Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, when he plans to announce funding for additional railway resilience work at Dawlish and Teignmouth.

The Department for Transport has already provided £15m funding for Network Rail to undertake development work on schemes to improve the resilience of the line through Dawlish and Teignmouth, in addition to the £40m spent by Network Rail to repair the damage caused by the 2014 storm. This is a highly unique and complex terrain and in order to deliver the best solution it is critical that the resilience study is comprehensive. The development work encompassing ground investigations, option selection and outline design is expected to be complete in 2019. A decision about the next phase of work and the funding for that can then be made.