Government claims 'significant progress' in floods protection

The Government today said it had made "significant progress" in better preparing the country for floods such as those which devastated parts of the country two summers ago.

But opposition MPs accused Labour of failing, two years on, to reduce the risk communities faced from flooding.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said the Government had made significant progress in implementing the 92 recommendations made by Sir Michael Pitt in his review of the 2007 floods.

Sir Michael warned when he published his report last year that the Government must take urgent action to protect the UK against the "ever-increasing threat" of flooding in the face of climate change.

Mr Benn said today that since the 2007 summer floods, the Government had increased funding from £600 million to a planned £780 million in 2010/11 for flood defence projects.

Some 85 flood defence schemes had been completed, protecting an extra 58,000 homes in England, while an additional 136,000 people had been signed up to the free flood warnings service.

A £7.7 million Flood Forecasting Centre, bringing together experts from the Environment Agency and the Met Office, has also been set up.

Mr Benn said other steps had also been taken, including a £5 million grant scheme for householders to make their homes more resilient and the publication of a draft Flood and Water Management Bill.

He said: "The risk of flooding remains and the publication of last week's UKCP09 climate projections underlines how it will increase in the future as a result of climate change.

"The Government remains determined to make this country better able to anticipate and deal with the impacts of flooding."

But Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Martin Horwood said: "The 2007 floods wrecked homes, properties and lives. Two years on, the Government's claim to have made 'significant progress' is laughable.

"If new floods hit us this summer, Britain will be almost as ill-prepared as it was then."

He said flood defences were underfunded by hundreds of millions of pounds, no one had yet taken on the recommended national overview of all flood risk and more houses were being built in flood risk areas.

The National Resilience Forum which would enable crucial planning for future floods and other emergencies had not yet been set up, he added.

Some 168 families remain out of their homes two years on from the devastating floods in 2007 which led to the largest recovery effort since the Second World War.

The last few households - out of 17,000 forced from their homes in June and July two years ago - remain displaced largely because of subsequent issues such as choosing to do extra building work or failing to wait for houses to dry properly.

But 99% of those who had to leave their homes are now back in them, the Department for Communities and Local Government said.

In the floods two years ago, which hit parts of Yorkshire, the Midlands and the South West of England, 13 people died, along with two premature twins, while 55,000 properties were flooded and thousands of people had to be rescued from the flood waters.

Last week the Environment Agency warned one in six homes in England is at risk of flooding.

Thousands of health centres and doctors' surgeries, schools and miles of railways and roads are also at risk, according to the agency's Flooding In England report.

And with climate change likely to raise the risk of flooding through rising sea levels and more rainstorms, £20 billion needs to be invested in flood defences to protect properties in the next 25 years, the agency said.