Communities suffering from repeated flooding could benefit from a new £100 million funding package designed to help protect their properties, the Government has announced.
The Frequently Flooded Allowance aims to improve access to public funding for small communities recovering from damage. The funding will be available for eligible communities where 10 or more properties have flooded twice or more in the past 10 years, and where community-wide defences are not always viable.
Communities that receive funding will be selected through an Environment Agency’s process to identify schemes that will most benefit. The money can be used to support existing eligible flood schemes which offer traditional defences and natural flood management, such as planting vegetation and building floodways.
It can also be used to install property flood resilience (PFR) measures, which put in place systems such as flood doors, air brick covers and pumps, depending on a case-by-case basis. All Risk Management Authorities – such as local authorities, internal drainage boards and water companies – will have the opportunity to put forward eligible projects as part of the process.
Sir James Bevan, chief executive of the Environment Agency, said: “While we cannot prevent all flooding, this allowance will help better protect homes and businesses at risk from repeated incidents. The Environment Agency has a successful track record in delivering flood and coastal defence schemes across the country, having better protected more than 314,000 homes from flooding since 2015.”
In 2020, the Government announced that the amount invested in flood and coastal erosion schemes would be doubled in England to £5.2 billion between 2021 and 2027, providing around 2,000 flood defences. This year, £700 million is being invested from that pot to protect 35,000 properties, bringing the total buildings safeguarded for the first two years of the six-year programme to more than 65,000.
Since 2015, the Government has invested £2.6 billion in projects to create more than 850 new flood and coastal erosion defences. More than 580,000 acres of agricultural land, as well as thousands of businesses, communities and major infrastructure – including more than 8,000 kilometres of roads – also benefited from improvement schemes.
The flood defences protected around 50,000 properties from flooding during Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, and The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), claims schemes delivered in the last year are already helping to provide better protection for thousands of properties across England.
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