Flood defence spending to increase to £800m by 2010-11

The newly appointed Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has announced that flood defence spending will increase to £800m in 2010-11, following widespread calls to boost the Environment Agency's budget after last week's flooding.

Benn estimated that the floods, which affected South Yorkshire particularly badly, could have affected up to 20,000 properties.  Meanwhile the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has estimated that flood-related claims could run to £1bn.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, Benn said: "The Government have always recognised the need to spend more on flood defence because of changes in climate, and we have increased spending from £307 million in 1996-97 to more than £600 million this year. I can today inform the House that we will further increase spending across Government on flood-risk management and defences to £800 million in 2010-11."

The news came as the Environment Agency (EA) said it had moved a step closer to introducing a new value test for flood defence projects, with a suite of new outcome measures (OMs) against which projects will be compared set to be confirmed by the government next month.

EA head of asset management Tim Kersley also gave CJ more detail on the areas that the OMs are expected to cover.
He said that the primary indicator for whether or not a capital works programme would get the go-ahead would continue to be overall flood risk. But the other eight OMs would also consider:

• The value of private property at risk.
• The wider economic value of infrastructure at risk.
• One or more environmental measures, to comply with EU legislation.
• Social deprivation.
• One or more considerations over flood warning.

Kersley said that he did not expect the introduction of the new ‘ranking system’ to affect the volume of
work coming through to contractors. “We will be putting as much expenditure as we can into the ground – about £150m at the moment – so there is quite a long, foreseeable, prioritised programme of work,” he said.