Rivers: West Lancashire

(asked on 4th November 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of allocating additional funding to the Environment Agency to fund the desilting of land in West Lancashire constituency so that that land can be effectively drained to protect crops from loss and damage.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 13th November 2020

De-silting (also referred to as dredging) and clearing channels, are important parts of the Environment Agency’s (EA) river maintenance regime. The EA will undertake these activities where there is evidence that they will reduce flood risk to local properties cost effectively without increasing flooding downstream.

Typically over each of the past three years the Environment Agency has spent between £45 million and £55 million a year on channel maintenance, of which between £5 million and £11 million is for dredging.

Channel maintenance in West Lancashire, where the majority of watercourses are man-made for drainage, includes a range of activities to maintain conveyance such as desilting, weed cutting and removing blockages. Locally over the last three years in West Lancashire the EA has carried out £175,000 worth of desilting, as part of its recurring maintenance programme.

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