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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans his Department has to enable farm owners and landowners to take more effective action in preventing inland flooding.

Many farmers and landowners are already taking actions to help manage flood risks – both risks to their own land and risks to surrounding areas. Government provides financial incentives for some of these activities within Countryside Stewardship and, through the Catchment Sensitive Farming advice programme, we have piloted including flood risk management within integrated advice to farmers.

The Government policy statement on flood and coastal erosion risk management, published in July 2020, explains our plans to do more to harness the opportunities rural landscapes bring to increase resilience for people living and working in rural areas and further downstream.

We will ensure our countryside is resilient to flooding so that our sustainable food industry can flourish, and our farming and agricultural sectors can thrive. To achieve this, risk management authorities will work with landowners to maximise good land and soil management and to implement natural flood management solutions.

We will join up actions for water, floods, the environment and farming to ensure actions that promote good soil and land management, water storage for farm use, and the restoration of peat, moors and other land are naturally designed to support flood risk management.

A key element of this will be the Environmental Land Management scheme, founded on the principle of public money for public goods. Farmers and other land managers may enter into agreements to be paid for delivering a range of public goods as set out in the 25 Year Environment Plan, including: a reduction in and protection from environmental hazards such as flooding.