Greg Mulholland – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Greg Mulholland on 2016-01-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of flood defences in the Leeds city region.

Rory Stewart

Whenever an exceptional event happens it is important to review what happened and how to prepare for the future, and the Environment Agency will always do this after a flood incident.

The flood response in Yorkshire will be overseen by Transport Minister Robert Goodwill who has been appointed as Flooding Envoy to the county and will track progress on recovery and identify lessons learnt

Work has also already started on the National Resilience Review, which is considering forecasting and modelling, resilience of key infrastructure and the way we make decisions on flood expenditure. The Review is being delivered by a cross-Government team and will be published in the summer.

£40 million funding has been committed to repair flood defences in response to the flooding. Going forward, as part of our new flood defence programme, we have been working with Leeds City Council and we are investing £33 million in a project to better protect Leeds City Centre. Construction of the new defences is already underway.