explored for a successor scheme that addresses current exclusions, for example SMEs and post-2009 homes, and incorporates lessons learnt from the original scheme?

What actions have been taken to scale up initiatives, such as the Build Back Better scheme, and how are the Government encouraging broader insurer participation?

Is the Department getting a cumulative cost of what is being spent on Build Back Better by the insurers? Yes, 72% offer it, but how much is take-up available? I am happy for you to write to us if you have those figures but not to hand.

We know how many claims there have been. It is just over 1,800 claims that have included Build Back Better. There is more that we could do get better, clearer, more up-to-date information on where it has got to. It is part of a broader piece for us. Phil Duffy also mentioned the work that the Environment Agency is doing with Peter Bonfield, which is looking more broadly at the different levers and ways that we can encourage the uptake of property-level measures. Our feeling is that the Build Back Better is absolutely critical to that, but there will be other things and we will be interested in his report. He will present at the next flood taskforce so that we can consider some of his recommendations as well. It is an important part of the landscape. We started this session thinking about climate change, but one of the ways for us to become more resilient will not just be hard defences or even natural defences, it will also be things like property-level interventions.

Thank you. It would be interesting to understand the scale of uptake, if you can provide more numbers.

Thank you very much for that answer. A final question. What role does the Government see for broader lenders and other financial actors in supporting household and business adaptation?

Thank you very much. You referred to the Flood Resilience Taskforce, which was announced in September of last year. How often has it met and do you think that there are any concrete achievements come out of that yet?

One of the things that we are keen to do at the next taskforce, which will be one year on, is to ask if we are materially better prepared this winter than we were last winter, what specific actions have we taken. It very much has that focus of learning lessons and using that to drive improvements.

The critics have said that it is not meeting that often. Can you point to things that are materially better as a result of this taskforce?

Thank you very much indeed for your evidence that you have given us today. We will bring this session to a close.