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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many of the 530 key local infrastructure assets identified by her Department as vulnerable to flooding in circumstances envisaged by the Environment Agency's Extreme Flood Outlines have had improvements made to their flood defences since the publication of the National Flood Resilience Review in September 2016.

Good progress is being made on the implementation of the National Flood Resilience Review recommendations. All infrastructure companies have completed their initial assessments of their vulnerable sites for suitability for temporary flood defences and as a result companies are investing heavily in resilience measures to ensure continuity of supply this winter. This includes putting in place or having deployment plans for temporary defences, and other contingency measures such as rezoning of water supplies and the use of mobile telecommunications cells to reduce the risk of disruption of services. Further to this, the Government is working with utility companies to improve permanent defences in the longer term.