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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has made an assessment of the potential implications for his policies of trends in the frequency of flooding in York; and whether he has made an assessment of whether the flood defence barriers will be exceeded before 2039.

Following flooding in York in December 2015, the Environment Agency (EA) received a £64 million booster funding to better protect 2,000 properties within the city and local communities, in addition to £38 million to upgrade the Foss Barrier.

The flood management projects delivered, mainly on the River Ouse, are designed to protect properties from a flood with a 1% probability of happening in any given year, considering the effects of climate change until 2039. Further climate change predictions indicate upper catchment flood alleviation measures will be required past 2039 to offer York the same standard of protection. Catchment-wide measures aim to ‘slow the flow’ of water and lower water levels through the city in times of flood. Opportunities include engineered storage areas and natural flood management.

The EA has undertaken preliminary modelling work to assess indicative locations for upstream flood storage, informing a long-term plan and future investment programme. The EA is also reviewing the operation of its existing flood management systems in the upper catchments on the Rivers Swale, Ure and Nidd to identify the potential for new approaches to managing flood risk and the environment, as well as the long-term investment requirement for these systems.

In addition, City of York Council is leading the £6 million ‘York and North Yorkshire Natural Catchment Flood Risk Solutions Project', also called ‘Ousewem’. The project aims to look at wider catchment opportunities and is part of Defra’s £150 million Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme. The project will develop a range of incentivised natural flood risk management opportunities across the Rivers Swale, Ure, Nidd and Ouse catchments.

Any future work in the middle and upper catchments to ‘slow the flow’ and ‘store’ water will likely require changes to current land use. Significant areas of the catchment are agricultural, and any future changes to the use of land will be challenging.